Is a male Nazi high jumper who competed as a woman really behind sex testing at the Olympics?
Athletes are facing a new era of 'eligibility policies,' but Heinrich Ratjen was probably not the inspiration
This story is part of the Tested podcast series, produced by CBC and NPR.
In 1936, a German teenager with a talent for the high jump was recruited by the Nazi Party and given an unusual task: pretend to be a girl. Heinrich Ratjen was told that he must adopt a whole new gender and identity in order to bring glory to the Nazis.
For several years, Ratjen undertook this mission, winning medals meant for women. Once his task was complete, he disappeared from sport, and returned to life as a man.
Ratjen's story is still cited today as one of a handful of examples of a "particularly nefarious form of cheating" as the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) medical commission once called it: men, dressing up as women, in order to win medals. And because of these nefarious actors, the story goes, sports must have some way of verifying whether women are really women when they show up to compete.
The problem is that isn't what happened. Ratjen was not a "man in disguise." And in fact, gender cheats were probably never actually the inspiration for sex-testing policies to begin with.
In 2021, the IOC released its Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations, a non-binding set of principles to offer guidance around this subject. However, for the 2024 Paris Olympics, the matter of sex testing has been left up to the discretion of governing bodies for individual sports.
Today, athletes around the world are facing a new era of "eligibility policies" that govern which women can compete at the elite level, and which ones can't. These policies require some women to make an incredibly difficult choice: alter their body's biology or give up on competing in the female category.
Athletes such as Christine Mboma, the silver medallist in the 200 metres at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which were held in 2021 because of the pandemic, and Maximila Imali, a Kenyan national record holder, are facing this decision. And on top of that, they're facing media scrutiny that, in some cases, accuses them of secretly being men, whether they know it or not.
Unpacking how, and why, Ratjen's story has been unshakeable — despite plenty of evidence that it is inaccurate — tells us a lot about why gender policing in sports sticks around, and reveals the ways in which mythologies tend to crowd out the messier, more complicated truth of gender.
Star athlete's story buried by Nazis
Heinrich Ratjen was born in 1918, in northern Germany. Like most children in that area at the time, he was born at home with the help of a midwife. According to police records, the midwife declared the baby a girl and Ratjen's parents took her at her word, naming the child Dora. For years, Ratjen lived as a girl — went to girls' schools, wore girls' clothes and never thought anything of it.
Around age 12, Ratjen later recounted, he began to experience changes to his body and began questioning his gender identity. As he got older, he got involved in women's sports and said even though his voice changed and he was "teased by his female sports colleagues," nobody really accused him of being a man in disguise.
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, then-17-year-old Ratjen competed for Germany, coming in fourth. In 1938, Ratjen broke the world record in the women's high jump at the European Women's Championships in Vienna. And he would have potentially lived many more years of his life as a woman had it not been for an encounter with the police on the way home from that event in Vienna — when two women called the authorities to report seeing someone on the train they believed was "a male person in women's clothing."
The police took Ratjen to the station and in the course of the conversation, he admitted to them that he was almost happy to have been noticed and brought in. The police report (which is now available at the German National Archives, and was uncovered by the reporter Stefan Berg for Der Speigel in a 2009 expose) says that Ratjen "did not dare to reveal himself to his parents or anyone else out of a sense of shame." He told the police that he was glad that "everything had come to a head," because now he would be potentially able to live as a man after all.
As this was Germany in 1938, Ratjen said he worried he would "be associated with a great disgrace in the eyes of the world" if he began living as a man. But the Nazi party had a vested interest in minimizing this kind of scandal around one of its star female athletes. The summary police document suggests that the police worked with the Reich Sports Authority to help Ratjen disappear without becoming an international news story.
Ratjen's story was covered in German newspapers at the time, but only lightly. Later that year, an article in a German paper reported: "On the basis of a medical examination, it has been determined that Dora Ratjen cannot be admitted to women's competitions."
The press were banned from discussing Ratjen further. Based on available information, it seems that Ratjen's exclusion from women's sport was not picked up outside Germany.
On Jan. 11, 1939, a German court declared Ratjen to be legally a man. Five months later, the Second World War would break out, and the sporting drama would take a back seat.
The only statement Ratjen ever made to the press comes from a 1957 story in the British tabloid Sunday People. In it, Ratjen allegedly admits to having been forced to fake his female identity for the Nazis. But there is reason to be skeptical of this article as written. Ratjen's quotes and details don't line up with all other available evidence from the police report. Other quotes seem to be too good to be true. "When you look back, it's silly to think of the things we foolish young Nazis used to do," he allegedly said.
At the time, Sunday People was overseen by an editor named Stuart Campbell, who had said that truth was "dispensable if he could improve a quote or a story." About the article itself, and Ratjen's backstory, Adrian Bingham, co-author of Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to the present, said, "I would have thought that in this instance, with a foreign interviewee outside the reach of other papers, he might feel confident that no one would find out or complain if he made up these quotes."
Other than that one bit of press, Ratjen lived a largely unassuming life working in his family's pub in Bremen until his death in 2008.
Historians who have studied Ratjen's case closely don't all agree on exactly what to make of his story. Some argue that Ratjen was likely intersex and perhaps had ambiguous genitalia at birth and was assigned female. Other historians say they believe that Ratjen's family, for reasons nobody can understand, knew he was a boy and chose to raise him as a girl.
But what's clear is this: Ratjen did not knowingly pretend to be a woman to cheat his way into women's competition to win medals.
Dubious justification for 'sex testing' in athletes
Ratjen's story wasn't known to the governing bodies of sports until 1957 at the earliest. But the first sex-testing policy was passed in 1936 — 20 years before anybody in the wider world of sports even knew Ratjen was perhaps not a girl at all.
And yet, even today, Ratjen's story is cited over and over again as either inspiration or justification for policies in sports that subject athletes to "sex tests" — exams and tests to confirm whether their bodies conform to specific ideas of female-ness.
Ratjen's story does not offer evidence for the need for sex tests, nor was it the cause for their implementation (as is commonly claimed). But it can be seen as a microcosm of the false narratives and misconceptions still floating around when it comes to talking about gender and sports.
First, there's the continued scrutiny of Ratjen's body and biology — the German National Archives even includes a full nude photograph of Ratjen, uncensored and unrestricted. Historians still pass around these images and examine them in an effort to figure out whether Ratjen was intersex or not.
Second, Ratjen offers an example of a case where the media and public have run with a story that is inaccurate in order to justify a more simplistic view of the world.
In many ways, things would be simpler if the mythology of Ratjen were true. It's a compelling tale, with a clear villain (a Nazi, no less!) and an obvious crime. But the reality of gender and sports, like the reality of Ratjen's story, is far more complex and messy.
As Vanessa Heggie, an associate professor in the history of science and medicine at the University of Birmingham, puts it: "Although the story of deliberate Nazi fraud makes better headlines, Ratjen's story is probably a more homely and familiar one of medical error, gender uncertainty and embarrassed silences."
'Suspicion-based testing'
The major cases of athletes who are currently being impacted by so-called eligibility policies were all assigned female at birth and have always lived as women. But their bodies have what are now known as "variations in sex development" — a catch-all term to describe bodies that don't fall neatly into a strict sex binary. Some estimate that people with these kinds of variations are about as common as twins (around 1 in 250).
Since 1936, there has been a long chain of policies trying to weed out women who were in some way fraudulent in the eyes of sports organizers — whether they were truly men in disguise or simply women who didn't look womanly enough.
For decades, sex-testing policies were mandatory for every female athlete. But today, those blanket tests have been abolished. In their place are more specific rules listing which kinds of sex variations are allowed and which require an athlete to change their body.
World Athletics declined to speak with the Tested podcast.
Historians and researchers who study this topic say that these rules are rooted in the suspicion that somehow, certain women are really men.
"What's happening is people are looking at women and deciding who looks too masculine for what I think should be a woman," says Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist at Amherst College in Massachusetts and the author of the book Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography.
Lindsay Parks Pieper, a sports historian at the University of Lynchburg and the author of the book Sex Testing: Gender policing in women's sports, agrees. These modern policies are, she says, "a return to suspicion-based testing, which then ties back to physical appearances. So, we come full circle.
"There's no recorded incident of a man masquerading as a woman," Pieper said.
Every case that has been floated has turned out to be unverified or more complicated, such as the case of Ratjen. And yet, sports governing bodies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years enacting sex-testing policies ostensibly to weed out a form of cheating that has never happened.
Corrections
- A previous version of the story stated that Heinrich Ratjen worked in his family's pub in Benin, the country, until his death in 2008. In fact, he lived and died in Bremen, the German city.Jul 16, 2024 8:27 AM ET
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