Renée Richards: Beyond the Icon

 

In 1975, at the age of 41, Renée Richards underwent gender-affirming surgery and began living openly as a woman. Two years later, she would become one of the most consequential figures in the history of transgender participation in sport. Born in New York in 1934, Richards had already lived an extraordinary life before becoming a public symbol: she was a highly accomplished tennis player, captain of the Yale men's tennis team, and an ophthalmologist. In 1976, after she was outed as transgender by broadcaster Richard Carlson, she was barred from entering the U.S. Open women's competition because she refused to submit to the chromosome test demanded by the United States Tennis Association. She challenged the decision in court, and in August 1977 the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor. At the 1977 U.S. Open, the 43-year-old Richards finally entered the women's draw. She lost her opening singles match to Virginia Wade, but reached the doubles final, where she and her partner lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stöve. Richards subsequently became a coach, working with players including Navratilova, and her name became inseparable from one of the earliest and most important legal battles over transgender participation in professional sport.

 

Yet the woman at the center of this history is far more complicated than the historical shorthand of "transgender tennis pioneer" suggests. Now in her nineties, Richards remains a deeply contradictory figure. The person who once went to court to establish her right to compete as a woman now argues that trans women who experienced male puberty should not compete in women's sport. That tension is at the heart of Finding Renée Richards, because the book is not interested in turning Richards into a convenient icon. Instead, it tries to recover the complicated human being behind the headline, the lawsuit and the history-making moment. And it is this woman, with all her contradictions, achievements, struggles and complexities, that journalist and author Julie Kliegman set out to find. Kliegman has spent much of their career exploring the places where sport, identity and the human stories behind public controversies intersect. Their work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, The Ringer, Slate, The Verge, Vox and Texas Monthly. They have worked as a reporter, editor and fact-checker, served as Copy Chief at Sports Illustrated, and written extensively about transgender athletes, women's sports and mental health. And now that Julie Kliegman has published Finding Renée Richards, I am delighted to welcome them to The Heroines of My Life to talk about the woman they spent years trying to understand, the extraordinary journey of researching and writing her story, and what they discovered along the way.

 

Monika: Julie, welcome to my blog, and thank you so much for finding the time to talk to me. I imagine you must be absolutely bombarded with interview requests at the moment, especially after the wonderful reception Finding Renée Richards has received. So I am genuinely delighted that, somewhere between the New York Times and all the other much bigger and more important places wanting to talk to you, you also found a little time for the small and humble blog of a transgender woman.

Julie: Thank you so much for having me!

 

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Monika: Julie, welcome to The Heroines of My Life, and thank you for accepting my invitation. Your book is about Renée Richards, but before we get to Renée, I would love to start with you. You studied journalism and Spanish at Northwestern, began your career fact-checking politicians for PolitiFact, moved into sports journalism, became Copy Chief at Sports Illustrated, wrote Mind Game, and eventually found yourself writing a biography of one of the most complicated figures in transgender sports history. When you look back at that rather winding route, does Finding Renée Richards now feel like the book your entire career was quietly preparing you to write?

Julie: In a weird way, it does feel like my career was building to this point. Writing Mind Game helped me understand the psyches of high-level athletes, and reporting for Sports Illustrated on top of my editing duties led me to focus on transgender athletes in the first place. And of course, with such a hot-button issue, my early background in political journalism came in handy. 

Monika: You started out fact-checking politicians at the Tampa Bay Times. Years later you were fact-checking a very different kind of historical record, reconstructing Renée's life from interviews, newspaper accounts, legal documents and archives. Did your early experience as a fact-checker change the way you approached biography, particularly when different people remembered the same event differently?

Julie: I think what my work at PolitiFact helped teach me is that nuance is important, as is verifying a given statement or story in as many ways as possible. In the book, if there were differing accounts of a certain event, I tried to just state that plainly and present all the facts as I had them, offering context when possible.

Monika: You have said that you often pursue subjects because you personally wonder about something and cannot easily find enough information about it. What was the original question about Renée Richards that you could not get out of your head?

Julie: More than anything, I wanted a fuller sense of what she'd been through, even beyond what I could gather from her own books, and what lessons from her story I or others could apply to the conversation around trans athletes' rights today.

 

Photo:  Digital Transgender Archive .
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Monika: You announced the book in 2024, but obviously a biography of someone in their nineties cannot be written simply by sitting down with the subject and asking questions. When you first began, what did you think you knew about Renée, and which parts of that initial picture turned out to be completely wrong?

Julie: The broad strokes of what I thought I knew turned out to be right. Renée was a pioneer who had lived a life that was extremely challenging at times. What I wasn't prepared for was the depth of her regret over having sued for her right to play in the U.S. Open women's draw. That level of reversal from her previous conviction really surprised me.

Monika: One of the great discoveries of the project came at Duke University's Rubenstein Library, when you received the Harry H. Harkins Jr. Travel Grant and began working through the Eleanor Foa Dienstag papers. You expected the collection to be useful, but you did not know just how important it would become. Can you take us into that moment of discovery, when you realised you had found something much bigger than you had anticipated?

Julie: It hit me when I was going through pages after pages of interview transcripts between Eleanor and not just Renée, but also so many people in Renée's orbit I didn't personally have access to, as many of them had long since passed on. Drawing on interviews with her friends and doctors made the biography that much richer.

Monika: You also discovered Renée's complete statement to the press after she was outed in 1976, preserved in those papers. After reading the words she used to defend herself at the time, did your understanding of the frightened, controversial figure portrayed in the contemporary media change?

Julie: I always knew Renée was a strong, assertive woman. But reading her defiant statement in her own words really did hammer that home for me. There's something so powerful about confronting a crowd of journalists and skeptics with: “Anatomically, functionally, socially, emotionally, and legally, I am female.”

 

Photo:  Digital Transgender Archive .
Additional info below.

 

Monika: Renée's story contains a remarkable irony: she was already a successful ophthalmologist and an accomplished tennis player before becoming famous as a transgender woman. Why was it important to you to make sure that "Renée Richards, the trans tennis pioneer" did not swallow up the rest of the woman?

Julie: That was something that was understandably really important to Renée too. That I convey the significance of her entire life and legacy, not just her 15 minutes of fame. That was a relatively easy task, in a sense, because she has led quite the life and is such an interesting person beyond just being out as trans at a moment when few people were.

Monika: Her life before transition is particularly complicated. There was her childhood in Queens, her family, tennis, medicine, marriage, fatherhood and the long struggle over gender identity. How did you decide how much space to devote to the years before Renée became Renée, without allowing the book to become simply a "before and after" transition story?

Julie: Renée sees her transition as a line bifurcating two halves of her life; I didn't want to shortchange either half. I did worry about writing the book in a way that would make her story sound cliché or too pat or, even worse, like a trope. But I also had to remind myself that telling her story is, in one sense, telling a story of what it was like to be transsexual in the 1960s and '70s, and walking people through the ups and downs of transitioning medically and socially is a big part of that picture.

Monika: There is an especially fascinating ethical question in the book concerning Renée's earlier name. Your first draft used "Renée Richards" and she/her pronouns throughout, including when describing her pre-transition life. Then, during a fact-checking meeting, you told Renée how you had written it, and she strongly objected, asking you to use Richard Raskind for that earlier period. What went through your mind when the journalistic convention you had followed suddenly collided with the wishes of the woman whose story you were telling?

Julie: It really broke my brain for a minute. I'm a copy editor by trade, which means I love following established rules and norms for language. But that also means, I have to remind myself sometimes, that it's OK to break the rules sometimes, when you have a good reason. There's so much about this book that Renée didn't have any say over, but it felt only fair to me that respecting how she wanted to be identified throughout her life would be an important exception.

 

Photo: Digital Transgender Archive .
Additional info below.

 

Monika: That disagreement seems to contain an enormous generational question. You are a contemporary trans and nonbinary writer, while Renée came of age in a world with completely different language and concepts surrounding gender. Did writing this book change anything about your own assumptions concerning how transgender people understand their past?

Julie: It just hammered home for me that every trans person is both complicated and unique. Just because the majority of people, particularly in my generation, might be comfortable doing something a certain way doesn't mean everyone is. Trans people are, of course, not a monolith. For Renée, incorporating her former name into my story was an essential part of chronicling her past, especially the turmoil in her mind as Dick and Renée represented opposing forces at times.

 

END OF PART 1

PART 2

 

Main photo: Renée Richards, 1976. Photo by Ben Olender / Los Angeles Times. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Other photos: 

Kopkind, Andrew. "Mixed Singles." Clipping. 1976. Digital Transgender Archive.  

Dacre, Paul, and Barnes, Ian. "Mixed Single Renee Quits." Clipping. 1977. Digital Transgender Archive.  

"Lonely Life of Transsexuals." Clipping. 1976. Digital Transgender Archive.  

 

© 2026 - Monika Kowalska

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