Renée Richards sued for the right to play as a woman and won, becoming the first openly transgender tennis player. Fifty years later, she thinks trans women and girls shouldn’t compete in women’s sports.
The woman who won the legal battle to enter the competition has spent her later years saying that many athletes like her should not do the same.
Renée Richards is 91 years old now, and the position she holds today is hardly the same as the one she fought for in court. She changed in 1975, and in 1976 she was outed by San Diego journalist Richard Carlson (Tucker Carlson’s father) after winning a local women’s championship in La Jolla. When the USTA and WTA responded by requiring a chromosomal sex test before the 1976 US Open, she refused, was banned from playing, and sued.
A New York judge gave her the order, and she competed in the 1977 US Open, reaching two finals with Betty Ann Grubb Stuart before losing to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stöve. Her career peaked at No. 20 in singles in February 1979, and she remains the only person to have played in both the men’s and women’s singles draws at the US Open. He left this trip after five years and returned to the eye doctor.
Her acceptance into the tour seemed less controversial after the decision, which is part of what Julie Kliegman writes in the upcoming history, “Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer,” on August 18. Kliegman says that Richards “did a 180” and that most girls believe that they should play with cisgender female athletes, pointing out the difference in girls who did not go through male puberty.
Richards has said for years that if he had changed at 22 instead of 40, “no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me.” In a 2024 position paper on the WTA, later published by Sports Illustrated, he argued that male puberty should exclude trans women from the women’s division.
The timing comes as the WTA’s new eligibility rule, which goes into effect this month, requires a one-time SRY genetic test for all players, to align the tour with the IOC’s March 2028 Los Angeles Games policy. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the state’s ban on transgender women and girls in women’s sports did not violate Title IX, and 6-3 that they did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, in which Justice Kavanaugh wrote that he could limit eligibility “based on blood sex.”
Richards later coached Navratilova to back-to-back Wimbledon titles in 1982 and 1983, and the two remained friends, although Kliegman says “Martina uses a language that Renée wouldn’t use about natural men and people who cheat in sports.”
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