IN THE SPOTLIGHT
At the height of her fame, trans trailblazer Renée Richards faced competitors on the court and harsh critics in the media,
In the late 1970s, American eye surgeon Renée Richards was followed by curious stares and flashing cameras everywhere she went.
“And what had I done to merit this interest? Perfected an organ transplant procedure? Gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Neither. Simply put, I had undergone a male-to-female sex change operation and then had the temerity to play in an amateur women’s tennis tournament,” she wrote in No Way Renee: The Second Half of My
Notorious Life. “To compound my audacity, I had not hung my head and apologized. I had gone to court, won my case, and played professional tennis as a woman.”
As she writes in her book, she was born Richard Raskind, raised as “a nice Jewish boy” in New York, graduated from Yale, became an ophthalmologist, married and had a son.
But there was another “entity” that was growing stronger and eventually took over, leading to surgery in 1975, a move across the country and a new name.
It was a name North America learned in 1976, when Renée Richards was outed by a reporter after winning the La Jolla tennis tournament. The San Diego Union reported that Richards’ strong serve and volley game “prompted rumours as to her gender.” (Playing as Raskind a year before her surgery, she was ranked 13th nationally in men’s 35-and-over tennis.)
In the summer of 1976, Richards, then in her early 40s, issued a statement. She had the “same right to play” at the U.S. Open as any other woman, she said.
This was the Cold War era, and with “millions of dollars of prize money” on the line, the United States Tennis Association fretted about what advantages Richards might have, and the nationalistic desires of “Iron Curtain” countries “to produce athletic stars by means undreamed of a few years ago.”
Shortly after Richards stated her intentions, the association instituted new genetic tests for female players. Richards took her case to the New York Supreme Court.
Along with the doctors who said she was a woman psychologically, physically and endocrinologically, tennis star Billie Jean King filed an affidavit. She had been her doubles partner at one point, and noted that Richards “does not enjoy physical superiority or strength so as to have an advantage over women competitors in the sport of tennis.”
After the court ruled in Richards’ favour in 1977, she lost to that year’s Wimbledon champion, Virginia Wade, in the first round of the U.S. Open.
Living as Richard Raskind had been a “long nightmare,” she later wrote, but the intense scrutiny and notoriety of life on and off the tennis court came with its own troubles.
Headlines were sensational and Richards was sometimes given the title of “controversial transsexual,” rather than tennis player. Writing in the Globe and Mail in 1976, Christie Blatchford criticized broadcasters who made “bad-taste” jokes at her expense: “The ‘he-she-it’ lines used by television’s blockheads show no sympathy for a human being who probably already has suffered a great deal.”
In 1979, when this photo was taken, Richards teamed up with the infamous Ilie “Nasty” Nastase, a Romanian tennis star — described as one of the most erratic players in the game — in the mixed doubles at the U.S. Open. “The stands were packed; everyone wanted to see the two of them,” says Jeff Green, who went with his family, as he did every year.
Nastase and Richards won that day and were photographed smiling as they walked off the court, the crowd on its feet still watching.
“At that time, it was something new to us all. She was the first person I had ever heard of as transgender,” says Green, now 76, from his home in Florida.
Richards (who prefers transsexual over transgender) retired from tennis in 1981. She was “tired of the fishbowl,” but continued to coach.
Reflecting on her life several years ago, she told writer Emily Bazelon that if she had had her surgery at 22, “no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me.”
“Maybe I should have knuckled under and said, ‘That’s one thing I can’t have as my new-found right in being a woman,’ ” she said in the piece, which was part of the book Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame. “I think transsexuals have every right to play, but maybe not at the professional level.”
Richards, now 81, remains a wellknown ophthalmologist in New York and a professor at New York University who has co-authored articles on such hard-to-pronounce topics as “diplopia following transconjunctival blepharoplasty.” She notes in her book that students consider her a “distinguished mentor, not a curiosity.”
She told GQ last year that being a trans pioneer is a small part of her life, but she has a hunch that the headline on her obituary will be “Transsexual Tennis Player Renée Richards Dies.”
She fought for her rights because she was “affronted that a medical operation could overshadow everything else I was as a human being,” she wrote in her 2008 book.
“But there is no denying that when I retired from tennis, the world was much more aware of what a transsexual was, and that familiarity, not to mention my success as a professional coach, dispelled a lot of the condition’s scandalous overtones. I opened doors for those who came after me, and I am a hero to many of them.”