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The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports by Michael Waters
5.0
challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring tense fast-paced
Queer and trans ppl have survived every empire that has tried to erase us. Not everyone has survived but we're still here. 

This history tells us how anti-trans violence and "sex tests" are not new. But also, some trans ppl socially and medically transitioned before WWII. Trans ppl are not new, in the US or in the world. 

This books is also, unfortunately, timely. We have seen a resurgence of anti-trans hate in the past 5 years in the US and the western world. This, along with increasing anti-immigrant legislation and violence, should serve as a blaring alarm for where we're headed (where we are, where we have been). It's all connected, and we must fight for everyone. 

Sex testing, from the start, was never about an actual threat to women's sports. It was always about the perception of a threat, the ambient sense of panic around femininity, masculinity, and gender transition. The feeling that something fundamental was shifting in the relationship between gender and sports and that the only way to stop it was to forcibly examine the bodies of anyone deemed suspect. It was a policy rooted not in real harm but in abstract fear. 

Today, sex testing most often takes the form of measuring testosterone even though the evidence that testosterone confers any kind of athletic advantage is slim.
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