Nearly 40 years ago, a 6 foot 2 inch woman in a sleeveless white dress took the court at Forest Hills. It was a first round match at the US Open between the unseeded Renee Richards, a strapping, left-handed American and third-seeded Virginia Wade, a 5’ 7 right-handed British champion. “Whatever else it may be,” The Guardian declared, on the eve of the match, “it is not as Virginia Wade suggests, ‘just another match’.” This however, was for almost entirely non-tennis reasons.
Wade won that day, but Richards had won simply by being there, even before stepping on to the tennis court. It had taken a different kind of victory in a different kind of court to get here. Just days before the tournament began a New York judge, on August 16, 1977, ruled in a landmark decision that Richards, a transgendered person, could play as a woman.
Before Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic champion and celebrated transgender cover girl of Vanity Fair, there was Renee Richards.
Renee wasn’t always Renee – in fact she had been Renee for less than two years, when she tried to enter the women’s draw of the 1976 US Open. From 1934 till 1975, which is to say since she was born, until she turned 41, Renee had lived as a man. A practicing ophthalmologist, Yale graduate, college tennis champion and member of the East Coast elite, Renee had lived life as Richard Raskind. Until, roiled by endless internal turmoil and finally fed up of playing a role she had been long uncomfortable with, she underwent a gender reassignment operation and became a woman.
Becoming a woman was no doubt not an easy transition for Richards to make; convincing the world of this would turn out to be even tougher.
A man's world
When she tried to enter the 1976 US Open, the authorities swiftly introduced the Barr body test, a test in use since the 1968 Olympics to distinguish men from women through chromosome identification. Richards, born with an X and Y chromosome, would have failed the test. She ended up not taking it and proceeded to lodge a protest in the Supreme Court of the New York county the same year. Until 1976, the United State Tennis Association had simply gone with a phenotype test – determining men from women with nothing more scientific than the naked eye, through an observation of primary and secondary sexual characteristics.
The USTA defended its actions in court by marshalling the fairness and equality arguments and also pointing with alarm to “as many as 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,” the USTA contended. “Because of the millions of dollars of prize money available to competitors, because of nationalistic desires to excel in athletics, and because of world-wide experiments, especially in the iron curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by means undreamed of a few years ago, the USTA has been especially sensitive to its obligation to assure fairness of competition among the athletes competing in the US Open, the leading international tennis tournament in the United States.”
It is not surprising that several women players were alarmed by this tall, Y-chromosome owning woman who was now playing against them, posing a challenge ostensibly far in excess of her gender.
Three women on the tour – Francoise Durr, Janet Newberry and Kristien K. Shaw – also submitted affidavits stating that "the taller a player is the greater advantage the player has, similarly, the stronger a player is, the greater advantage the player has, assuming like ability."
Earlier that year as Richards was "outed" on the circuit as formerly male, a rush of anxiety swept through the tennis firmament, with some players outright refusing to play against her.
Since her transition to womanhood, Richards had played nine tournaments as a woman, winning two and emerging runner-up in three. (In 1974 Richard Raskind had ranked 3rd in the east and 13th nationally in the men's 35-and-over division.)
The record itself seemed to smack of overachievement. Vicki Berner, director of women's tennis for the USTA, a former Canadian number one and tour director in charge of players, had perused the records. Had a 40-plus-year-old woman been as successful as Richards on the court? The judge recorded that Berner had been “unable to find” such a record as Richards’ which was “unparalleled in the history of women's professional tennis”.
The battle of the sexes
In her defence, Richards trotted out a series of doctors – including the specialist who conducted her sex-change operation, an independent expert and her own gynaecologist.
"With respect to Dr. Richard's internal sex, due to the operation I performed, one would say that Dr. Richards' internal sexual structure is anatomically similar to a biological woman who underwent a total hysterectomy and ovariectomy,” said Dr. Roberto Granato, her surgeon. Aside from being unable to reproduce, Richards, he said, “should be considered a woman, classified as a female and allowed to compete as such”.
One Dr. John Money, concurred that Richards resembled a woman whose ovaries and uterus had been removed. He further opposed the Barr test as inadequate, pointing out that it would be “unfair to use that test as the sole criterion for determining one's sex for purposes of participating in a sports event”. He continued:
“‘Dr. Richards is psychologically a woman; endocrinologically female; somatically (muscular tone, height, weight, breasts, physique) Dr. Richards is female and her muscular and fat composition has been transformed to that of a female; socially Dr. Richards is female; Dr. Richards' gonadal status is that of an ovariectomised female.”
Medicine had stepped up in Richards’ favour. And now a fellow athlete came forward. Bille Jean King, a winner of multiple grand slams (but at this point still a closeted lesbian) weighed in in support with her affidavit. King had partnered with Richards in one doubles tournament and attested that “she does not enjoy physical superiority or strength so as to have an advantage over women competitors in the sport of tennis."
“Being gay, I felt like an outsider already…” King later said. “Maybe that was the empathy I felt for Renée, because I knew what it felt like to not be welcomed by everybody.”
By this point King had won one of her own crucial battles – this one grandiosely billed as The Battle of the Sexes – when she defeated Bobby Riggs, a former men’s Wimbledon champion, hustler and part-time misogynist who believed he could beat any top-ranked woman. The 1973 exhibition match ended with King’s decisive 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 embarrassment of Riggs in front of a television audience of 50 million, with every volley serving to inch the women’s movement just a little bit forward.
King was already doing her bit for the women’s movement. Richards was unwittingly gathering the building blocks for another one. Though she was later hailed as a transgender icon and a pioneer who called time on discriminatory practices on a minority, she always maintained in interviews that she never saw herself as anything quite so grand.
Richards’ plea before the court was that her human rights had been violated. The court concurred. The Barr body test was found to be “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable”. She would be allowed to play as a woman.
The court ruled:
(The full judgement can be read here)
The 1977 US Open remained remarkable on a number of other fronts – not limited to Richards’ saga, but also featuring a stray bullet, a 14-year-old teenage wonderkid, and a controversial “spaghetti racket”. It was also to be the last edition of the tournament on the clay courts of Forest Hills, before moving to the hard surfaces of Flushing Meadows, where the tournament continues to be held.
As the cases of runners Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand suggest, there will always be difficult questions on what constitutes a permissible advantage in sport, what separates the sexes and how much of a role nature plays. Richards’ case was only the beginning.
She eventually achieved a career-best world ranking of 20, featuring in a few Grand Slam doubles and mixed doubles semi-finals, but never quite delivering on the apocalyptic fears that the tour would be turned upside down.
In fact, Richards, who is still alive, later went on to reconfigure her opinion on playing on the women’s circuit as a transgender person.
“Having lived for the past 30 years,” she said. “I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”
But that was still decades away. As the match wore on that September day in 1977, Richards was dismantled by Wade in two sets. "I was on centre court in the stadium at Forest Hills,” she later said, “and Virginia Wade had been used to that situation her whole life and I hadn't been. No matter how much good tennis I had played as an amateur there's nothing that compares to playing as a pro in the US Open on centre court.”
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
Wade won that day, but Richards had won simply by being there, even before stepping on to the tennis court. It had taken a different kind of victory in a different kind of court to get here. Just days before the tournament began a New York judge, on August 16, 1977, ruled in a landmark decision that Richards, a transgendered person, could play as a woman.
Before Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic champion and celebrated transgender cover girl of Vanity Fair, there was Renee Richards.
Renee wasn’t always Renee – in fact she had been Renee for less than two years, when she tried to enter the women’s draw of the 1976 US Open. From 1934 till 1975, which is to say since she was born, until she turned 41, Renee had lived as a man. A practicing ophthalmologist, Yale graduate, college tennis champion and member of the East Coast elite, Renee had lived life as Richard Raskind. Until, roiled by endless internal turmoil and finally fed up of playing a role she had been long uncomfortable with, she underwent a gender reassignment operation and became a woman.
Becoming a woman was no doubt not an easy transition for Richards to make; convincing the world of this would turn out to be even tougher.
A man's world
When she tried to enter the 1976 US Open, the authorities swiftly introduced the Barr body test, a test in use since the 1968 Olympics to distinguish men from women through chromosome identification. Richards, born with an X and Y chromosome, would have failed the test. She ended up not taking it and proceeded to lodge a protest in the Supreme Court of the New York county the same year. Until 1976, the United State Tennis Association had simply gone with a phenotype test – determining men from women with nothing more scientific than the naked eye, through an observation of primary and secondary sexual characteristics.
The USTA defended its actions in court by marshalling the fairness and equality arguments and also pointing with alarm to “as many as 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,” the USTA contended. “Because of the millions of dollars of prize money available to competitors, because of nationalistic desires to excel in athletics, and because of world-wide experiments, especially in the iron curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by means undreamed of a few years ago, the USTA has been especially sensitive to its obligation to assure fairness of competition among the athletes competing in the US Open, the leading international tennis tournament in the United States.”
It is not surprising that several women players were alarmed by this tall, Y-chromosome owning woman who was now playing against them, posing a challenge ostensibly far in excess of her gender.
Three women on the tour – Francoise Durr, Janet Newberry and Kristien K. Shaw – also submitted affidavits stating that "the taller a player is the greater advantage the player has, similarly, the stronger a player is, the greater advantage the player has, assuming like ability."
Earlier that year as Richards was "outed" on the circuit as formerly male, a rush of anxiety swept through the tennis firmament, with some players outright refusing to play against her.
Since her transition to womanhood, Richards had played nine tournaments as a woman, winning two and emerging runner-up in three. (In 1974 Richard Raskind had ranked 3rd in the east and 13th nationally in the men's 35-and-over division.)
The record itself seemed to smack of overachievement. Vicki Berner, director of women's tennis for the USTA, a former Canadian number one and tour director in charge of players, had perused the records. Had a 40-plus-year-old woman been as successful as Richards on the court? The judge recorded that Berner had been “unable to find” such a record as Richards’ which was “unparalleled in the history of women's professional tennis”.
The battle of the sexes
In her defence, Richards trotted out a series of doctors – including the specialist who conducted her sex-change operation, an independent expert and her own gynaecologist.
"With respect to Dr. Richard's internal sex, due to the operation I performed, one would say that Dr. Richards' internal sexual structure is anatomically similar to a biological woman who underwent a total hysterectomy and ovariectomy,” said Dr. Roberto Granato, her surgeon. Aside from being unable to reproduce, Richards, he said, “should be considered a woman, classified as a female and allowed to compete as such”.
One Dr. John Money, concurred that Richards resembled a woman whose ovaries and uterus had been removed. He further opposed the Barr test as inadequate, pointing out that it would be “unfair to use that test as the sole criterion for determining one's sex for purposes of participating in a sports event”. He continued:
“‘Dr. Richards is psychologically a woman; endocrinologically female; somatically (muscular tone, height, weight, breasts, physique) Dr. Richards is female and her muscular and fat composition has been transformed to that of a female; socially Dr. Richards is female; Dr. Richards' gonadal status is that of an ovariectomised female.”
Medicine had stepped up in Richards’ favour. And now a fellow athlete came forward. Bille Jean King, a winner of multiple grand slams (but at this point still a closeted lesbian) weighed in in support with her affidavit. King had partnered with Richards in one doubles tournament and attested that “she does not enjoy physical superiority or strength so as to have an advantage over women competitors in the sport of tennis."
“Being gay, I felt like an outsider already…” King later said. “Maybe that was the empathy I felt for Renée, because I knew what it felt like to not be welcomed by everybody.”
By this point King had won one of her own crucial battles – this one grandiosely billed as The Battle of the Sexes – when she defeated Bobby Riggs, a former men’s Wimbledon champion, hustler and part-time misogynist who believed he could beat any top-ranked woman. The 1973 exhibition match ended with King’s decisive 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 embarrassment of Riggs in front of a television audience of 50 million, with every volley serving to inch the women’s movement just a little bit forward.
King was already doing her bit for the women’s movement. Richards was unwittingly gathering the building blocks for another one. Though she was later hailed as a transgender icon and a pioneer who called time on discriminatory practices on a minority, she always maintained in interviews that she never saw herself as anything quite so grand.
Richards’ plea before the court was that her human rights had been violated. The court concurred. The Barr body test was found to be “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable”. She would be allowed to play as a woman.
The court ruled:
It seems clear that [the USTA] knowingly instituted this test for the sole purpose of preventing [Richards] from participating in the tournament. The only justification for using a sex determination test in athletic competition is to prevent fraud, i.e., men masquerading as women, competing against women.
This court rejects any such suggestion as applied to [Richards]. This court is totally convinced that there are very few biological males, who are accomplished tennis players, who are also either preoperative or postoperative transsexuals.
When an individual such as [Richards], a successful physician, a husband and father, finds it necessary for his own mental sanity to undergo a sex reassignment, the unfounded fears and misconceptions of [USTA] must give way to the overwhelming medical evidence that this person is now female.
(The full judgement can be read here)
The 1977 US Open remained remarkable on a number of other fronts – not limited to Richards’ saga, but also featuring a stray bullet, a 14-year-old teenage wonderkid, and a controversial “spaghetti racket”. It was also to be the last edition of the tournament on the clay courts of Forest Hills, before moving to the hard surfaces of Flushing Meadows, where the tournament continues to be held.
As the cases of runners Caster Semenya and Dutee Chand suggest, there will always be difficult questions on what constitutes a permissible advantage in sport, what separates the sexes and how much of a role nature plays. Richards’ case was only the beginning.
She eventually achieved a career-best world ranking of 20, featuring in a few Grand Slam doubles and mixed doubles semi-finals, but never quite delivering on the apocalyptic fears that the tour would be turned upside down.
In fact, Richards, who is still alive, later went on to reconfigure her opinion on playing on the women’s circuit as a transgender person.
“Having lived for the past 30 years,” she said. “I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion.”
But that was still decades away. As the match wore on that September day in 1977, Richards was dismantled by Wade in two sets. "I was on centre court in the stadium at Forest Hills,” she later said, “and Virginia Wade had been used to that situation her whole life and I hadn't been. No matter how much good tennis I had played as an amateur there's nothing that compares to playing as a pro in the US Open on centre court.”
