A nutrition drink endorsement on the back of a magazine would become an unlikely provocation for gender tests in the Olympics. The advertisement, which appeared in 1934, featured Czechoslovakian track star Zdenek Koubek. While Koubek claimed the photograph was used without her permission, the officials revoked her amateur status, thus crashing her dreams of competing at the 1936 Berlin Games.
Koubek retired in 1934, but a year later, newspaper Czech World broke a story that she was planning a gender reassessment surgery. Koubek had participated in the Women’s World Games in 1932, becoming the fastest woman on the planet, and now wanted to be a man. “My soul was always more for being a man,” Koubek said in a press conference.
European society, at large, warmly greeted the decision, and her celebrity status swelled, except in Nazi Germany. Wilhelm Knoll, the head of the International Federation of Sports Medicine and a Nazi sympathiser, whose advice the IOC often sought, wrote a letter to the international federations, suggesting gender tests, the first of this sort in the Games. “I request that all female participants in the Olympic Games should have their gender checked beforehand by a specially commissioned doctor. By competing in women’s sports, ‘they’ unfairly make use of superior physique, as a man, against frail women,” he wrote in the letter.
In the subsequent meeting of the athletics federation, members provided anecdotal evidence of instances where “women competitors were believed to be men”. It passed a rule that if a protest was lodged, medical experts would perform “a physical inspection”. Thus, the first vague law to bar trans and intersex women from competitive sport was founded.
In the aftermath of the latest row over Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, the gender of a competitor in a female competition has become a talking point. It’s interesting to go back in time to find out how such issues were sought to be settled to ensure no one had an unfair advantage.
What often used to be a whiff of doubt, whispered among athletes, became a full-blown storm at the 1936 Games. The first of such tests was conducted on American sprinter Helen Stephens based on the complaint of Polish athlete and runner-up in that race, Stanislawa Walasiewicz. Stephens passed the gender test. But ironically, when Walasiewicz, who later migrated to the USA and changed her name to Stella Walsh, was shot dead in Ohio 40 years later, the autopsy revealed that she had “ambiguous sexual features”.
The most intriguing and fascinating of all cases, one that staunch advocates of gender screening often fish out, is the story of Heinrich/Dora Ratjen, part of the critically acclaimed movie Berlin 36. The world record holder in high jump then was Gretel Bergmann, a German Jew. The Nazis wanted to keep her away and so, replaced her with the 17-year-old Dora, whom they plucked from the village of Erichshof near Bremen.
Some claim the Germans intentionally put a boy in a girl’s dress, forcing the first instance of gender fraud, though a more sympathetic view is that she didn’t exactly know her gender and that her assigned gender, by the midwife, was that she was a girl.
“My parents brought me up as a girl,” Ratjen told the police in 1938. “I therefore wore girls’ clothes all my childhood. But from the age of 10 or 11, I started to realise I wasn’t female, but male. However, I never asked my parents why I had to wear women’s clothes even though I thought I was male,” she would add.
Ratjen would join a local athletics club and practise in the evening, after working at a tobacco rolling factory during the day. She kept breaking records and was soon picked in the national team.
Some made fun of her husky, masculine voice, but more as banter than genuine doubt about her gender. Bergmann herself would tell German newspaper Der Spiegel: “I never had any suspicions. In the communal shower, we wondered why she never showed herself naked. It was grotesque that someone could still be that shy at the age of 17. We just thought, ‘She’s strange. She’s odd’… But no one knew or noticed anything about her different sexuality.”
The Olympics was a disappointment and Ratjen ended up in the fourth place. But two years later, she bagged gold at the European Athletics Championships with a world record jump of 1.67m, and a year later, won gold at the World Championship too. But when travelling from Austria to Cologne, after setting another world record, a police officer in the train grew suspicious of a “man dressed as a woman”, which they related to espionage, and arrested her.
Ratjen showed her IDs that declared her a woman, but was dragged to the police station, where she supposedly confessed that she was a “man”. Some allege the police officer was tipped by fellow high jumper Dorothy Tyler-Odam, whose record she had broken.
Ratjen’s records were revoked and she slipped into oblivion. She was rumoured to be working as a waiter in Berlin, having changed her name to Heinz, and died in 2009 in her hometown. Whether she, like Koubek, performed a surgery is unknown. Some researchers though allege that the claims about her gender were twisted by the makers of Berlin 36.
But her story set off suspicion, which still grips major athletic events of the world, despite advanced science and testing methods, and remains as grey as it was in the days of Koubek and Ratjen.
