Finding Renée Richards: new biography revisits 1977 US Open lawsuit and her later stance on trans athletes

In 1977 Dr Renée Richards sued for the right to play in the women’s draw of the US Open after transitioning, and a new biography examines that case alongside Richards’s present-day support for restrictions on trans athletes. Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer, by Julie Kliegman, revisits the legal fight and Richards’s later views.

Kliegman, a sports journalist who is trans and non-binary, places Richards’s lawsuit and its aftermath at the centre of the book and notes the legal team that represented her. “The lawsuit was really significant,” Kliegman says. “Obviously, clearly, it was very significant for Renée. But the decision was limited to her, as opposed to setting a precedent for trans people going forward.” Kliegman reports that Richards sought help from Roy Cohn’s firm, which successfully argued the case.

The author interviewed Richards in person on multiple occasions and drew on Richards’s autobiographies and unpublished interview transcripts while researching the biography. Kliegman describes encounters in which Richards showed her photographs of celebrities and met for lunch at the golf club where Richards attends ladies’ day. Kliegman says the project allowed a reexamination of a 50-year-old cause célèbre and the broader topic of inclusion for trans people in sport and society.

Kliegman observes parallels between the 1970s debate and contemporary disputes over trans athletes and says the modern environment is more hostile. “What struck me the most is that if anything, the conversation and dynamics between athletes are amplified today by the hostility [that is] more powerful than anything Renée would have faced,” Kliegman says. The author reports that Richards now supports limits on trans participation: “Renée today believes that trans women and girls should not be allowed to play girls and women’s sports unless they have not undergone so-called male puberty,” Kliegman says. “She does not, overall, believe most trans athletes should be allowed to play girls and women’s sports. It was an interesting point of tension between me and Renée.”

Kliegman describes Richards as citing studies about competitive advantage but says the evidence, in her view, remains inconclusive. “Renée … cites research that shows trans girls and women may have an advantage over cisgender peers,” Kliegman says. “My impression is that the research isn’t conclusive enough.” Those differences informed a recurring tension between author and subject during interviews.

On editorial choices, Kliegman departed from recent journalistic practice by using Richards’s birth name and male pronouns for earlier life stages. “In recent years, you usually don’t refer to someone by their former name, former pronouns, when they change it,” Kliegman says. “I came to understand [using their birth name when talking about their early life] was really important for [Richards] to fully depict the back and forth, the push and pull, Dick [Richards was formerly called Richard Raskind] and Renée.” The author adds: “It was a tough one for me,” and quotes Richards’s view: “[Richards] felt I could not describe it accurately without ‘he’ and ‘her’ pronouns … So much in the book, Renée did not have any say over. It’s a journalistic project, not an authorized biography. Just about the only thing I think she needed a say over was [to] describe her respectfully.”

Kliegman recounts Richards’s early life as Richard Raskind in New York City in a Jewish-American family, with a father who was an orthopedic surgeon and a mother who was a psychiatrist. The book says Raskind was bullied by an older sister who made him wear her clothing, attended Yale University, began privately wearing women’s clothes and presented as female on visits to Greenwich Village while continuing to play men’s tennis. After medical school at the University of Rochester he became an ophthalmologist in New York, joined the Navy, competed in service tennis tournaments and worked aboard submarines; the book also notes that he dated women and discussed gender identity with several psychoanalysts.

According to the biography, Raskind travelled to a clinic in Morocco in the late 1960s that performed sex-change operations but chose not to have surgery then, later married Barbara Mole and had a son, Nicholas, and, after that marriage ended, underwent a sex-change operation in New York in 1975. He adopted the name Renée and relocated to California while continuing to compete in tennis as a woman and finding success on the court.

The book recounts that Richards was outed by broadcaster Richard Carlson, after which the United States Tennis Association challenged whether she was “genetically female” and demanded a test to determine whether she had “the conventional XX sex chromosomes.” Richards sued and, after a judge ruled in her favour, she was allowed to play in the US Open; she lost in the singles first round to the defending Wimbledon champion Virginia Wade and, partnering Betty Ann Stuart, reached the doubles final where they lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stöve. Kliegman writes that Billie Jean King played a significant role in persuading much of the women’s tennis world to accept Richards, noting that King met with Richards and played doubles with her.

The biography records that Richards reached a career-high singles ranking of No 20, later coached Martina Navratilova in a partnership the book describes as successful but sometimes bumpy, and returned to a long career practicing ophthalmology with clients including journalist Keith Olbermann. Kliegman says Richards suffered a late-life family tragedy when her son Nicholas died by suicide at age 47 in 2019: “It’s still raw for her,” Kliegman says. “I don’t think the tragedy of losing a child is something most people ever get over.”

Kliegman concludes that Richards’s views on restrictions for trans athletes sit alongside an increased awareness of political efforts targeting trans people, linking that shift in part to the Trump administration’s policies. “If I did not see her views on trans athletes themselves evolve, what I did see was that she now understands restrictions on trans athletes … are connected to this broader project the right wing has to try to eliminate trans people from public life,” Kliegman says. “It’s not a distinction she was making, and was comfortable with, before Trump was reelected.”