Renée
Richards walks gingerly down the gravel driveway of her
upstate New York home. At 72, she’s still
active and fit, though a far cry from the imposing
athlete who stalked the net at the 1977 U.S. Open, two years
after her sex-change operation.
Richards became
an unintentional hero when she was outed after an amateur
tennis match in La Jolla, Calif. She was 41 years old and
had no desire to turn pro. But when tennis officials
preemptively told her she couldn’t, Richards
began a fight that would forever define her life.
“I was
happy starting a practice in ophthalmology in
California,” she recalls. “Then they
told me I couldn’t play, and all of a sudden I became
the world’s activist for the sexually
disenfranchised.”
Transgender
people today may turn up in Oscar-nominated films and
smash-hit sitcoms, but in 1975 the very idea of gender
reassignment was shocking. The sex-change operation of
Christine Jorgensen had made international headlines
two decades before. But for all intents and purposes,
Richards was alone.
“You have
to put it in perspective,” she says. “Nobody
had ever heard of doing anything like this. I was big.
I was tall. I was not as strong as the 20-year-old
women I was playing, but I was imposing. I was a
pariah.”
Richards’s
newly released autobiography, No Way Renée: The
Second Half of My Notorious Life (Simon and
Schuster) revisits stories from her best-selling 1983
memoir, Second Serve. She writes of growing up
as Richard Raskin, a boy wearing his sister’s
clothes, the years-long struggle to have a sex-change
operation, and the decision to challenge the United
States Tennis Association for the right to compete against
women.
She then brings
the story up-to-date, sharing her bemused accommodation
to an ever-changing world, her career as an ophthalmologist,
her drive to be a good father (Richards’s word)
to her son Nicky, and the search for love that
continues today.
It’s a
story Richards is proud to tell and retell. And while
she’s not shy about recognizing the path she
forged, she is hardly the firebrand activist some
would wish a transgender poster child to be.
“I’m not an advocate,” she says,
reflecting on this publication’s title.
“I’m essentially a pretty passive
person—a tennis player and a doctor.
“I’m not politically or socially what ordinary
people would call an activist.”
Richards
attributes much of her conventional thinking to her
upper-crust education at Horace Mann college prep
school in Riverdale, N.Y., and Yale in the 1950s,
where she learned the traditional values that she adheres
to today. For instance, while Richards believes everyone
deserves the legal rights of marriage, she
can’t quite force herself to think of two women
as “married.”
“I was
born in 1934. Marriage to me meant men and women,”
she admits. “I have two very close friends
three houses up the road. They’re lifetime
partners and they don’t call themselves
married.”
She quickly adds
that they may be bound by the same generational
conventions she learned. “They’re in their
50s. If they were in their 20s, they’d be
demanding it. I know that,” she says.
For her part,
Richards thinks transgender people should not be able to
compete at the highest levels, a belief she realizes
undermines everything she accomplished. She suggests
transgender females like Canadian mountain biker
Michelle Dumaresq and Danish golfer Mianne Bagger play
at club events rather than on national teams.
“The U.S.
Olympic Committee has decreed in all of its great glory and
intelligence that transsexuals can play in the Olympics if
two years have passed since their operations—I
think that’s going to come back to haunt
them,” she says.
It’s not
new thinking. Transgender athletes today confront many of
the same arguments Richards did 35 years ago. What
constitutes gender? Are transgender people fair
competition in women’s sports? Which locker room
do they use?
In the clamor
Richards endured during her battle to compete athletically
against women, she heard little complaint from the one group
you’d expect, her competition.
“I called
her and said, ‘Can I come listen to you and your
story? At least meet
you,’ ’’ remembers Billie Jean
King. “She said sure. I was there for four
hours.”
“When I
look back on it, I’d say it was a remarkably warm
welcome,” Richards says. “It’s
not just that they were willing to play me; some of
them have stayed close friends to this day. Wendy Turnbull,
Virginia Wade, Ilana Kloss, Martina [Navratilova] and
Billie Jean and Mary Carillo—they’re all
very good friends of mine.”
King filed an
affidavit in court supporting Richards’s entry into
the U.S. Open. In 1981, Navratilova asked Richards to
join her team of coaches as she prepared her epic
rivalry with Chris Evert. Nineteen years later
Navratilova would insist that Richards induct her into the
International Tennis Hall of Fame.
“Here are
the two greatest of all time in my court,” says
Richards. “And they had everything to
lose.”
“After she
won the lawsuit, the players were freaking out,” says
King. “I said, ‘You guys, she’s a
woman, so she’s playing. Get over
it.’ ”
Some of the
details of Richards’s life are confounding, others
surreal, and a few seemingly self-sabotaging. When
Richards sought counsel for her fight against the
USTA, she chose closeted gay, homophobic, McCarthyist
lawyer Roy Cohn. When she decided to begin her new life as a
woman, she opted to live in Orange County, Calif.,
which hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a
presidential election since FDR’s second term. The
John Wayne Tennis Club was her local court.
In March 1999,
Tennis magazine published an article titled
“Regrets, She’s Had a Few,” implying
this included her sex-reassignment surgery. Although
Richards adamantly denies this is true, she admits to
wishing it had not been necessary.
“I realize
it’s remarkable,” she says. “[But] I
would rather have not had this overwhelmingly diverse
experience of being able to live half of my life as a
man and half of my life as a woman. I would rather I were
not born or imprinted into being a transsexual.
Absolutely.”
Richards
acknowledges the effect she’s had on transgender
people and society at large. But that doesn’t
mean she approves of it.
“I
don’t even like the word transgendered. I
didn’t have a gender operation; I had a sex
change. Now there’s a new thing that the
transgendered want to have their birth certificates changed
so they can be women without having an operation. So
it’s all my fault.
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