I was reading about the history of chess recently when something caught my attention. This is the the rabbit hole. In 1978 Maia Chiburdanidze become the women's world chess champion. She got to play for the championship because of her performance in the 1976 Tbilisi women's interzonal. But she got to that point because of her performance in the 1975 Soviet women championship.

But her performance was actually not that good like 7th place when the top 3 would have been advanced. What happened? Well the player who got 3rd place dropped out because he alerted the soviet chess authority that he was transitioning into being a man. There are really very few sources I can find and none in English so there's not many details about his life before or after this. What I have been able to figure out though is that he was from Crimea and was a rising star of women's chess. After he decided to no longer present as a woman he basically fell into obscurity finding maybe meddling success in chess from then on. Really for all I know he could still be alive. Anyway I thought this was a cool as hell little bit of history.

Best source I found for someone who reads Russian or wants to deal with translation.