1. Renee Richards: The First Transgender Woman to Play a Professional sport.
Renee Richards is a world-renowned eye surgeon and in the 1970s was a famous international female tennis player. However, until she underwent gender reassignment surgery at the age of 41, Renee was a 6ft 2in surgeon called Richard Raskin. As Raskin, Renee had captained the Yale tennis team and won several tennis titles. However, despite marrying and fathering a son, Renee had always been conflicted about her sexual identity; a conflict she did not resolve until 1975 when her physical gender finally became female.
In 1976, Richards began to play tennis as a woman. However, her birth sex was quickly outed, and the US open promptly tried to stop her from competing as a woman by introducing a chromosome screening procedure. So Richards decided to sue. The USTA lawyer George Gowan attempted to argue that allowing Richards to play would be opening the floodgates to “worldwide experiments, especially in the Iron-Curtain countries, to produce athletic stars by means undreamed of a few years ago.” However, the judge observed there were relatively few athletes in Richard’s position – and ruled in her favor, allowing Richards to compete in the 1977 US Open. The judgment made Richards a trailblazer against transgender discrimination.
Where Do We Get this stuff? Here are our sources:
History Collection – 11 Remarkable Transgender People from History
National Geographic Channel – The Short Reign of Elagabalus, Rome’s Hard-Partying Emperor
Crosscut – Meet Harry Allen, Transgender At-Risk Youth of Yesteryear
The Guardian – Gerda Wegener: ‘The Lady Gaga of the 1920s’
Scientific America – The Surprisingly Old Science of Living as Transgender
New York Times – Overlooked No More: Roberta Cowell, Trans Trailblazer, Pilot and Auto Racer
Anderson, Lucy Hicks [Tobias Lawson] (1886-1954), Kevin Leonard, Black Past.org
BBC Sports – LGBT+ History Month: Renee Richards’ Journey from Tennis Outcast To Trans Pioneer