THIS WAS SO FASCINATING! The Other Olympians details the stories of several athletes who publicly transitioned in the 1930s, calls for sex testing in women’s sports, and how that was tied into the Nazi Party and the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It’s always so interesting to go back and see true stories of queer/trans individuals in history, it just makes it so clear that this is something that has always been around no matter what certain people try to say. It’s also so frustrating to see how current ideas about needing to ban trans women from women’s sports can be traced back to misinformation, fascism, and the Nazi Party.

Seriously, this book is so eye opening. I had never heard of the stories of these athletes who transitioned on the world stage. The trans men featured in the book all transitioned after competing as female athletes. This caused a stir about keeping men out of women’s sports, but none of these men wanted to go back to competing against women.

The author covers all the different conversations people were having about wanting to start sex testing for women's sports. He details how there was actually a lot of public support for the men after they transitioned, and a lot of the detractors or the people who were the most adamant about implementing sex testing came from the Nazi Party or were sympathizers. There’s a lot of discussion in the book about how sex isn’t a binary category and how these men trying to set up the rules couldn’t even really describe who they were trying to keep out of women’s sports.

I definitely recommend this book for people who are interested in LGBTQ+ history. It makes so much sense to see how the history of sex testing in women’s sports was tied to fascism, especially when thinking about who is continuing that messed up cause in the present. I ended up listening to the whole book in one day because it was just so engrossing.

Waters’s book is meticulously researched and offers a clear, historical narrative at how sex identification and regulation in women’s sports has roots in fascism and sexism, the latter of which was brought up by women who in today’s terms I would describe as TERFs. It looks at the beginning of women’s sports, the Olympics, and queer athletes and how all of them intersected with each other in the early 1900s.

The text is perhaps more academic than some might prefer, with details about events occasionally being pretty dry. However, overall the balance between looking at politics, women’s sports, and the lived experiences of queer folx was done well enough for me. I appreciated most of all the lived experiences context and various primary sources examined, particularly as the attitudes/publications of the time show a more complex understanding of transitioning individuals than is usually presented.

Waters’s work holds historical importance in highlighting, preserving, and examining overlooked narratives, and his research is invaluable in understanding the ongoing, persistent issues facing queer folx, particularly trans and intersex individuals, in women’s sports. I think many will find this book useful and thought provoking.

The Other Olympians by Michael Waters is a look at an unknown and forgotten part of Olympic history: transitioned athletes and their impact on sports and history as a whole.

Thank you to the FSG Team and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

This was a deep, deep, well-researched dive into the 1930s and how the advancement of Nazi politics unraveled the political and sociological ideas about gender and sex in that era. The story follows IOC and women's sports leaders as they developed a modern Olympics along a gender binary, and how that base-level division of sports ultimately led to sex-testing of athletes in a problematic and dangerous way (even today).

The deepest of dives sometimes dragged a bit for me (there were full stories of a few athletes' lives that delved further than I expected, but I learned a lot about each person and got to see how their lives, countries, cultures, and access impacted the way they experienced sex testing in sports.

One thing I really loved was the emphasis on intersex athletes (as we might understand them today, but we didn't then). I've been passionate about how sex testing impacts intersex folks, and I was glad to see it so thoroughly discussed.

My favorite chapters were perhaps the last three, which zoomed out and reviewed the more modern developments as these polices rolled out and were studied.