# Renee Richards Born Richard Raskind on August 19, 1934 in New York City. American ophthalmologist and former professional tennis player whose **1976 transition and 1977 New York Supreme Court ruling** (Richards v. United States Tennis Association) established the **first major legal precedent for transgender women's eligibility to compete in women's professional sports** in the United States. ## The 1976 Transition Richards underwent gender-affirming surgery in 1975 and began transitioning publicly in 1976 — at age 41, after a successful pre-transition career as a Yale-trained ophthalmologist and amateur tennis player. The transition became national news after Richards entered the 1976 U.S. Open as a woman; the USTA blocked her entry by introducing a chromosome test specifically for the purpose of excluding her. ## Richards v. USTA (1977) Richards sued. The case was heard in the New York Supreme Court, where Justice Alfred Ascione ruled in **August 1977** that the USTA's chromosome-test requirement was "grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and in violation of her rights under the Human Rights Law of this State." The ruling was the first major American legal precedent holding that **a transgender woman who had undergone gender-affirming surgery and hormone therapy was legally eligible to compete in women's professional athletic competition** — and the basis for Richards's subsequent participation in the women's tour from 1977 through 1981. ## Tennis Career Richards played the professional women's tour from 1977 to 1981. Her career results: - **Reached the doubles final at the 1977 U.S. Open** (lost with partner Bettyann Stuart) - Ranked as high as **No. 20 in the women's singles world rankings** (1979) - Won approximately $50,000 in prize money over the four-year professional career - **Coached Martina Navratilova** in 1982-1983, a period during which Navratilova won six of the eight Grand Slam singles tournaments she entered ## Subsequent Career and Public Position Richards retired from competitive play after 1981 and returned to her ophthalmology practice in New York. She has been an unusual contemporary trans-political figure: her public statements in the 2010s and 2020s on the contemporary trans-athlete legislative wave have been **substantially more cautious and restrictionist** than the mainstream trans-rights movement's position — arguing that the question of trans-women athletes in elite competitive sports involves more biological complications than her 1977 case acknowledged. This positioning has made Richards a frequently-cited figure by both sides of the contemporary trans-athlete debate — invoked by the trans-rights side as the foundational legal precedent (which she is), and by restrictionist commentators as a trans woman who has publicly questioned the contemporary trans-athletic-inclusion framework. ## Place in the Vault Richards's 1977 case is **the foundational American legal precedent for transgender athletic participation**, established almost a half-century before the contemporary state-legislative anti-trans-athlete wave began in 2020. Her own complicated public positioning on the contemporary question — combining her foundational role with significant skepticism about its contemporary extensions — makes her one of the more analytically interesting figures in the contemporary trans-athletic-policy discourse. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Schuyler Bailar]]