Renée Richards Sued the USTA for the Right to Play as a Woman in 1977. Now, at 91, She Argues Trans Women Shouldn’t
Renée Richards sued for the right to play as a woman and won, becoming professional tennis’s first openly transgender player. Fifty years later, she thinks trans women and girls mostly shouldn’t compete in women’s sports.
The woman who won the legal fight to compete has spent her later years arguing that most athletes like her shouldn’t get to do the same.
Renée Richards is 91 now, and the position she holds today is nearly the opposite of the one she fought for in court. She transitioned in 1975, and in 1976 was outed by San Diego reporter Richard Carlson (Tucker Carlson’s father) after she won a local women’s tournament in La Jolla. When the USTA and WTA responded by requiring a chromosomal sex test before the 1976 U.S. Open, she refused, was barred from playing, and sued.
A New York judge granted her an injunction, and she competed in the 1977 U.S. Open, reaching the doubles final 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 both the men’s and women’s draws at the U.S. Open. She left the tour after five years and returned to ophthalmology.
Her acceptance on tour turned out to be largely uncontroversial after the ruling, which is part of what Julie Kliegman documents in a forthcoming biography, “Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer,” out Aug. 18. Kliegman says Richards has “done a 180” and now believes trans women and girls mostly shouldn’t play alongside cisgender athletes, carving out an exception for girls who haven’t gone through male puberty.
Richards has said for years that if she’d transitioned 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 to the WTA, later published by Sports Illustrated, she argued that male puberty itself should disqualify trans women from the female category.
The timing lands as the WTA’s new eligibility rule, effective this month, requires a one-time SRY gene test for all players, aligning the tour with the IOC’s March policy for the 2028 Los Angeles Games. On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that state bans on trans women and girls in female sports don’t violate Title IX, and 6-3 that they don’t violate the Equal Protection Clause, with Justice Kavanaugh writing that states may set eligibility “based on biological sex.”
Richards later coached Navratilova to Wimbledon titles in 1982 and 1983, and the two remain friends, though Kliegman says “Martina uses language that Renée would not about biological males and people cheating in sports.”
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