The story of Heinz Ratjan has been used to justify gender testing at the Olympics—but we've gotten it all wrong.
that block many trans and intersex women from competing in the women’s category. These policies date back to the 1930s, when World Athletics first passed a rule forcing athletes about whom there were “questions of a physical nature” to strip down before a doctor and “prove” their womanhood. These were cruel, unscientific procedures, but for decades, officials cited a single name as justification for them: Heinz Ratjen.
It all collapsed on the train ride home from Vienna. At a stop in Magdeburg, Germany, a pair of Nazi soldiers pulled him aside. They believed him to be a cis man who was dressing up as a woman in order to cross the border — potentially a British or French spy. They arrested him and brought him to the police station, where they took his mug shot and put him through an invasive medical exam.
Rather than the masterminds of a conspiracy to gain an advantage in sport, the Nazis were mortified to discover that Ratjen was intersex. They allowed only one article about Ratjen to appear in print, in the sports magazinewrote cryptically, “it has been established that Ratjen cannot be admitted to female competitions.” Days later, on Oct. 12, the Reich Propaganda Ministry demanded that “nothing further” be published about Ratjen in Germany.
It was a fantastical story of fraud, the perfect kind of Cold War tabloid story — a scandal involving gender, queerness, and a Nazi conspiracy. But there is “a probability bordering on certainty” that Ratjen did not actually give this interview,that some reporters “regarded the truth as dispensable if he could improve a quote or a story and get away with it.”to Ratjen as one of the first “gay deceivers” in sports, a myth that only gained steam over the decades.
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