As the 2018 US Open tennis tournament gets into full swing, those of a certain age may just recall the media storm around an ophthalmologist who entered the 1977 competition, staged at Forest Hills for the last time before the move across New York to Flushing Meadows. She lost comfortably in the first round of the singles to Virginia Wade, the reigning Wimbledon champion; so why all the fuss?
According to Renée Richards, the player in question, she had never intended to enter the competition but was spurred on to make a point after being denied entry the previous year. The problem for the United States Tennis Association (USTA) was that Richards was formerly Richard Raskind, having transitioned in 1975 at the age of 40.
Her certification as a woman by New York State cut no ice with the USTA; in an attempt to block her participation in the 1976 US Open they for the first time insisted on female entrants having a chromosome test. Richards initially refused to comply, but after finally acquiescing to take the test was found to have an ambiguous result. The USTA had their excuse to bar Richards from competing, so she responded by suing them for gender discrimination.
The early years as Richard Raskind, Richards says, were fulfilling, but it always felt like there were two personalities competing inside her. ‘I had a very good and full life as Dick,’ she once explained, ‘but I had this other side of me that kept emerging and that kept pushing back, until finally it just wasn’t possible to submerge Renée anymore and Renée won out.’
Growing up in Forest Hills, Raskind learned to play tennis at a young age and it soon became an important part of the teenager’s life. There followed the captaincy of the Yale University men’s tennis team and the All Navy Tennis Championship during a spell as a Navy medic.
Raskind qualified as an eye surgeon via the University of Rochester Medical School and a residency in ophthalmology at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, New York, specialising in paediatric ophthalmology. For several years from 1953 Raskind competed in the US National tennis championships. At that time the major tournaments were open only to amateurs; only in 1968 did the US National admit professionals, when it re-branded as the US Open.
He had a seemingly glittering career in ophthalmology combined with high-profile competition on the amateur tennis circuit, as well as becoming a husband and father. But no amount of therapy could enable Raskind to deal with the conflict of those deep feelings inside of being a woman that, ultimately, only proceeding with gender reassignment would.
As Renée Richards (Renée meaning ‘reborn’), she decided to make a new start by moving across the US to practise ophthalmology in Newport Beach, California. If her intention was to blend in quietly to her new surroundings, Richards could not suspect that her love of tennis would soon throw her back into the spotlight and take her full-circle back to Forest Hills.
Her first round loss to Virginia Wade at the US Open was headline news
It seemed the natural thing to do to join a local tennis club as part of building a new life. In a short time she so impressed some of the other members at the John Wayne Tennis Club that she was persuaded to enter a women’s competition nearby at La Jolla, which she duly won. Being six feet two inches tall, with a powerful left-handed serve, Richards inevitably stood out against the other competitors. A woman in the crowd recalled seeing a story about a tennis-playing doctor who had moved to California after undergoing a sex-change and made the connection.
The local press was tipped off and suddenly Richards was in the media spotlight, backed into giving a press conference to correct some of the erroneous rumours by now going around. A controversy blew up as to whether Richards should be allowed to compete in women’s tournaments at all; with the US Open just weeks away, the USTA took the pre-emptive step of introducing the chromosome test rule.
For Richards, the USTA’s move was the turning point. ‘I never had any intention of playing in the US Open,’ she recalled. ‘But when they said, “You’re not allowed to play” that changed everything. I said, “You can’t tell me what I can or cannot do – I’m a woman and if I want to play in the US Open as a woman I’m going to do it.”’
In taking on the USTA in her gender discrimination lawsuit, her lawyer was up against a raft of top New York legal guns who paraded a slew of witnesses, all testifying as to why Richards should not be allowed to compete in the women’s competition.
Richards had only one witness, but that witness was undoubtedly one of the greatest women tennis players of all time: Billie Jean King. A former world number one, still a current player and veteran of the so-called ‘Battle of the Sexes’ series of matches with Bobby Riggs, King supplied an affidavit stating that she had met Richards, that she was a woman, that she was entitled to play, and that she couldn’t be denied. Her testimony turned the case and Richards won.
That legal victory emboldened Richards to put her ophthalmology career on hold and turn professional as a player. But that was only the first battle over; the fight to become accepted on the professional women’s circuit was about to begin.
Among the avalanche of mail from both sides of the debate that Richards received was a letter from an old friend, ex-tennis professional Gene Scott. Scott was dismayed at the way Richards had been treated, so issued her an invitation to compete in the professional tournament he ran at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, New Jersey.
Her acceptance sparked the withdrawal of 23 female entrants. Richards recalled of that time, ‘I had death threats, I had people that hated me, I had people that told me I was immoral, and people told me I was awful. There were some players who would walk off the court when I played them or they wouldn’t play me at all.’ Yet, despite the fevered attentions of the public and national television, Richards progressed as far as the semi-final in this, her first professional tournament.
And so to that first round match in the 1977 US Open, against Virginia Wade on Centre Court. In the pre-match press conference, Wade had admitted that she wasn’t ‘comfortable with the whole idea’ of playing Richards, but she won the first set pretty comfortably and, although Richards put up more of a fight in the second, completed a straightforward 6-1, 6-4 victory.
Richards had the best result of her professional career in the women’s doubles, partnering Betty Ann Stuart to the final which they lost to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stove. Richards continued playing professionally until 1981, briefly reaching number 20 in the Women’s Tennis Association rankings – even though she was banned from competing in European tournaments. But her achievements in the sport did not stop with her playing career: she went on to coach Navratilova to victory in all four Grand Slam tournaments and to number one in the world rankings.
Richards eventually retired from tennis and resumed her career in ophthalmology at a practice in New York. Her ophthalmology credits include spells as head of the strabismus department as well as surgeon director at the Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital and the position of professor of ophthalmology at the NYU Medical School.
Through her struggles to become accepted on the women’s tennis circuit she had become, in her own words, ‘a public figure, a reluctant pioneer, for all of the disenfranchised groups in the world, no matter whether they were transgender, gay or lesbian.’
In an interview she gave to tennis.com last year to mark the 40th anniversary of her first appearance in the US Open, she claimed that she was still uneasy about being a transgender role model, and that her gender is ‘a part of life,’ not ‘a way of life.’ Most of all, she said, ‘I am first and last an individual.’