I spent that week hitting with Chrissie and Martina before the championships, and even routed Chrissie in a practice one day while helping her prepare for the tournament as she’d once helped me prepare for Roland-Garros. When we were done, Chrissie motioned to me to meet her at the net and said quietly, “Billie! How can you not be out there this year?” Skipping singles at Wimbledon in 1976 remains probably the biggest regret of my professional tennis life.
When I got back to the New York Sets after Wimbledon, I resumed playing singles again, not just doubles. I was so glad I did. The Sets advanced to the World TeamTennis finals opposite the San Francisco Golden Gaters, and they were to be played the same week I had agreed to coach and play for the U.S. Fed Cup team. Some bicoastal flights and overnight drives were required for me to make both competitions. But our teams ended up taking both titles. Not bad for a thirty-two-year-old sometime “retiree” who was icing her knees during some changeovers. On the final weekend of Fed Cup and the World TeamTennis final I had played five matches in forty-eight hours—eight pressure-saturated sets of singles and doubles—without dropping a set.
Though both titles were hugely important to me, most of the media attention and live television coverage was focused on another tournament in the town of South Orange, New Jersey, which was ninety miles away from our Fed Cup site. The Slims publicity director, Jeanie Brinkman, was among the first to be alerted that something was happening there when a reporter called her one day and said, “Do you know there’s a man playing the women’s tour?”
Jeanie said, “Are you nuts?”
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When forty-one-year-old Renée Richards turned up at the Tennis Week Open in South Orange, plenty of questions were raised that sports and society continue to grapple with today. When the rules for tennis and other sports were written, nobody thought about questions such as, Can a player compete as a woman if she had been born a male? Can hormone therapy and sex-reassignment surgery turn one sex into another? Is gender what you are assigned when you were born, or what you self-identify as later? What mix of physiological, psychological, and social forces are in play?
Before undergoing sex-reassignment surgery in 1975—an exceedingly rare procedure in those days—Renée had been known as Dr. Richard Raskind, a junior champion in high school and captain of the Yale tennis team who later served in the Navy, qualified five times for the U.S. Championships, and went on to build a career as a brilliant ophthalmological surgeon based in New York City.
Raskind seemed to have everything going for him—a thriving practice, a beautiful wife and young son, scads of dear friends who loved him—but he was also harboring a secret. Ever since he was a child, he had felt he was a female trapped in a man’s body. He started crossdressing as a woman during college. Later, he began a course of hormone therapy, which was relatively new, and traveled to Morocco intending to continue transitioning—then canceled. When he again thought he couldn’t continue as a man any longer, he got a divorce. After completing her transition, Renée—she chose the name because it’s French for “reborn”—moved to California to start a new life with a new identity. She kept the details private from all but a few friends.
One of the first people to recognize her there was an old acquaintance from her amateur days, Bobby Riggs. When Bobby saw a six-foot-two woman practicing at the John Wayne Tennis Club in Newport Beach, he ambled over for a closer look through those thick glasses of his because he thought he recognized that distinctive forehand. When Bobby got close enough, he said, “Oh, it’s you!” Though he hadn’t seen Dick for years, there had been rumors.
In July 1976, Renée entered and won an important amateur tournament in San Diego. One of the losing players recognized her and tipped off a local reporter. The story made international headlines, and Renée was soon the most famous transsexual since Christine Jorgensen went public in the 1950s.
Jorgensen was an important person in LGBTQ+ history. Before she died in 1989, her advocacy for transgender rights and insistence on living an out life contributed greatly to society’s changing definition of sexuality, and the recognition that it can be something that is not necessarily binary, or even static. Christine sparked important conversations about how, psychologically, some people’s gender identity can be different than their biological sex. That kind of public dialogue wasn’t happening in America before she came along. The fact that she professed herself to be happy in her new life made an impact too.
Unlike Christine, Renée has always called herself a “reluctant crusader.” That changed when the USTA and the Women’s Tennis Association banned her from all their tournaments, including the U.S. Open. Renée said she never had any intention of playing the Open until they told her she couldn’t. She had gone through an agonizing series of operations and hormone therapy and untold emotional turbulence to be who she was. She owned a U.S. passport that said she was female. She was licensed to practice medicine as a female. What right did tennis officials have to reject her?
Renée told a writer from womenSports she wanted to show the world she wasn’t a “two-headed monster. A transexual, or anyone different, any minority, can still be a socially acceptable person.” Gladys interviewed Renée for World Tennis magazine as well and became one of her earliest supporters. Another ally was Renée’s friend Gene Scott, who invited her to play his event in South Orange, and then refused to back down even after Jerry Diamond, the WTA’s executive director, pulled the event’s sanction and most of the top players withdrew. Renée’s debut there was a spectacle. Howard Cosell called her matches on TV, a capacity crowd of 3,200 was on hand, and hundreds of media members clamored to interview her. Hoping to add a little levity and simultaneously underscore her determination not to be cowed, Renée accepted Gene’s offer to make an entrance by arriving for her first match in his Rolls-Royce. “I’m here to make a point,” Renée told reporters. “It’s a human rights issue. I want to show that someone who has a different lifestyle or medical condition has a right to stand up for what they are.”
Renée made it to the semifinals, and the crowd gave her a standing ovation as she left the court when she lost. Renée cried, feeling that she’d nonetheless let people down. She received hundreds of letters from all kinds of people, some of them hateful, more of them supportive, and many of them heartbreaking accounts of the discrimination and challenges they endured. (Significant hurdles remain. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, the largest survey of transgender people in the U.S. to date, found that 81.7 percent of the respondents reported seriously thinking about suicide in their lifetimes, and 40.4 percent reported actually attempting suicide. Ninety-eight percent of those who experienced four or more instances of violence in the past year said they considered suicide that same year.)
Once Renée set her sights on the 1976 U.S. Open, the tournament committee announced a new rule requiring every woman entered to submit to a chromosome test to determine if they were genetically female. I felt the requirement was wrong then and I feel the same now. Renée refused the test and started a controversial legal battle for the right to play.
My instinct was to wait to take a public position until we learned more about the science and subject of sex reassignment, and I said so at one heated WTA meeting about Renée. (Today, many trans people prefer the term “gender confirmation” surgery over the term “sex reassignment.”) At the start, the women players were almost unanimously opposed to allowing her on the circuit. Many people said they were worried that letting her compete would open the floodgates for other transgender players who were younger and stronger. Some even said that men would have the surgeries (it’s actually a grueling series of surgeries) just to compete in women’s tennis, which was absurd. It was more proof that ignorance breeds fear and contempt.
By March 1976, Renée was still snared in her legal battle and my knees felt strong enough to play tournaments again after another knee surgery. I
asked the WTA to grant me a wild-card entry into the Virginia Slims singles championships in New York that month, and they initially said yes—then they said no. I was upset about their change of heart, so I decided to enter an unsanctioned four-tournament series that Gladys was running called the Lionel Cup. Gladys, generous as ever, had also offered a slot to Renée. The WTA was not happy that I was breaking their boycott of Renée. That was okay with me. I wasn’t too happy with them, either. Now that I was possibly going to play against Renée, I had to figure out my public stance on the issue of transgender players on the tour. I wanted to hear from Renée first, so I called her and said, “I need to meet you.”
A friend of Renée’s loaned us her apartment for our first conversation. We talked for four hours. Renée was open and warm and funny. She’s a wonderful storyteller. She told me how she had always known she was female, and how she tried to overcompensate by taking up aggressive sports and acting macho in public. In private, she sometimes wore her sister’s dresses. Her whole life had been a denial of her authentic self, and she finally couldn’t live that way anymore. She fought depression and suicidal thoughts.
I was full of questions and, because Renée is a doctor, she was able to describe in clinical detail how her body had changed since her transition. Because of the removal of her testes and years of estrogen therapy, she was physiologically identical to a woman who had been through a hysterectomy and had her ovaries removed. Her muscles had lost their mass and were actually less efficient at supporting her large frame than most women of her height and weight. Renée weighed only 147 pounds, and she was nowhere near as powerful as Richard had been. The only thing about her that wasn’t female was the Y chromosome lingering in her cells. Beyond that, doctors I spoke with confirmed to me she was physiologically female. By the time we parted ways that day, I was convinced that Renée was a woman.
As it turned out, we didn’t take the court together until the second tournament that Gladys sponsored, this one in Port Washington, New York. I was entering singles and doubles, and so I asked Renée if she would be my partner. I knew my colleagues at the WTA would flip out, but she was becoming my friend, she was about to be thrown back into the maw of the New York media, and I wanted to make a very public show of support for her. I was thirty-three and Renée was forty-three and we didn’t even have a chance to practice together before our first match because I got stuck in traffic, but we played like a couple of kids. At one point Renée foot-faulted on a serve and I turned around and joked, “Renée? Don’t do that.” She broke up laughing.
Renée was an incredibly smart player, and we rolled all the way to the semifinals. The day of that match, however, Renée had the flu. At several junctures she turned to me and said she wasn’t sure she could play on. Every time, I told her, “Keep going…You’re fine, Renée.” (Easy for me to say.) We won the first set, but now she was panting when we sat down on the changeover and she told me, “Billie, I’m burning up.” Again, I prodded her to keep going. “I won Wimbledon with a fever of 104!” I goaded her. She got up and limped through a few more games, but at the next changeover she was practically sprawling on the ground. That’s when I turned to the stands, which were filled with her friends from Long Island, and shouted, “This is the last time I’m ever playing with a Jewish American princess!”
That drew huge laughs, including from Renée. She straggled back to her feet, we won the match and, thanks to her determination, we went on to win the tournament.
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In Renée’s legal case against the USTA and WTA, her lawyers argued that the organizations were violating New York State’s human rights laws against gender discrimination. She asked for a restraining order to prevent them from barring her from the 1977 U.S. Open. The case was heard in New York Supreme Court, with affidavits from doctors and other experts on both sides of the issue. Some of the tropes the USTA and WTA’s attorneys invoked were stunning to read in a formal legal document. In one court filing, they wrote,
We have reason to believe there are 10,000 transsexuals in the United States and many more female impersonators or imposters. The total number of such persons throughout the world is not known. Because of the millions of dollars in prize money available to competitors, because of the nationalistic desires to excel in athletics, and because of world-wide experiments, especially in the iron curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by any means undreamed of a few years ago, the USTA has been especially sensitive to its obligation to assure fairness of competition.
Seriously? The WTA and USTA attorneys were suggesting that an army of Eastern Bloc drag queens might be rounded up from every gay bar and cabaret between East Berlin and Moscow and then trained for peak athletic performance to rake in millions in tennis prize money, all for the glory of the Communist state? They were equating transsexual people to “experiments.” That was unacceptable.
There was no recognition of the profound and complex factors that push someone to declare a different gender identity than the sex he or she had been assigned at birth, or the many surgical procedures, long-term psychological screening, counseling, and medical interventions necessary when someone goes through what Renée did. Renée later wrote two books detailing her life and transition, and portions are difficult reading. For me, trying to imagine the pain and sense of displacement, the long recoveries, the feeling of being in-process until the long journey is over, is heartrending. I can’t imagine people getting gender confirmation surgery merely because they can. They do it because they can’t bear not to go forward with it.
A few officials and players, including Frankie and Vicki Berner, argued against Renée in the same court filing, claiming that she would have an unfair advantage because she was born a male.
I submitted an affidavit that supported Renée and argued the opposite: “From my observation of Dr. Richards and experience with her on the court, as well as my total knowledge of the sport of tennis, she does not enjoy physical superiority or strength so as to have an advantage over women competitors.”
On August 16, 1977, Judge Alfred M. Ascione found that Renée’s human rights had been violated by the USTA and WTA and declared, “This person is now a female.” She was cleared to play the U.S. Open, which was now just days away.
Right after Renée won her case, I went to another WTA meeting and said to Chrissie, Rosie, Frankie, and the others, “Look. Renée is a woman, she’s going to play and we should welcome her. And besides, she’s great. You’re going to love her.”
I don’t know if Chrissie knew I had used similar language when she was sixteen and our veteran players were icing her out. I wonder now if Alice Marble had a comparable talk with the other white players before she walked Althea Gibson through the gates of Forest Hills when Althea broke the color barrier there in 1950.
At the 1977 U.S. Open, Renée had the bad luck to draw Virginia Wade in the first round, to whom she lost. Renée and Betty Ann Stuart did advance to the doubles final before falling to Martina and Betty Stöve. What a thrill it was to see Renée contend for the title after her long fight and hear the band playing while the trophies were handed out. She retired in 1981 and coached Martina for a while. Renée is still a good friend, not to mention the best ophthalmologist Ilana and I have ever had.
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I continue to work hard to keep apprised of the latest ethics, science, and thinking about gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, and transgender rights, especially as they apply to the right to play sports. Figuring out the best way to include and protect the interests of all the athletes involved remains a hot-button discussion at all levels of competition. It’s hard to see how we can arrive at a one-size-fits-all policy.
The Women’s Sports Foundation tracks the transgender issue and publishes position papers and guides for athletes, parents, and sports organizations. What we know is constantly evolving, and
so are the arguments about how to keep competition fair and yet available for everyone. Right now we have more questions than answers. How do we measure what physical advantages remain after trans athletes transition? What kind of testing or parameters should we have, if any at all? How should those standards change from sport to sport? Should trans athletes have to out themselves in order to compete? Remember, not everyone lives in a safe environment where being transgender is accepted or free of repercussions.
Defining the rules for hyperandrogenous (or intersex) athletes, people who are born with the anatomical or hormonal characteristics of both a male and female, is also challenging. In 2018, the Women’s Sports Foundation honored the South African track world champion Caster Semenya for her accomplishments and example after she was ordered by the track and field’s world governing body, the IAAF, to submit to hormone suppression therapy if she wanted to compete. Can you imagine someone trying to reverse-engineer Michael Jordan because he jumped too high or the Olympic champion Katie Ledecky because she swims too fast?
The IAAF said Semenya’s naturally occurring testosterone levels exceed what a woman “should” have. But the IAAF has no such limit on how much naturally occurring testosterone a man can have. Apparently, the IAAF believes you can be too much of a woman but never too much of a man.
“This is the only area of sports I know where people are asked to undergo unnecessary medical intervention in order to compete,” Katrina Karkazis, a bioethicist from Yale, told me. Katrina has consulted with the United Nations, the Women’s Sports Foundation, and Semenya during her fight. Katrina added, “The IAAF acts as if the side effects of hormone suppression therapy are benign, and they’re not.”
The IAAF has been trying to police Caster ever since she won her first 800-meter world title in 2009 at age eighteen in a scorching time. Back then, word was leaked to the press that she was hyperandrogenous. It was a grievous violation of her privacy, and she didn’t confirm the report. She won a temporary injunction lifting the hormone therapy order in 2010, but the IAAF successfully fought to reinstate it. As I write this, the IAAF has kept up its efforts to police Caster, most recently by passing rules that targeted only her events, the 400, 800, and 1,500 meters. Caster initially planned to adjust by trying to qualify for the Olympic Games in the 200-meter sprint, a steep challenge. However, she ended 2020 ranked 165th in the world, despite many top athletes sitting out the year due to the coronavirus pandemic. In February 2021, Caster, then thirty, filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights in a last-ditch bid to save her career and avert having to take more hormone suppression medication. If successful, she said she’d try for her third consecutive 800-meter title at the Summer Olympics, which were pushed back by Tokyo organizers from 2020 to 2021; if denied, she’d attempt a long-shot bid in the 5,000.
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