Renée Richards

Renée Richards (born August 19, 1934, New York City, New York, U.S.) is a former American professional tennis player and ophthalmologist. As one of the first out transgender professional athletes, she is the only person to have played in both the women’s and men’s tournaments at the U.S. Open.

Early life

Richards grew up in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York City, and played tennis from an early age. At Yale University Richards was captain of the men’s tennis team and graduated in 1955. In medical school at the University of Rochester, Richards specialized in ophthalmology. After graduating in 1959 Richards interned at Lenox Hill Hospital. During this time Richards played tennis professionally, competing as an amateur at the U.S. Open several times. Richards also served in the U.S. Navy, winning the men’s singles and doubles competitions in the All-Navy Championships.

After completing naval service Richards began transitioning while living in Europe, receiving hormone shots and publicly identifying as a woman. Richards planned to receive gender-affirming surgery in Morocco but backed out after seeing the conditions of the clinic.

In 1970 Richards married model Barbara Mole; the couple had a son before divorcing in 1975. In 1973 Richards underwent gender-affirming surgery. After the transition she officially adopted the name Renée, which is French for “rebirth,” and moved to California. There Richards continued to practice ophthalmology and began competing in local tennis tournaments. When a local television reporter named Richard Carlson, the father of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, reported in 1976 about Richards’s past life, she had a decision to make: She could stop competing and have a quiet life, or she could take on a cause. She told NPR about it in 2007:

All of a sudden, I was reading in the paper, well, she can play in a tournament as an amateur in La Jolla, but she could never play in the U.S. Open. She can’t join the Women’s Tennis Association.…And so all of a sudden, I was told I couldn’t do something that I’d thought…I should certainly be allowed to, even though it wasn’t on my list.

Life on the women’s tour

Richards’s attempt to play in a professional tennis tournament later that year was met with contention, with 25 of the 32 players in the tournament withdrawing and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and the United States Tennis Association (USTA) pulling their support. When the USTA demanded that she take a chromosomal test to affirm her gender, Richards sued the organization on the basis of discrimination. Richards submitted two affidavits in her support: one from the doctor who had performed her gender-affirming surgery, Robert Granato, and one from her doubles partner, Billie Jean King. Judge Alfred Ascione ruled in Richards’s favor, saying that the test was “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and violative of her rights under the Human Rights Law of this State.”

The decision paved the way for Richards to play in the women’s division of the U.S. Open in 1977, where she lost in the first round to Virginia Wade. That same year she and her doubles partner, Betty Ann Grubb Stuart, reached the U.S. Open finals before losing to Martina Navratilova and Betty Stove. In 1979, at age 45, Richards reached the highest ranking of her career: 19th in the world in women’s professional tennis. She played in her last U.S. Open in 1981, retiring from professional tennis at 47.

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Richards continued her medical career, becoming a leading specialist in strabismus surgery, which corrects crossed eyes. For a number of years she coached Navratilova. She retired from surgery at age 80.

Position on transgender athletes

Richards’s position on transgender athletes in sports is not the blanket acceptance one might expect of someone who fought hard for transgender rights. Instead, her position is steeped not just in her own experience as an athlete but also in her knowledge as a medical professional. In 2004, when the International Olympic Committee ruled that transgender athletes could compete at the Olympic Games if they had undergone gender affirming surgery and had received hormonal therapy, Richards criticized the ruling, saying:

It’s ironic that everyone has tried so hard to keep a level playing field—from corked bats to doping—but now the IOC has come up with a decision that defies fairness in a similar vein. Sex-reassignment surgery is based on putting materials into your body.

In the 2012 essay collection Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame, she spoke candidly about the biological advantage she now realizes she would have had over other female competitors if she had transitioned at a younger age:

Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion. There is one thing that a transsexual woman unfortunately cannot expect to be allowed to do, and that is to play professional sports in her chosen field. She can get married, live as woman, do all of those other things, and no one should ever be allowed to take them away from her. But this limitation—that’s just life. I know because I lived it.

In a 2024 paper presented to the WTA that was later published by Sports Illustrated, Richards—as much as a doctor as a former tennis player—outlined the biological characteristics unique to a gender that remain even after gender transition. She looked at research into the lifelong effects of testosterone after puberty and the extent to which estrogen replacement can mitigate that before stating:

I believe that having gone through male puberty disqualifies transgender women from the female category in sports.

Richards has also spoken out—this time as a Navy veteran—on policies of the Donald Trump administration aimed at driving transgender members of the military out of service, saying in 2025, “I can only think of myself because I was in the Navy when nobody knew that I was a transgender.…That goes a long way back, but I’m still representative of the same ilk even though they didn’t know it at the time.”

Books and honors

Richards has written three memoirs: Second Serve: The Renée Richards Story (1983), No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life (2008), and Spy Night and Other Memories: A Collection of Stories from Dick and Renée (2014). She was also the subject of a 1986 biopic based on her first memoir, in which she was portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave, and a documentary, Renée (2011). She was inducted into the USTA Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000 and inducted into the inaugural class of the National Gay and Lesbian Sports Hall of Fame in 2013.