Renée Richards with Julie Kliegman

This week, Sports Illustrated’s Julie Kliegman volleys with Sarah about trans athlete Renée Richards’s fight for her right to play in the U.S. Open. They also dig into how the dialogue surrounding trans athletes has and hasn’t changed in the 40-plus years since. Plus, are tennis balls hollow? An investigation.

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Transcript

Sarah: I went to the Queens Museum recently and I was like, I had no idea the U.S. Open was so near the climax of Men in Black.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about Reneé Richards with our pal, Julie Kliegman. This is You’re Wrong About's first tennis episode. This is an episode about sports and gender and the debate over trans kids and sports, trans people in sports, but of course especially as always, American trans youth.

We have a little trigger warning for you for suicide and suicidal thoughts, which comes up briefly in conversation. It's not something that happens in this story, but it is a topic of thought. 

Speaking of Pride Month, we have a special Pride episode bonus offering for you with our friend Chelsey Weber-Smith, in whose closet I am recording this right now. Carolyn informs me that it's funny that I just came out of the closet, and yet here I am trapped in the closet. But Chelsey Weber-Smith’s the only closet I would ever want to be in. We did a great episode together where they told me all about the gay agenda. I really love doing it with Chelsey. I love Chelsey's work. Please go listen to American Hysteria. If you haven't yet, you're in for a treat. 

Buckle up Cowboys. Here we go. We're headed for the U.S. Open.

Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where very occasionally we talk about sports. And here we go again, with Julie Kliegman. Hello. 

Julie: Hi. 

Sarah: How are you?

Julie: I'm great. Thanks for having me.

Sarah:  I am so happy you wanted to come and talk to us. Because I do feel like the show secretly is like a little bit of a sports show, just very occasionally. 

Julie: A little bit.

Sarah: And I think one of the things I love about talking about sports is that whether we know it or not, I think we're always talking about gender. Which is part of today's show.

Julie: Absolutely. Yeah. I'd say that's exactly right. And that is already a more perceptive understanding of sports than 90% of people interested in sports have, so nicely done.

Sarah: I try. Yeah. I mean I don't understand most of them, but I think they're all neat and. I would love to start off with, who are you and who are we talking about today? Because this is my favorite kind of episode. This is somebody's life. 

Julie: Sure. So I am Julie Kliegman. I am the copy chief at Sports Illustrated. I have a book coming out next year called, Mind Game, about how elite athletes navigate mental health. So not quite related to gender, but also not-not related to gender. 

And we're going to talk about Reneé Richards today. Do you have any previous knowledge of her or of tennis in the 1970s?

Sarah: In terms of Reneé specifically, I have nothing. Which is one reason I was excited to talk about her with you is that you reached out, you said you wanted to talk about Renee, and I generally am excited to talk about someone who seems to have been very famous in their moment and then forgotten, arguably intentionally, by history. And in terms of tennis in the seventies, my friend Patrick will be slightly sad that I don't know anything, because I'm sure there's cool stuff to know. But I know that people wore really cool outfits. And Chris Everett was around and had her picture taken by Andy Warhol. That's it. 

Julie: Yeah. There you go. That's a great jumping off point. Yeah. So Reneé Richards is a trans tennis player. She would use ‘trans’ as short for ‘transsexual’, whereas most of us know it today as ‘transgender’. But her preferred term, just so you know, is ‘transsexual’. By the same notion, instead of saying she liked transition genders she says she had a sex change operation. I'm using her terminology, but in general, we'll still use ‘transgender’ and all that good stuff. 

Reneé Richards, she was the first if not the first openly transgender professional athlete, certainly the first one of note that we commonly remember. There were instances of transgender athletes in the Olympics who kind of went unnoticed, because it wasn't really an issue. And I'm not trying to say trans people were invented in the 1970s in sports. But she's the first well-known, professionally out athlete. So that's what comes with a lot of meaning attached to it. As you said, she was very famous in her moment. A lot of people who were alive then, which does not include me, at least know her name. I'll send you a picture of her playing tennis if you would like it. 

Sarah: Yeah. Oh yeah. Of course. Tennis is also a funny sport in my life. Because unlike most sports normal people play, I have played it and know how it works. So that's very exciting. 

Julie: Oh yeah. Do you know the scoring? 

Sarah:  I know that you go in intervals of 15, and I know that you- oh my God, she looks amazing. Sorry. 

Julie: She does though, right? 

Sarah: She looks like this is an episode of Charlie's Angels, where it's like, “All right, Angels, you're infiltrating the U.S. Open. Have fun.” 

Julie: She looks very powerful, very strong to me. 

Sarah: And I don't know. It is such a cool shot because I guess she's preparing a backhand. Maybe her eyes are on the prize. It's such an intense sports moment. And it's just, I think we watched sports partly because we got this sort of vicarious thrill off of watching somebody pursue something so intently. But yeah. Where do you want to start us off? 

Julie: Last year I was asked to write an article for Bookforum, RIP. They did a sports issue, and I, very much like you, I didn't know a ton about her. And I found writing about her and researching her to be very interesting and very thorny. 

And so what we're going to go over is that she was, as I've said, a transsexual female tennis player. And she notably sued for her right to play in the U..S Open in 1977. So I think her story is about who gets to be a woman in women's sports, and are we any closer to consensus there than we were in 1977? And you could definitely make the case that we're further away. 

And then the other thing about this story is it's about who's allowed to enjoy recreation, and in general, live an enjoyable life. Is liberation just about sustenance or is it about the freedom to be yourself and show up in leisure too? 

I hadn't really seriously looked into her until I was doing research for that article, and I had come out as non-binary about a year before. I also identify as transgender. And it was very interesting for me to do this research because I think when you're new to an identity or new to a label, you're used to either finding people like, oh my God, I totally identify with this person. Or, oh my God, who the hell is this? Why do we share a label? What is that? Everything becomes so black and white when you're still new to things and learning about them in relation to yourself. 

She was maybe one of the first people I found that occupied this really interesting middle ground for me, where I appreciate her place in history, and I also don't appreciate a lot of things she said. And I think talking about her and her complexity is really important. 

Sarah: The kind of girlboss-ification of women in history, and so many other things of that nature, with different categories of identity. But in this case where we want everyone to be someone to look up to, and what if someone is deserving of our study. Study being a form of care, for not necessarily being somebody we want to even emulate, because they lived a life and it's important to us. 

Julie: And Reneé herself very much rejects this idea of being a role model, of being a pioneer. I think she was a pioneer, ultimately. I think that's indisputable. But she doesn't want the worship that comes along with that.

Sarah: She's like Moses. She's like, no, I just want to relax. Don't make me do it. 

Julie: Exactly. 

Sarah: That's a classic Moses quote, “I'm busy chilling”. Yeah. 

Julie: NMJC- Moses. Alright, so I'll take you into her early years here. 

Sarah: Yeah, I would love that.

Julie: She was born in 1934, was raised in Sunnyside, Queens, and then her family moved to Forest Hills, which is famously the site of the U.S. Open. 

Sarah: Oh my God. Wow. That's right, because I went to the Queens Museum recently and I was like, I had no idea the U.S. Open was so near the climax of Men in Black.

Julie: The two most important events in history.

Sarah: That's so true. 

Julie: So yeah, her father was an orthopedic surgeon, and her mother was a psychiatrist. So you have this very serious, very medically, scientifically oriented family. She started playing tennis seriously at age 10. She had always loved shagging balls for her dad when he played. She started competing around 10, and she obviously had a knack for it or we wouldn't be here talking about her. 

Now during this time from a very early age, she started experiencing what we would call today as gender dysphoria. I don't really want to go into quite all of the cliches and stereotypes about a trans girl growing up and trying on clothes and looking in her mirror and all that silly stuff. But Reneé presented as a boy for her entire childhood, except for in some private moments and moments where she would sneak off from her family and friends. 

She chronicles pretty thoroughly the mindset that she had in her teenage years. She described herself as walking a tightrope between genders. And over the years that would cause her a great deal of depression. She would have suicidal thoughts, though she also noted that she never seriously considered suicide. Around that time in her teenage years, she found a book of her mother’s that described transsexualism as a disorder. 

So she says that event marked the beginning of a full-scale effort to do away with Reneé. The specter of lunacy turned the struggle into a real war. And then she describes herself as spending her next 15 years mostly as trying to kill off Reneé and present as a boy and then a man. 

Sarah: I don't know. It's so sad to hear. Not because it's surprising, I guess, but because maybe the language we use publicly about trans youth doesn't emphasize the emotional violence of trying to force yourself to be something you're not. 

Julie: I think that's exactly right. And then you run across books like this that call you a lunatic, and it's like, how are you supposed to feel? How are you supposed to get through that? I think even today, we definitely don't talk enough about the mental health effects of simply existing as a trans person. 

And then you have all these laws, like the trans sports laws that kind of come down on top of that. And Trevor project research has shown that that really does have an effect on kids' mental health.

Sarah: Which shouldn't be news, but of course it does need to be news. We do need to corroborate with studies, the fact that if you're constantly receiving messages, challenging your right to exist, it can be bad for you. It's like, gee.

Julie: Yeah. Who would've thought.

Sarah: This sounds an awful way to grow up at any time, but also this is the 1940s, which is also famously a time so repressive that we conspired to leave no trace of sex in our movies, lest the Aliens someday learned that we had it. I guess. 

Julie: Because the aliens totally aren't having sex themselves. No, they would never.

Sarah: They just anally probe people in remote corners of the galaxy. That's their thing. It's fine. 

Julie: So she goes to high school at the prestigious Horace Mann School where she played football. She played baseball, and she says she once had scouting interests from the New York Yankees in baseball. And of course she played tennis as well. 

She went to Yale for college where she was the captain of the men's tennis team. She went to University of Rochester for med school. She graduated in 1959. In college is when she started seeing a psychologist about her transsexualism. And she would go on to see the same psychologist for years and years. She eventually goes into the Navy to continue training as an ophthalmologist, following in that scientific background that her family has.

Sarah: I have no idea if her memoir covers this, but how early did she want to do that? As a child, was she like, I want to be an eye doctor?

Julie: Yeah. Maybe she was, but that's not really the impression I got from the book. The impression I got from the book is, I love playing sports and I'm expected to go into this serious, standout field. 

Sarah: Which is I feel like such a feature of growing up with that kind of family and expectations where you're like, what's something impressive I can do that isn't like heart surgery.

Julie: Yes, exactly. She does grow to love the profession though. So that's nice. Not everyone can say that of their careers. So she does really well in the Navy playing tennis there. She won singles and doubles in the All-Navy Championship. At one point she was ranked as high as fourth in her region.

Sarah: I had no idea there was Navy tennis. This is like a whole world opening up. 

Julie: Yeah. Military sports. They're a thing.

Sarah: I feel like there should be more Pauly Shore movies about this. 

Julie: So she is done with the Navy. She became a world-renowned ophthalmologist. She specializes in eye muscle surgery, in correcting double vision. By all accounts, she really does seem to like this career quite a bit. It seems like it gives her a lot of self-esteem, a lot of confidence, a lot of sense of purpose. 

Per an affidavit made later, she would say that she made $100,000 a year as an ophthalmologist, which obviously even today is a significant amount of money, and back then certainly was a very significant amount of money.

Sarah: This is like when people are going around buying a house for $50,000 and maybe it has a pool. What is her relationship to tennis in this period? I guess this is also a question about how professional tennis works. Because I assume, based on other sports, that if you're really good at something you probably won't make that much money at it unless you're one of the best in the world. So you have to also be an ophthalmologist or something. Is this something that she wants to pursue full-time, and ophthalmology is like, does that feel like a concession to practicality? I don't know, what's that all like?

Julie: It does feel like a bit of a concession to practicality, the eye surgeon career. It does feel like a bit of a case of like tennis isn't serious. But she loves it, and she keeps coming back to it at every stage of her life. 

So she played against men in the U.S. open five times between 1953 and 1960. And a lot of the argument that people make about trans athletes is oh, they were a nobody as a man, and then they became a woman and they're destroying the competition. But the reality is, she was a good tennis player when she was presenting as male. 

Sarah: Yeah. Also, I don't know, that argument is so clearly based, like so many of the other ones are. And the idea of transitioning so as to achieve some kind of ulterior motive, aside from just being able to live your life as the person you are. No, it's all about tennis. 

Julie: And she kind of makes this point, too. And others will in defense of her. And it's like what are you thinking? You think there's going to be a parade of men dressing as women just so they can beat the shit out of a tennis ball? I don't think that's how it works.

Sarah: That could be a fun party, but it's more of a limited event kind of a thing. That's the Drag Invitational. I feel like this is something that we are inside of right now. This idea that someone's gender is about you. That someone's gender is about the feelings of me, the senator from Iowa or whatever.

Julie: Yeah. This idea that you were personally offending me by doing something to your body. We don't act like that when people get tattoos. 

Sarah: My mom does, but not to nearly that extent. We did a bonus episode this month with Chelsey Weber-Smith on the gay agenda. And the spoiler/teaser I'll give you for it is that there's only a straight agenda. That's the only agenda. Because straightness is the only thing that people have to be forced into. The only thing that has to be rigidly taught and that you have to punish people for not doing, and that you have to groom people into is heteronormativity. And it feels like there's a lot of projection about people secretly understanding that's what they're doing and then that's why they have to accuse everyone else of it, I think. 

Julie: Yeah, no, I think that's a great way of putting it. Much like with her childhood, I'm not going to talk too much about the x’s and o's I guess, of her transition because it's not really…

Sarah: Not our business. Yeah. 

Julie: Yes. Correct. And that was in 1975. And like I said, her book does go into a lot of detail about that whole process, both physically and emotionally. And she's very adamant throughout both of her autobiographies. The second one is called, No Way, Reneé.

Sarah: Does she have a book called, Walk Away, Reneé, or is she saving that?

Julie: I was really hoping so, but yeah, maybe. Maybe that's the next book. Yeah. She's also on and off hormones a little bit over the years, as I think is pretty normal. She talks about the muscle definition disappearing in her arms, which I think is notable for a tennis player. At the same time her muscles are disappearing, she's also like, hey I get to wear sleeveless dresses without feeling embarrassed of my arms. That's pretty awesome. So it's like a pro and a con for her as a female athlete, I think. 

Sarah: Yeah. God that is emotional. 

Julie: At first, she tried to leave tennis behind entirely. She moved from New York to California. She of course, naturally, she just happens to live across the street from a tennis club and she really just can't fucking resist tennis. That's been a constant in a very tumultuous life. So it makes a lot of sense to me. She describes herself as being Eve in the Garden of Eden. Except instead of an apple, she says she has a tennis ball. 

Sarah: What's even in the middle of tennis balls? I bet it gets really gross in there. Or no, it's golf balls that are really gross inside. Are tennis balls hollow?

Julie: They do seem hollow, right? Like just the sound they make. 

Sarah: They’ve got to be hollow. Listeners, write in, tell us what's inside a tennis ball. Go cut one open right now. 

I'm wondering if there's stuff in her book about how she finally decided to transition finally. Because I don't know, especially at this time, and what options did she have? And probably, again, the corollary of was it easier in 1975 than it is now?

Julie: It was definitely a little bit harder in 1975. Not that it's by any means easy now. But she had a lot of trouble finding a surgeon who would sign off on this and do the operation. She ultimately decided to go to Morocco and do the surgery. But then she got cold feet and backed out and ended up getting the surgery done in New York, finally. 

But it was a battle for her to get this operation done. It was a battle for her to get hormones. She had her psychologist this whole time telling her that she was a man. She had exactly one conversation about her transition with her mother and she was like, but you were such a normal child. A) I don't think that's really true from anyone's vantage point. And B) Come on, lady. 

Sarah: Yeah. And that's the kind of remark that I feel like so much of the time means like that the parent ordered a chicken salad sandwich and then you grow up and you realize pretty quickly that you're an endive salad. And then you're like, I'm an endive salad. And they're like no, you're the thing I ordered. I've looked into it, and I really don't want you to be something I didn't order, and you're what I ordered. 

Julie: Yeah. I think every parent, my understanding, feels that to some degree. But yeah, it's all to say she had this pressure on her, from her psychologist, from her mother, from medical institutions. And she was a part of these medical institutions too, so I can't imagine how that must have felt for her. Being a well-respected ophthalmologist, a world-renowned ophthalmologist, and at the same time being told no, you don't know what's best for your body. 

Sarah: And which ironically is the fastest way to get the medical establishment to treat you like a woman is to ask, to be able to present as one finally. Because the beginning of your life as a woman is being denied your first ever medical procedure as one.

Julie: That is very fitting.

Sarah: I feel like we look at history and sometimes we expect people to be able to be like this entire infrastructure that I was raised in, that I grew up knowing about having my world shaped by, was schooled and came of age and is telling me that I have to keep living a lie in order to be considered sane and I have to all by myself somehow find a way to believe. I think for so many people it can't even be a conscious decision to decide to try and step out of that and trust your own understanding of who you are because we are raised to believe in institutions and that's so hard to walk out of.

Julie: Reading the book is fascinating because it's like you really do see these moments of self-harm and just total lack of clarity. And not by her own doing. It's by all the people and institutions surrounding her. 

Sarah: Yeah. So 1975, so she's 31 at the time?

Julie: 41.

Sarah Oh, 41. Wait. Oh, yeah. She was born in 1934. Oh my God. Okay.

Julie: Okay. Yeah, so it's 1975 when she transitions. Obviously at this point she's well past the prime of an average professional athlete, who typically peak in their late twenties, maybe very early thirties. She’s called her transition in the years since, a very selfish thing. I think she's probably being a little bit too hard on herself. I think there's a difference between being selfish and taking care of yourself. Trans people just aren't often afforded the space or the means to take care of themselves, and it probably felt like a luxury at the time to be doing something like that. 

Sarah: Yeah. And does she get into why she deems it selfish, or is she just like, it's obviously selfish? 

Julie: She has a wife and a family before she “fully” transitions. I'm using quotes, “fully”. I think she's using the word “selfish” in the context of context of ,how could I give up my family. Because she does get divorced. I think she has a lot of feelings, especially later in her life ,about her relationship to her son. 

The year after she had the sex change operation, she's been told by a gynecologist friend that she shouldn't get back into tennis. That her serve would be recognized anywhere, that she's going to get outed by playing tennis. But she really can't resist. She lives near this tennis club, and she loves the sport. And she says, “Private play is fun, but it isn't as spicy as a tournament”. Yeah. The spice factor, who can resist? 

Sarah: Yeah. And I love that. And I love that she, I don't know if she would describe it as fun, because spicy things aren't always fun exactly, but that she misses it.

Julie: I'm just going to send you one line from her book.

Sarah: So she wrote, “I felt so comfortable as Reneé that I thought once again, Why shouldn't I have everything I want?” Oh, I love it. 

Julie: It's definitely a stance she backtracks on closer to the present day. But I think it's really notable that she felt so bold and so entitled to the things that everyone else has that we don't have to always fight for. 

Sarah: She finally feels comfortable. When you have that feeling of like, why shouldn't I have everything I want? It feels like that has something to do with shedding that feeling of having to stifle yourself, which admits to questioning your own right to exist in any real way. And so then, I don't know, it feels very powerful for her to then come back to tennis. She's finally maybe doing the thing that has been most consistent in her life as herself, truly for the first time.

Julie: Exactly. I think that's ultimately why she couldn't resist. Because playing tennis is in some ways the most natural form of who Reneé Richards is.

Sarah: We'll get more into this later, but we're so fixated on the concept of winning in sports that I feel like we have forgotten in some ways about what else they offer to the people who do them, and to kids especially. And one of them is just being like, when you find the right thing for you, you can feel like you don't have to feel weird about your body for at least one hour of the day. And everybody should have access to that. 

Julie: Everybody should. And I think it does get intentionally overlooked by a lot of lawmakers that kids are doing this stuff fun. They're doing it to make friends, they're doing it to feel at home in their bodies ultimately. And for lawmakers, no, it's all about scholarships. It's all about making cis girls cry. I don't know, what have you. 

Sarah: You know who makes cis girls cry? Cis boys. Work on that, government. 

Julie: Preach. Another interesting thing that I think she says around this time is that she writes, “The whole world seemed to be looking for me to be their Joan of Arc”, so that's a really fascinating comparison to me. Joan of Arc was definitely gender nonconforming, very likely to be trans. She was literally burned at the stake for not complying with gender norms.

Sarah: When you put it that way.

Julie: So she started playing these tournaments because she couldn't resist. At a tournament in La Jolla in 1976, she is playing really well. Meanwhile, a reporter in the background is doing some digging. She had her name legally changed, but he has unearthed her dead name. This person, by the way, happens to be Tucker Carlson's father.

Sarah: What? 

Julie: Richard.

Sarah: No!

Julie: Yes. She is literally outed by Tucker Carlson's father.

Sarah: And that was the day Tucker went to “bring your demonic little boy to work” day. And you can really see the impression it made.

Julie: So he basically outs her. But in his version of things, like we see today, she is apparently a man masquerading as a woman. He does not use the term “transsexual” or “transgender”. He just thinks she's trying to hustle people at tennis, basically. 

Sarah: She worked so hard on tennis hustling that she just found out she was a woman. 

Julie: So she holds a news conference at her tennis club. She says about a hundred reporters came.

Sarah: So this is like a giant story. People are like, oh my God. 

Julie: Yes. This is a very big story. So she is forthcoming at this news conference really owning her identity. She's not the only tennis star who has come out as queer, not really by their own choosing. Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, they weren't exactly like jonesing to come out. 

She then goes to a tournament in South Orange, New Jersey. It's run by a friend of hers who's like, “No, come play. Come play. It'll be fine.” She had played there before her transition as well, so she's now second guessing herself at every possible moment. She's like, can I pat a ball boy on the head? Oops. Better not. Better not make the trans look bad. Better not be seen as essentially grooming or being creepy or doing anything even remotely out of line that could be considered weird or unusual in any form. 25 of the 32 women entered in that tournament ultimately drop out in protest of her presence. This continues to be a big national story at this point. 

Sarah: When Tucker Carlson's dad outed her at this previous tournament she was in? 

Julie: Yeah. 

Sarah: How high in the rankings of women's tennis is she at this point?

Julie: She's doing pretty well because she, I believe, wins that tournament. It's not like she's like a fringe player. She is known to be competitive. She is succeeding. I don't think she's Chris Everett level, who again is like many years her junior. 

Sarah: But she's good enough to make people nervous.

Julie: Good enough to get the Carlson’s concerned. 1976, that same year, is the first year she tried to compete in the U.S. Open against other women. Incidentally, by the way, this is the same summer that Caitlyn Jenner captivates the world and wins the Olympic decathlon. 

Sarah: Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. And the decathlon is like a singularly terrifying Olympic event, too. It's like they just rolled all of the other events into one and we're like, all right, Caitlyn, get out there. 

Julie: Yes. And she did, and she was great. And then I think everything in her public image went downhill from there, probably.

Sarah: It was a good moment though.

Julie: So as Caitlyn Jenner is doing her thing, we have Reneé applying to play in the U.S. Open. And the USDA tells her that she can, if she passes the Barr body test, which hadn't been required before for planning in the U..S Open. 

Sarah: Is that where they see how many bars your body can go to? Oh my God. I'm sorry. 

Julie: Close. No. So the Barr body test is looking at your chromosomal makeup. Many women have XX chromosomes. Many men have XY chromosomes. 

Sarah: As I remember, every time I have to look at bathroom doors that are pulling that shit and I'm like, I don't fucking remember.

Julie: We need to have a whole conversation about bathroom doors at cutesy breweries and stuff. 

Sarah: Oh my God.

Julie: They're outta control. She refuses to take this test, arguing that correctly, in fact, that not all men have male chromosomes and vice versa. She didn't feel like her chromosome makeup that she was born with in 1934 had anything to do with her sexuality in 1976. She writes that in her book. 

Now I'm going to send you another quote from her book that I think you're going to enjoy. It would be great if you could read. 

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. “How hungry for tennis success must you be to have your penis chopped off in pursuit of it? How many men would do it for a million dollars? If you could find one, would such a neurotic be likely to have the concentration to play topflight tennis, even if he didn't go completely crazy once he realized what he'd done?” That's so great. 

Julie: Yeah. No, I love it. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Which is like, of course these are not men masquerading as women. Reneé is just a woman trying to be a woman and trying to play a sport. And those two things are only kind of related. And yeah, so that's the defense in her book for what she's doing as she faces backlash from people on the tour, from coaches on the tour, from the USDA itself.

Sarah: Women's sports do have a ton of problems, but the problem is that nobody cares about them and there's no money. And you can make minimum wages, someone in like the top 10 athletes in your sport, in your country, and you can still not really be able to get by. And that's the problem. I feel like the problems in women's sports, they are being clobbered by men, but like at the institutional level.

Julie: Yeah. Something we've seen a lot of in the last few years, I'm sure was equally rampant during Reneé's hay day was abusive coaches. That's one problem. You also have inequity in facilities. 

Sarah: We love to hide the dangerous elements of sports by talking about how important it's for community and leadership and being part of something. And it feels like one of the unacknowledged fears is what then if you are on a team with, if you're a cis girl and you're on a team with, and you love a trans girl on a team with you, or if you're in a relationship with all of your teammates and you're doing something together and then you are whoops, building community with trans people and then you can't be pushed around as easily by your parents? 

Julie: Yeah. What if the cis kids find out that trans people are people?

Sarah: Now that's the tennis ball that God told you not to take a bite of.

Julie: I'm just thinking about all the fuzz, it sounds like the texture is not ideal. 

Sarah: The sensory idea that is like truly squirm inducing and that's why I can't stop thinking about it.

Julie: So Renee is not allowed to play in the 1976 open because she does not take the bar body test. But she keeps playing tennis even though it jeopardizes her credibility, it jeopardizes the credibility of people she's playing for who are hosting tournaments. She plays when she can. And in 1977, she once played women's doubles with Billie Jean King at Billie Jean King's invitation. So that's pretty cool. Billie Jean King is not out at this point as lesbian, by the way. 

Sarah: It's also crazy that Billie Jean King is, from what I remember from that American Masters, one of the people who made Title IX possible. But we remember her mostly for that time she beat that old, gross sexist.

Julie: Who else beat the old, gross sexist? Reneé. This guy was just out here challenging anyone with a pulse to play him in tennis and it was like, bro, just, no. 

Sarah: And it worked because they made a Holly Hunter movie about it. 

Julie: She does decide to take the Barr body test in 1977 at some point, and the results are apparently ambiguous. She says she passed. I don't think that's the common consensus. She says she wouldn't take the test a second time under USDA's conditions. 

At this point, they're at an impasse, and Reneé sues for the right to play in the U.S. Open. So talking about how every character in the story is like their own main character in a different story. The person who agrees to take on her case is Roy Cohn. 

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Julie: Yeah. 

Sarah: That's a name that jump scares you.

Julie: Oh yeah, absolutely. Just to be totally clear, it's that Roy Cohn. The Roy Cohn you're thinking of.

Sarah: And for people who aren't thinking of a Roy Cohn, please tell us who is Roy Cohn? There are so many ways to know him. I know him as the guy who wrote Donald Trump's prenup when he married Ivana, which is surely a good sign.

Julie: Oh, definitely. Yeah. That was one of the first places I was going to go was his support of Donald Trump. The other obvious association is McCarthyism. He was that guy involved with the Rosenberg’s and all that.

Sarah: Truly the long 20th century. And died of AIDS while being a virulent homophobe and just apparently had his fingers in every legal pie in the 20th century. I also know him first as a character in Angels in America, which is a strange way to meet someone. Because that's a redemption arc for him because it's him dying and entertaining the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. But that's a whole other episode. 

Julie: Reneé was told by a friend that he was controversial, but the best there was. And I'm like, this is the biggest understatement I've ever heard in my life. “He was controversial”. Reneé is all nervous and she goes to his apartment. He greets her at the door in a bathrobe because, of course he does. He immediately takes the case. He ends up handing it to his partner, Mike Rosen. But the association with the case is very much with him. You know it’s Roy Cohen's partner. So it's a whole thing. Interestingly though, Reneé barely spends any time on this in the book. 

Sarah: I've never been part of a lawsuit, but it does seem even in the best of circumstances, it takes over your life in such a profound way that by the time it's over, it feels like it would make a lot of sense to not want to talk about it anymore. 

Julie: And this book came out in 1983, so she's not all that far removed from it. The case was heard in the New York Supreme Court in August of 1977. The U.S. Open typically starts around Labor Day, so beginning of September. So this we're like down to the wire here. Reneé had doctors testify for her that she was indeed a woman. This is, of course, not based on social norms or respect for people. It's based purely on the fact that she had this one surgery, right? But nevertheless, the doctors testify for her. Billie Jean King files an affidavit supporting her. The USDA's argument on the contrary, was the Barr body test was needed to keep male imposters from entering the woman's tour. So it goes back to this idea about protecting women in sports, like protecting in heavy air quotes. 

Sarah: And again, why would you want to be in women's sports if you identify as a man and you could be in men's sports where you get paid more money and people notice what you're doing?

Julie: People watch you on tv. You have TV broadcasts, like.

Sarah: The song remains the same and the song is stupid. 

Julie: Yes. The judge also thinks the song is stupid, I guess, because he rules in favor of Reneé. He misgenders her in the ruling, but nevertheless, he rules in favor of her. He does have some concern for Reneé 's sanity here, which I think there are a lot of people in this country who would rather see trans people dead than living as their true selves. So at least he's acknowledging that she needed to do this for her livelihood. 

Sarah: And that this was fundamentally necessary. And then to believe that you're allowing maybe someone else to take the ingredients they find in what you say and construct the understanding that if this was essential to somebody's wellbeing, then they were always a woman. 

Julie: So the good news is Reneé can play. She can play anywhere in the U.S. or South America. She would've had to undertake a second lawsuit to be able to play in Europe. So she does not do that, but she can play. And after all the hype about being able to supposedly beat Chris Everett, she loses in the first round of singles to Virginia Wade, who is a British player who had won Wimbledon just that year. 

She does come pretty close to winning in doubles though. She's playing with Betty Ann Stewart, they lose to Martina Navratilova and her partner. This is interesting for several reasons. The most immediate reason is that Reneé would go on to coach Martina for a couple of years. So Reneé plays in several more U.S. Opens. She played professional tennis for four more years. She's coaching Martina. 

Then she returns to being an eye doctor in 1981, which is the same year that King and Navratilova both come out. Yeah, that's her tennis career. She never wins the U.S. Open. A lot of them are happy to play with her. Some of them are not. They'll make snide comments about being in the locker room with her. They'll complain about her being in it for the money stuff, which I think is funny, but she does have a lot of supporters. So it's just a mixed bag. 

And then she kind of is like, okay, maybe I'm finally actually too old for this. Let me go back to my other love, eye surgery. 

Sarah: I love that she has ophthalmology as a fallback. It's just very Elle Woods. So she's back to the ophthalmologist's life. 

Julie: She is a practicing ophthalmologist for several more decades, I believe. And she's 88 today, so she is still among us. She has given a handful of interviews to major publications over the years, as I was alluding to before. They all misgender her and deadname her. 

There's an ESPN documentary made about her in 2011. It's weirdly obsessed with her relationship with her son, which is fractured. It's very interested in this question of can trans people parent kids? Focusing on that aspect is maybe missing the story in my opinion. I don't know how she was as a parent to her son, but probably it's not all wrapped up in her being trans. 

Sarah: And like you were saying before, it's like you can't in a postmortem very easily or at all pick apart the effects of transitioning when you have a child. And then the social stigma and the beliefs of people around you and the effect that has on everybody and you're in your child's life. 

We did an episode last fall about people's abortion stories. And we had people send in their stories of experiences with abortion, and there were like several themes that were very prominent. And one of them that showed up over and over and over again was that my abortion wasn't bad, but the stigma around it was. Or the experience around it was, or the pursuit of it was, but the abortion itself didn't feel bad or wrong, but everything around it made it harder. And this feels like that kind of thing too, where we have something that we stigmatize socially and then people have to deal with the fallout of the way people treat them and the way people react to something that maybe was painful because it was a medical procedure or a surgery, but that was very clearly to them the thing that they needed and allowed them to be happier to even survive. But then if we're against that, then we get to cook up these bad faith arguments about how abortion or transitioning or whatever else is harmful because look at the effects of the way our culture treats you when you've done that.

Julie: Right. You can't win. Yeah. It's really interesting just to compare the reaction that trans athletes get today to the reaction she got then. 

So I just want to go into a little bit about the reaction then. There were some interesting letters to the editor from the New York Times from around the time of the lawsuit. And there's some garden variety transphobia in the letters to the editor. But for the most part, the letters are really supportive of Reneé. Kelsey from Greenwich, Connecticut, she is like, this sounds an awful lot like how white people would suffer from losing to black people in sports. Not to mention the damage that was inflicted on Little League Boys when girls signed on to play. These are imperfect comparisons, but I think they're also astute, at least for the time. She says, “as a lifelong woman, I would like to welcome Dr. Richards to our ranks and assure her that most of us, excluding our dollar happy sisters on the court, feel no fear and hold no prejudice as far as she is concerned.” 

Sarah: Yeah. And I feel like that's the kind of viewpoint that doesn't get represented by the historical record if we zoom out too far, then that misses the people who were always there in a more quiet way, being like, that makes sense. Reneé seems great. I'm going to not shout because I'm not violently opposed to her, but will say at a normal volume that this all seems great for her and good for Reneé. And then people who spoke a little bit more quietly don't get remembered as people who shouted.

Julie: It's a little bit like how you only leave like a Yelp review if there's like a bug in your food or something.

Sarah: It is like that. It's like history is composed of Yelp reviews. 

Julie: Yeah. So I think we can go into a little bit of her kind of present-day views, which we've talked a little bit about already with the documentary and everything like that. She does not like the word “transgender”. As I mentioned at the top of the show, she calls it inclusive as a word, and that's what she doesn't like about it. So she's like, “I changed from man to woman, not something in between.” 

She correctly points out that transgender suggests, and in many instances refers to an in between, partway from one sex to the other. And she says “the idea of androgyny is not appealing to her. I like the binary system that God designed for us. Two sexes, two genders, male and female. It's what makes the world go round and is the spice of life”. 

Sarah: I love that she loves the word spice. I feel like this is obviously a much bigger conversation now in a great way, I think there are trans elders old enough and. Talkative enough to say things that the trans community today is like, absolutely not. What are your thoughts on that?

Julie: Yeah, I guess it didn't totally surprise me that someone her age and who came up in that time facing that pressure and those stigmas would have those views. It's obviously a little disappointing, especially knowing her story. It's not like she instantly went from being a man to a woman, though. Maybe that's how she sees it based on her writing. But she did have this whole tweener phase kind of thing, is normal, where she's taking hormones, she stops taking hormones. She feels like her chest is changing. She has surgery on her Adam's apple at one point. And so I think it's maybe not the most introspective thing she's ever said, but I don't know. 

What I'm going to say next even disappoints me a little, more because now she's talking specifically about tennis and whether trans people should compete in sports. She's basically saying if I had played women's tennis in my twenties, I would've won Wimbledon, she says. But at 40, she knew she wasn't going to be the best. She thinks for scientific reasons trans women shouldn't compete against cis women. 

And I'll be very clear here, the science on this is not settled. There's very little of it and when there's very little science on something, it is an active choice to err on the side of exclusion rather than inclusion. These studies on transgender athletes right now just frankly don't exist. There are some studies on transgender bodies as they compare to cis bodies and physical activity, but that's obviously not the same when you're dealing with like elite level athletes. There are researchers working on longitudinal studies about athletic advantage or lack thereof, but for now, we're in this moment where you can kind of read the tea leaves however you want to. And I think that's really dangerous. 

But yeah, Reneé chooses to read them as no, the science on this is settled. Trans women have way more testosterone than cis women, which on average isn't wrong. It just doesn't necessarily have to be scary. 

Sarah: I don't know. And then I feel like another approach to this topic is just like, why are we dividing sports up by gender at all. 

Julie: My editor's going to think I paid you to say that. But that really is the ultimate question. And I think obviously a lot of this and a lot of the pearl clutching around this sums back to Title IX. It was passed in 1973 and it made opportunities for women by making sure there were women's athletic programs at colleges. Subsequently, it slowly created professional opportunities for them as well in sports. Even though it's scholastic in nature, it really affects women's sports at all levels. 

And so you have women clinging tight to these spots that they think they otherwise wouldn't have gotten. And they're probably right about that. But would the world end if we organized basketball by height or other sports by weight class? Probably not. 

Sarah: Yeah. Or figure skating by musical genre. Yes, I just want all gender, all sexuality, skating, organized however we want to. But you could have, for example, a night of Bond themes. I think we would all be happy with that. 

Julie: I think we would be too. People care a lot about sports whether they are fans of sports, whether they have kids who play sports, whether they played sports growing up, whether they're singularly obsessed with Tonya Harding. Everyone has some connection, right? Yeah. So I don't know. 

This is all to say that sports mean different things to different people, and everyone takes them really personally in certain ways, and I think it's hard then when you see people like Reneé saying oh, there's no room for in between, or maybe trans people can have everything except for sports. So we have had prominent trans athletes since Reneé, but maybe no one who has so singularly captivated the public in the same way she has. I think you have to look at what's going on now and think about what are we doing? 

As recently as a few weeks ago Nikki Haley, who was running for president as a Republican, was asked on a town hall what one of the biggest issues facing the country was, and she said, trans people in women's locker rooms. Honest to God, that's what she said.

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Julie: She didn't say the word “cisgender”, but implying cisgender. She said teen girls are killing themselves because of it.

Sarah: Oh, are they? 

Julie: Apparently.

Sarah: God. Ugh.

Julie: Yeah. And we're at a time in which 22 states, that's nearly half of all states, banned transgender athletes from sports at the high school or college levels. That's only been since 2020 that this has been true. It started with Idaho. Some states ban only trans girls and women. Some also ban trans boys and men. Some states have injunctions in place, preventing enforcement for now as the cases wind their way through the legal system. If you're non-binary, good luck. I don’t know what to tell you, but you probably can't play somewhere. 

Sarah: If you're not in binary, you get nothing. 

Julie: You're welcome. One of the people leading this charge against transgender athletes is Martina Navratilova. 

Sarah: Twist! God, I didn't know that. Knife in the heart. 

Julie: I know. So she co-run this group called the Women's Sports Policy Working Group. It's a really prominent organization that purports to advocate for a middle ground solution in women's sports.

Sarah: It's a terrible acronym. There is not a single vowel in that acronym. Do better. 

Julie: I know. I know. It's a little unclear. I'm constantly looking up the name to remember it. So it purports to advocate for this middle ground, but in reality it is pretty clear when you dig into the rhetoric that this group is opposed to trans competitors altogether. And it just feels like Martina, who obviously herself is gay, can point toward her relationship with Reneé to vouch for her track record on queer inclusion in sports. But at the same time it's like, what did you want her to do? Because Reneé has stuck by her friend as well and said yeah, she's right about biology.

Sarah: And to get back to this idea of the girlboss-ification of history, yeah, sometimes you go through the machine, and you are very grateful for all the joy you were allowed to have, and you respond to that by trying to rigidly police everyone following behind you. And it sucks and it hurts. We do not respond to being told we're less than human by rising above it, typically. We respond by being wounded. 

Julie: I know. It's so shitty and so hard to process. Reneé herself has said she got into tennis because she wanted individual glory. She wanted to stand out at first in her family, but then presumably you're meant to understand later that she just wanted to stand out in general and I would posit basically, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with wanting that for yourself? And she now feels okay. I was allowed to do it, yes. But I was old. Now other people cannot want this for themselves. 

Sarah: Which implies, I don't know, the guilt underneath everything still of just, I could do this, but it wasn't great that I did it and we can't have too many people doing it. Trans kids in sports, it really gives me whiplash to realize that this wasn't even a conversation a few years ago. This proves that this is a manufactured controversy that people did not know to even think about before they started being told to do so.

Julie: Right. And I do think luckily for most people who aren't in Congress or aspiring to be, they're still really not thinking about it. Or if they are, they're not necessarily thinking about it in the way that conservatives want them to be. 

Sarah: Yeah. All of these laws that are about, harming and destroying the right of any marginalized group to continue to exist or done in the name of white cis women and how it's never about them. Because a law doesn't really like them either, but it's just classic. 

Julie: It's worth mentioning that Reneé does have this privilege in the sense that she's white. I can't imagine what it would've been like for a Black trans woman on the tour, or, you see the way that Black trans girls are treated in sports and also in life. Compounding that stress and that stigma onto somebody is like, it's rough. 

Sarah: Yeah. And I don't know, I feel like I'm happy that I know about her. I feel like this is a story where the ending is uncomfortable and the ending should be uncomfortable, I think, because this is not a time to sit back and be like, and then Reneé won her battle and everything was great. It's like, no, it was not great. 

Julie: I hope people feel a little bit more insight into her story and that helps them contextualize what's going on today. And I hope someone picks up her books from this because honestly, they're delightful. 

Sarah: I certainly will. I don't know. Thank you so much for bringing her story to us. I feel, in terms of what's happening now, I don't know, what do you wish that people were able to see in all this that they maybe haven't yet that?

Julie: Trans people are complex just like everyone else. We're messy as hell just like everyone else. People like Reneé can be pioneers or trailblazers, but uncomfortable ones. Both of them personally with that status and the rest of us being uncomfortable looking up to them. And I hope people do realize that as frivolous as sports may sound, they do mean a lot of things to many people. And they do shape the debates around marginalized groups in this country beyond sports in so many ways. 

Sarah: There are so many memorable moments, I think, of athletes making an impression on us, not just because of what they do, but because of the way they do it. Like Flo-Jo. Or Billie Jean King or today, Amber Glenn, the skater. Just that you are at the top of your game showing people what you can do physically, but also showing up as physically the person you are and the person you feel like, and the gender you feel, and the sexuality you feel. I understand why people pushing the straight agenda are scared by that because that can be so freeing and that can allow people to feel more strength and conviction in being who they are. So yes we're a pro sports show, twist. 

Julie: Glad to be a small part of that. 

Sarah: Thank you for being our sports correspondent.

Julie: Anytime. 

Sarah: Where can we experience more of your brain? 

Julie: You can experience my brain at Sports Illustrated and on social media at @JMKliegman. 

Sarah: Amazing. Julie, thank you for everything. Thank you so much for illustrating all of those sports. It would be really hard to tell what was going on otherwise.

And that is our episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being queer. Thank you so much to Julie Kliegman, our wonderful guest for all of their research and storytelling and everything, Julie, that you do. 

And Carolyn Kendrick, thank you for editing and producing and for everything that you do. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time.