Talking with her three decades later, one still has the uneasy sense, at times, of that impatient male surgeon trapped in her body trying to break out. Not that Dr. Richards, 72 and still practicing, is ever anything but polite. She comes outside in the rain, in sneakers, warm-up pants and a red sweater, to greet her visitor, reining in her enthusiastic, pound Bernese mountain dog. She provides a tour of her cozy three-bedroom cottage in the hamlet of Kent Cliffs, in Putnam County, an hour north of New York City: the faded chintz armchairs, the walk-in closet where a mink shares space with a golf bag that bears her name.

A faulty documentary on transsexual tennis star



Richards, Renée – | igor-xml.ru
At an anarchic U. Open, the transsexual tennis player made a pioneering point. Over three harrowing months, the crumbling metropolis had been rocked by terrorizing riots, a chaotic blackout and the frantic search for a serial killer. Nationals under the name Richard Raskind. These tree-lined lanes were where young Richard had grown up, where he had learned to play tennis—and where he discovered as a child that he had a second, female self inside him, fighting to get out. She had taken the plunge into that fishbowl in August , when she entered her first pro tournament as a woman at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in New Jersey.


40 years later, Renée Richards' breakthrough is as important as ever
Click here for more. It was the equivalent of a serve that came back with more spin and more heat than the sender ever expected. In February, Martina Navratilova wrote an op-ed in London's Sunday Times , discussing the hot-button issue of transgender athletes. Her point, she thought, was hardly tendentious, arguing that male athletes who transition to become female athletes but declined to undergo gender reassignment surgery should not be allowed to compete against women. It would not be fair

The United States Tennis Association began that year requiring genetic screening for female players. She challenged that policy, and the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor, a landmark case in transgender rights. Richards attended Horace Mann School and excelled as the wide receiver for the football team, the pitcher for the baseball team, and on the tennis and swim teams. During college Richards began dressing as a woman , which at the time was considered to be a perversion, with transsexualism classified as a form of insanity. Charles Ihlenfeld, a disciple of Harry Benjamin who specialized in endocrinology, transsexualism, and sexual reassignment.