Trailblazer who fought and won in sex-switch struggle
On International Transgender Day, Renee Richards can stand tall for a brave battle with tennis’s top brass, says Simon Briggs
‘People call her a reluctant pioneer. No one is more important in the movement for acceptance’
Today, as you may or may not be aware, is International Transgender Day. One suspects that Dr Renee Richards – the worldrenowned eye surgeon – would not need reminding. But despite her status as the first transgender woman to play professional sport, Richards rarely speaks about her trailblazing past.
It is hard to blame her, when she has been back and forward over this extraordinary story so many times. There have already been two autobiographies and two movies, in the first of which she was played by Vanessa Redgrave.
Richards was born in 1934 as Richard Raskin. The son of a surgeon and a psychiatrist, Dick Raskin was part of New York’s Jewish intellectual elite and a fine athlete, too. His left-handed serve, delivered from a rake-like 6ft 2in frame, helped him to captain the Yale tennis team, dominate the All Navy Championships and win a New York State title. He married a model, fathered a son and, from the outside, seemed to be enjoying a charmed life.
So much for appearances. In fact, Raskin was locked in a desperate battle between male and female selves that lasted a couple of decades before he finally underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1975. Renee means ‘reborn’ in French, although Richards claims not to have known this at the time.
Things turned surreal the next year. Richards won a tournament in California under a third name (Renee Clark), and was outed on the evening news after a spectator recognised that ferocious serve. After weeks of controversy, the US Open introduced a chromosome screening procedure to keep her out. It was stubbornness, more than any wider point of principle, that drove Richards to sue. “I’m basically a selfish person,” she has written.
After all she had been through, she was damned if she was going to let the United States Tennis Association take away something she loved. In court, the defendants used the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument, supplemented by a dose of Cold War paranoia. USTA lawyer George Gowen made reference to “worldwide experiments, especially in Iron Curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by means undreamt of a few years ago”.
Yet Judge Alfred Ascione correctly observed that the number of athletes in Richards’s position was vanishingly small, and ordered that she be allowed to play. At the 1977 US Open, Richards lost to Virginia Wade in the first round of singles, but reached the final of the women’s doubles, before a team featuring Martina Navratilova – a player she would later coach for two years – beat her.
Ascione was right to scoff at the idea of a transgender avalanche. More than four decades later, there have still been only a handful of cases. Caster Semenya is the nearest comparison in terms of notoriety, but she was born with internal testes, which technically makes her an intersex athlete rather than a transgender one.
Society is very different today, but even in this more enlightened era, Richards’s story retains its resonance.
This month, New York attorney John Coffey organised a panel evening on the case at the Brooklyn Bar Association. He was surprised and delighted by the turnout, and all the more so when Richards herself made a late decision to participate.
“People describe Renee as a reluctant pioneer,” said Coffey, “but I believe that as time went on she realised how much her case mattered. No one is more important in the movement for acceptance.”