Finding Renée Richards, Just in Time

A conversation with author Julie Kliegman about their new book on the trans tennis player who was far ahead of this moment.

It’s been a relatively quiet stretch of tennis, with ATP withdrawals from Canada and Cincinnati causing the most buzz. But it’s been another cacophonous moment at the intersection of women’s sports and transgender issues, particularly with right-wing media working tirelessly to amplify and inflate the tired issue around the WNBA.

There have also been some reverberations from the WTA’s new gender testing policy, first reported here on Bounces, with several top players being asked about the change during WTA 1000 Toronto.

Breaking: WTA to Require Genetic Sex Testing for All Players

I mostly don’t want to foreground this issue any further—I don’t think it’s productive for women’s tennis or women’s sports to do so. But I do want to put a bow on discussion of the issue here at Bounces by sharing a conversation I recently had with the author of a new book, out next week, that manages to find a quieter humanity in the one real-life case of a trans woman competing at the elite levels of a major women’s professional sport: Renée Richards, who had played in the men’s U.S. Championships four times from 1953 to 1960 and then played women’s tennis tournaments around the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s after transitioning.

Renée Richards in 1976 (Photo by Ben Olender, Los Angeles Times)

While Richards did not dominate the women’s tour, peaking at No. 20 on the WTA rankings, she had more success than nearly any other women’s tennis player has ever had in her mid-40s, so her results turn into something of a Rorschach test. Richards herself has also waded into the recently ratcheted-up debate, arguing later in life that she shouldn’t have been allowed to compete after all—despite having won a court battle to break down the doors of the sport nearly 50 years ago.

Richards, who is still alive, active, and opinionated at age 91 (she turns 92 next week) is put into fascinating focus in a timely new book: Finding Renée Richards by Julie Kliegman, coming out on August 18th and now available for pre-order.

Author photo of Julie Kliegman by Nina Subin.

Kliegman’s book shows, despite general progress on most fronts of LGBTQ+ issues in the last half century, how much less fraught and charged the topic of trans women in women’s sports was many decades ago, before it had been weaponized as a culture-war wedge issue. Renée Richards was mostly seen as a person, and became a popular player with most of her peers on the WTA Tour. After she stopped playing, Richards coached Martina Navratilova for a stretch of her dominant career.

Much has changed, of course, for Navratilova and the broader issue in the decades since. The book covers Richards’ whole life—including her very successful ophthalmic surgery career—and many of the contradictions which have made her such a fascinating and frustrating character.

I had a lengthy chat with Kliegman about their book, their process, the issues, and more. Since it’s quite a long read I am also sharing an audio recording of our call for Bounces subscribers along with the transcript, if you’d like to enjoy it as a podcast of sorts.

Much about this topic gets shouty and headache-inducing quickly, so I really relished this chance to have an adult conversation about the issues involved.

To read and/or listen to the whole thing, please subscribe to Bounces! And get yourself a copy of the book!