In December 1935, the Czech track star Zdeněk Koubek announced that he was going to be living as a man. To sports fans, the news seemed hard to believe: Koubek had been assigned female at birth, and he had competed, and set a world record, in the women’s 800-meter dash.
But after years of expressing an affinity for masculinity, Koubek decided the category no longer fit him. He was going to undergo a series of operations in his home country of Czechoslovakia, he told the press. Afterward, he hoped to compete in men’s sports.
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