Dr Renée Richards, an ophthalmologist who had previously competed as a male amateur tennis player, became the centre of a landmark controversy when she sought to enter the women’s draw of the US Open in 1977 after her sex‑change operation. Her challenge to exclusion dominated headlines and remains a touchstone in debates over gender, sport and law.
A new biography, Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer by Julie Kliegman, recounts that Richards turned for legal help to an unlikely ally: Roy Cohn. Better known for prosecuting suspected communists during the red scare and for later mentoring Donald Trump, Cohn and his firm took up Richards’s case and successfully argued for her inclusion in the tournament.
Kliegman’s book uses the 1977 lawsuit as a focal point to map Richards’s life and public role. The biography examines both the courtroom drama that brought Richards into the spotlight and the broader cultural context in which questions about gender identity and athletic competition were being newly contested.
The author also explores a less straightforward part of Richards’s legacy: in later years she publicly supported restrictions on transgender participation in women’s sports. That posture, at odds with the stance that made her a pioneering litigant, adds complexity to how historians and sports commentators assess her influence.
The biography positions Richards’s story within ongoing conversations about fairness, inclusion and the governance of sport. By tracing the legal, personal and political facets of her life, the book aims to illuminate why the case still resonates decades on and how a single figure can occupy contrasting places in the history of civil‑rights and athletic policy debates.