Hello and welcome to Outward Slate's LGBTQ podcast, which this week stands for the cross, golf, badminton, triathlon, and Q is still just queer since there's no Summer Olympic sport that starts with it. I guess we should probably all get together and work on that. I'm Brian Louder and editor at Slate, and I'm talking about the Olympics, not only because they're coming up later this summer in Paris, but because our show today is going to dig into one of the little-known aspects of their history that has to do with the policing of biological sex and the establishment of gender surveillance in sport. I love saying sport that way. It makes me feel very European sport.

Speaking of sport, when we look at the anti-trans movement that's got a hold on our country today, we generally trace its origins to

youth sports, specifically the fixation on trans girls participating in youth teams and activities

appropriate to their genders. This was the issue, not bathroom bills and the other gambits that

sort of preceded it some years ago that really caught on and galvanized a lot of Americans

to fear trans youth and their inclusion and

what they symbolize about sex binaries and fairness, quote-unquote fairness and athletics. But as

our guest today shows us, fear-mongering around sex and sports is nothing new. In fact, it goes all the way

back to the 1930s when a group of early Olympic bureaucrats and Nazis classed with early

trans and intersex athletes about their

participation in the 1936 games and a whole sex surveillance regime was born.

To help us understand that clash and how it left us with the problems that we have today,

I'm joined by Michael Waters.

It's time to take a quick break, but we will be back with Michael Waters right after that.

Thank you. quick break, but we will be back with Michael Waters right after that. Okay, we're back. Michael is a wonderful writer, an historian, an occasional slate contributor.

His most recent piece for us was about salacious steamship gossip, so if you missed that,

please go check it out. He's also a writer for the Atlantic,

The New Yorker, Wired, Vox, The New York Times, and many other publications. It's been my pleasure to edit him a number of times and even better to have him on the pod today to talk about his new book, The Other Olympians, Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports, which is out this June from FSG. Michael, welcome to Outward. Thank you for having me. Slate is

always the best place to be, so I'm filled to be here with you. Wow, we appreciate that. We're

delighted to have you, and this book is really fascinating, and I think is one in a handful of recent

gay queer history books that are adding dimensions to that narrative that we haven't had before.

So I think this is a real smart intervention in that way. To start, I wondered if you could tell us how you came to this project. I know that you discovered your two main athletes. I'm going to mispronounce name. I'm going to do my best at this. Deadneck, Quebec, and Mark Weston in the course of working on something else, and you were sort of shocked

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