Somehow PBS Manages to Tie Olympic Coverage With Opposing Transgenderism and Nazis

With the Paris Olympics set to begin on Friday, PBS’s Amanpour and Company devoted their entire show to the games on Thursday, including a wild history lesson on the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness and the Making of Modern Sports author Michael Waters tried to tie Nazism with opposition to transgender ideology.

As part of his history lesson, Waters touched on the Czech runner, Zdenek Koubek. Koubek was a champion female runner who would later identify as a man. It should be noted that Koubek was intersex, not transgender.

However, as CNN International’s Hari Sreenivasan claimed, not everyone was thrilled with the idea, “There's an interesting character you write about, kind of—it's sort of behind this interest in figuring out how to test athletes. His name is Wilhelm Knoll. Tell us a little bit about him. Who is he? Who was he?”

After recalling the publicity around Koubek, Waters recalled, “While the public is just kind of curious about, like, okay, it's literally, like, how is it possible to move between these categories? Like what are the medical advances that, that sort of allow this, you do see this small group of sports officials who have a very different reaction. And the most prominent among them is Wilhelm Knoll, who in January 1936, writes this op-ed, essentially accusing Koubek of being a fraud and deceitful in some way.”