Overlooked No More: Willy de Bruyn, Cycling Champion Who Broke Gender Boundaries

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

In early 1936, a Belgian cyclist, Willy de Bruyn, read an article in the Flemish newspaper De Dag  that would change his life. He learned that a Czech sprinter who had been assigned female at birth was transitioning and would begin living as a man.

It was just the spark de Bruyn needed. He went to see a local doctor and soon announced that he, too, wanted to live the balance of his life as a man.

De Bruyn (pronounced deh-BREN) was born in the village of Erembodegem, about 30 miles northwest of Brussels, on what would prove to be a cataclysmic day — Aug. 4, 1914, when England declared war on Germany, cementing the start of World War I. De Bruyn, too, had been assigned female and given a feminine name, but from a young age he felt a pull toward masculinity.

By age 15, he was working eight hours a day in a cigarette factory, and hating it. But his parents, who owned a local bar, needed the money.

About a year later, de Bruyn saw an ad posted in the bar for a women’s cycling race. The competition, organized to celebrate a local holiday, offered a cash prize, 300 Belgian francs, a sum about equal to his week’s salary at the factory. De Bruyn, a recreational cyclist, had never entered a bicycle competition, but a group of athletes he was friends with told him that he was fast enough to win, and so he enrolled.

To his surprise, he came in first. His winnings, as he later put it, were “quickly liquefied”: To celebrate, he and his friends plowed through bottles of wine.

De Bruyn began entering cycling competitions across Belgium, mostly for the prize money. Many of these were local events near his hometown, but he was building a name for himself. A local bike manufacturer gave him a new bike to help promote the brand.

His career reached its zenith in September 1934, when he competed in Brussels in an unofficial women’s cycling world championship that had been organized by a private sports promoter.

Dozens of athletes from seven countries gathered for the event, the highest-level competition available to women cyclists at the time. (Women’s events in the Olympics were sparse then and did not include cycling.)

Again de Bruyn came in first, completing the course in a little over four hours. The second-place finisher, Eliane Robin of France, lost by just a few feet.

The win made de Bruyn one of the premier cyclists in the world, but because the Union Cycliste Internationale, which the International Olympic Committee regarded as cycling’s governing body, did not recognize the women’s events at the time, his accomplishments were not entered in the record books. (The U.C.I. did not recognize women’s cycling until 1958.)

Despite those limitations, de Bruyn “was hugely popular,” said Suze Clemitson, editor of “Ride the Revolution: The Inside Stories From Women in Cycling” (2015), “and, I would say, to a greater extent, influential in the way that women’s cycling developed in Belgium at that time.”

“Willy was indisputably the huge thing in women’s cycling,” she added, in an interview.

For de Bruyn, however, the victory was bittersweet. By then he could not escape his desire to live as a man. He sought out books about people like him, in particular devouring the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist who offered medical care to transgender and intersex people in the 1920s.

De Bruyn trembled when he read about one of Hirschfeld’s patients, a worker in a printing shop who began living as a man at age 25 and was able to marry. While it is difficult to graft modern identity labels onto de Bruyn, it seems most likely, based on his writing, that he would fit a contemporary definition of intersex, meaning someone born with biological traits that don’t neatly fall into male or female categories.

“I grew more convinced that an error had been made in determining my civil status,” he wrote in a personal essay published in 1937. He was often depressed, but he tried not to blame himself. “Should one blame an individual,” he wrote, “when he is victimized by the imperfections of medicine and of the legal system?”

De Bruyn was about 22 when he decided to step away from sports and consult a doctor about changing his legal status. “After examination I was delivered a certificate that eliminated all doubt,” he wrote.

He traveled to the civil court of Oudenaarde, the Flemish municipality where he was living by then, and explained that he wanted to change his name and sex on all his identity documents.

It took months of tedious back and forth, but he ultimately received a new birth certificate, with his name and sex marker changed to reflect his male identity. De Bruyn, a reporter later wrote, was “profoundly happy” at the prospect of living publicly as a man.

In April 1937, he announced his transition with a long first-person essay in De Dag titled “A New Life — How I Changed From a Woman Into a Man.” In a preface, the editors of De Dag wrote with striking empathy that they wanted to help de Bruyn “carve a space for himself in a life that can often be so hard, and so hostile.”

De Bruyn became one of several high-profile athletes in the 1930s to publicly undergo gender transition, among them the Czech sprinter Zdenek Koubek and the British shot-putter Mark Weston. (It was Koubek de Bruyn had read about in De Dag.) Their transitioning prompted the popular American sports magazine Physical Culture to write about the subject under the headline “Can Sex in Humans Be Changed?”

In Belgium, de Bruyn was one of the few nationally known queer figures. At the time, “there was a very hush-hush culture around queer sexualities, despite the existence of a relatively visible queer subculture in bigger cities like Brussels,” Wannes Dupont, a professor of the history of sexuality at the University of Edinburgh, said in an interview.

Perhaps de Bruyn’s transition created a little more space for queer athletes in the region. Shortly after he left women’s sports, a Dutch cyclist who had been one of his main rivals, Mien van Bree, entered a lesbian relationship with a fellow rider, Maria Gaudens.

Today, de Bruyn has returned to the spotlight as an essential figure in European queer history. In 2019, a street in Brussels was named after him, and in 2021 he was the subject of a Google Doodle.

After leaving women’s sports, he entered a few men’s competitions, though that part of his career didn’t last long. In 1938, he married a woman, Clementine Juchters, whom he had known for five years. The wedding took place “in the middle of a large crowd of curious people,” according to a French newspaper.

The couple went on to open a cafe in Brussels. To attract customers, de Bruyn touted his personal history in ads, calling himself the “former world cycling champion” who had “become a man.”

He died on Aug. 13, 1989, in Antwerp, Belgium. He was 75.

In his later years, de Bruyn all but disappeared from public view. According to immigration records, he and his wife traveled to New York in 1955 and 1957 and probably lived there for some time. He was issued an American Social Security number under the name Willem M. Debruyn.

In 1965, a Belgian couple spotted him selling smoutebollen, a kind of Belgian doughnut, at the World’s Fair in New York, as recounted by the Belgian newspaper De Gazet van Aalst. The couple were shocked to see an athlete they regarded as famous out in the open and going unremarked upon in a foreign city. They remembered a time when de Bruyn was the talk of a nation.