[News/People] [USA] The Woman Who Paved the Way for Men to Become Women

[Stephanie Stevens]

GQ, USA


Celebrities

The Woman Who Paved the Way for Men to Become Women

Forty years before Bruce Jenner announced his intent to transition, another star athlete made the same decision against the backdrop of a much less understanding world. His name was Richard Raskind; now it's Renée Richards. Here, a rare interview with the quiet trailblazer whose struggle laid the groundwork for Jenner, Transparent, and the transgender community's historic moment

by Michael Hainey

May 2015


Dr. Renée Richards has lived forty years of her life as a woman and forty years as a man. It was a warm August day in 1975 when Dr. Richard Raskind walked into a New York City hospital for surgery. Three days later she left the hospital, no longer Richard Raskind but now Renée Richards, her new name a statement: Renée, French for "reborn."

It had been a long and difficult path to that day. As Richards says, it was her all-American biography that so unsettled doctors when she approached them about her desire for surgery. "I was not what people thought of when they thought of someone wanting to have this surgery. There was nothing 'wrong' with me."

On the surface, Richards was the epitome of postwar-establishment success. Born in New York, the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia—his father was an orthopedic surgeon and his mother was a psychiatrist who practiced out of their home in Forest Hills, Queens—Richards went to Yale, where he became a tennis champion; he enlisted in the Navy; he graduated from medical school and became one of the country's leading eye surgeons, specializing in pediatric ophthalmology. Richards married and fathered a son. He got his pilot's license and loved to fly. But for forty years of his life, he was wrestling with the knowledge that he was a woman. Decades of five-times-a-week therapy, of searching for answers, of looking for any solution.

If you are of a certain age, born before the '70s, you remember Richards. Long before Bruce Jenner became the most famous person to ever transition, it was Richards fighting the battle in public, albeit reluctantly, for acceptance. After her surgery, she moved to Newport Beach, California, in order to rebuild her life. Looking for an outlet, she returned to playing tennis, at a local club, the John Wayne Tennis Club. A few members, impressed with her game, encouraged her to enter a women's tournament. She won. But shortly after, she was outed by a local sports reporter. A debate began: She's not really a woman, so how can she play women's tennis?

In 1976, she applied to play in the U.S. Open and was denied. She sued, and after a year of legal fighting, the court ruled in her favor, saying she had been discriminated against on the basis of gender. Richards entered the tournament in 1977 and lost in the first round but reached the finals in women's doubles. She retired from playing in 1981 (she continued to coach) and returned to her ophthalmology practice.

When I first contacted Richards, she told me she didn't want to talk. "My life is bigger than one data point," she said. "I'm a doctor, a surgeon, a Naval officer, a Yale graduate, a tennis champion. I'm many things." But after we spoke a bit, she agreed to have me up to her house to talk about her life, her thoughts on Jenner, and this pivotal, momentous moment in the battle to secure full civil rights and societal acceptance for transgendered people.

Richards lives in Putnam County, north of New York City, in a house surrounded by woods. She shares the home with her dogs, Rocco and Romeo, and her assistant Arleen, a woman Renée describes as her "entirely platonic friend." Richards takes the train in one day a week to her practice. Until very recently, you might see her on the train eating a doughnut for breakfast. Now it's raspberry yogurt. "I'm trying to be gluten-free now," she says. "Did you know Djokovic is gluten-free? Look at him."

Do you see yourself as a pioneer?
I've been told that. I've been told that....

But do you wear that label? When you lie in bed at night, do you think about your life and think, "You know what? I did that"?
I know I did it. But I was a reluctant pioneer, so I can't take that much credit for it. [laughs] I was not an activist. It was a private act for my own self-betterment, for what I wanted to do. I wanted to go and play tennis, you know? And I wanted to stand up and say what I was. That, too. But it was private. I wear the mantle of being one of the pioneers for the sexually disenfranchised, in particular the transgendered group. The gay world considers me a pioneer, and I'm proud that they do. But do I lie in bed thinking that I was a pioneer? No, I don't.

You have said your accomplishments proved to be a major impediment in your desire to change your sex. People thought there must be something wrong with you, because here's a guy who had it all.
It was too scary for them. They couldn't fathom how someone who had been so supremely successful in everything—in medicine, in sports, in life, as a heterosexual man, as a husband, as a father—they couldn't understand that. They couldn't understand how I could still have this overwhelming compulsion to be what I really should have been a long time ago—to have been allowed to become a woman. In this day and age, they would understand. The best example I know is somebody like Bruce Jenner. But in my time, I was turned away. I was turned away by the doctors who were actually doing this kind of thing, because I was too scary for them.

Because you were the epitome of East Coast establishment?
Absolutely. Some people don't understand why I'm not an activist for the transgendered community, why I don't talk and preach. I think I do more good for that community by being the best doctor I can be, by being the best tennis coach now and formerly tennis player I can be. I'm more helpful to them by being excellent in something that they can all be proud of—all that one of their sisters, or brethren, has accomplished.

But I hope that you, in a quiet moment, can see that history gives us the right people at the right times.
Was I a good person to come along at the time that I came along to do this? Probably, yes.

Can you take me back to your surgery? It's that morning in August '75. You're 41. And you come out of surgery and you are...?
All alone. I was all alone. I had just gotten out of the Navy. My mother had died three years before. I didn't have a support group. I didn't have anything.

And then, when you went to Europe and lived as a woman for a year...
Yeah. I don't think I fooled many people, but I satisfied myself.

You talk more than once in your book about suicidal thoughts.
There were a couple of Christmases after I got divorced, I had been living by myself in an apartment in New York, where, if I hear the Christmas songs of that time, to this day, I get depressed. Was I suicidal? Maybe I talked about it, but I don't think I was ever really going to do that. I was down, but my option wasn't suicide.

So you wake up in a hospital room, and you're alone, and you think...?
I think I accomplished something. I think I did what I had to do, and I'm still alive, in a great deal of pain. And then I went out to the country to see my friend, whose house I stayed at for a while. And then I came back to my apartment in New York. I went back to work and then started to make plans to find employment in California and change my license and do all of that stuff. [Richards hired a lawyer to change her name legally to Renée Richards on all documents, including her Yale diploma and her medical license.]

Okay, you're condensing a lot. Go back to the hospital.
[long pause] I remember the circumstances—the nurse and the doctor and all that—but I don't remember the thoughts that I had when I became a woman, feeling different. I don't remember any of that. That's... [sighs, laughs] I couldn't begin to try to remember what that was like.

Isn't that curious, though?
No, because it was a long time ago, and I don't remember anything that startling about it. There was a time where I wanted to do it, and I had this operation. I was now a woman. I was satisfied, happy that I was able to accomplish it. Scared. I knew my life was gonna be pretty different. But you know, part of what has always helped me is being unaware. I'm very good at being unaware of crises or dangers or problem times or risk. I mean, when you ask me how I could fly my airplane around the way I did, all over the country, it was insane! How many times I should have been killed! And I've probably felt the same thought, the same kind of brain, what you're asking, the day after I was operated on or the day before. Renée just goes in willy-nilly and does these things.

Where does that come from?
Because I'm just dumb. [laughs] Because I had no idea what I was doing. Which is not a stupid answer, as I can tell by the look on your face. It's the truth. People often do things that are considered very heroic without the faintest idea of what they've gotten themselves into. And that was true with me. I mean, when I stepped out on that tennis court, with 4,000 screaming people there to just get a glimpse of me, and we had to go down the back-door dressing room in the fire escape to get to the court because the front entrance was so mobbed with people, and Howard Cosell on Wide World of Sports interviewed me there, and he said, "Renée! How can you sit here so calm in front of this multitude of people clamoring to get a piece of you?!" I said, "Howard, I don't know. I'm just doing it." And that's how I was doing it. I didn't know when there death threats. They had to be pointed out to me. I didn't know when people were writing horrible things about me, how immoral I was, and how terrible I was, and how awful I was, and what am I doing? And it's like a blissful—not indifference, but a blissful ignorance, in a way. Ever since I was a kid, I did that. If I was hell-bent on doing something, I was gonna do it, and I didn't think too much of the consequences.

You must have heard those things yelled at you while you were playing, right?
Yeah, I heard them. I would do radio interviews where they would tell me I was immoral.

Doesn't that hurt you?
It did hurt. Of course it hurt. But it doesn't make you stop because some bigot's on the other end of the line. [laughs] When I played in that tournament in La Jolla and I realized that people were making innuendos that this is not who this person says she is, it got to be too much for me. I called up before the semifinals to the tournament and said, "I'm withdrawing," and the voice on the other end of the line is Virginia Glass, whom I knew because I used to practice with her son, Luis, at Great Neck Tennis Club. And she said, "Renée, you can't withdraw. You have to stand up for who you are. You've got to finish it." She says, "I'm a Filipino woman, and I'm married to a black man, and our sons Luis and our other son are part Filipino and part black, and we are always the subject of bigotry and bias of all kinds, and here you have the chance to stand up, and you are somebody of significance, and you just go out there, and you have to do it, and you go play." I said, "Okay." So I played. [laughs] And that's my life. My life is "You can't make this stuff up!"

You have a son. Did the nature of your fatherhood change after your surgery?
Well, I couldn't be as good a father to Nick after I had the surgery.

Because of the circumstances you had created, or...?
I lost my moral authority. I could no longer be the guide as a father should be to a son because of what I had become. So I didn't have, in my mind, at least, the moral authority. Maybe I did for him, but I didn't for myself.

But that authority, the authority of your character, was still there, don't you think?
It was, but...

But you felt the physical distance.
The physical distance. And I could have been a tougher, more authoritarian parent, which he needed.

When you talk about your own parents—
My father never did much as a parent.

Your mother was more the authoritarian.
That's right. And Nick didn't have me as a good authority figure. Which he could have used. I mean, I tried, when I came back after four years, and I tried to tell myself, "Don't berate yourself. People go off to war for four years and don't see their sons and come back." But this was different, because when I came back, I was this infamous, notorious woman. And so I felt that I had lost the moral authority. Of course, I've been trying to make up for that for his entire life. I did as well by him as I could, in my mind. The children of transgendered parents—it's not easy for the families. In a way, being a transgendered person is a very selfish thing, and you have to call a spade a spade. Because it is. Whether you could do otherwise, or you could hold it off, has nothing to do with it. I mean, even if you can't hold it off. Obviously I couldn't hold it off. That being said, it's still a selfish way to go.

But Richard leaving Richard behind and becoming Renée—that's something you felt as a compulsion, right? Something you didn't have full choice over?
Correct. That's the category most transgenders fall into—it's a partially controlled compulsion. Some people can control it for their whole lives. I know a few.

They're cross-dressers, but they'll never have the surgery?
Right. And some choose not to or can't not go through with it. In some cases, the reality happens that way, and a man can lead a pretty successful life, and he has his closet full of dresses, or his special apartment that he goes to or whatever, and lives two lives. And some people do.

Did Richard Raskind die?
No. Richard Raskind was very much alive in a different persona. A persona of Renée Richards. A persona I'm comfortable in being and have always wanted to be. But what Richard Raskind did, what Richard Raskind accomplished, the way he thinks—no, that's not changed, that's not wiped away. Not by a long shot. One thing I was gonna mention was, we were talking earlier about the separation of sexual identity: the tennis-player identity, the doctor identity. You have to realize that somebody who is an entertainer, or even like with Bruce Jenner—a person like that can have a sex change and be just as accepted as an entertainer or a TV star or something like that afterwards. But if you're talking about someone who's a surgeon or a physician of any kind and bringing your child to see that person, it's a whole different matter. When I came back to practice after being so notorious, I couldn't ever be a frivolous, entertainment-type, public kind of character. I mean, I had to be the same confidence-engendering... I'm operating on people's eyes; I'm operating on their kid's eyes. I mean, you better be some kind of a transsexual to do that! Otherwise you're not gonna have much of a practice. It's a whole different thing than being an entertainer.

Did anyone ever break your heart?
No. Everybody who fell in love with me fell in love with me.

You always ended it?
Yeah. Yeah. Um, I'm trying to think if there were any men that broke my heart.

Richard was always breaking up with women. But Renée never did find her great love.
Correct. One of them became a very good friend of mine, but the sexual part of it was very short-lived. It was there, but it was short-lived, because I never really felt oriented sexually to men. It was fun having sex with a man, especially the first few years as Renée. It was fun, and I enjoyed it, but there was never a love object, never a love object. I was always oriented towards women as love, I think. Ever since I was 16 years old, I either had a girlfriend or was living with one, with a woman. The one man that's still alive, he's old, old, and we keep in touch, and we're very good friends, but the sexual part of it ended within a year after it started, and I just realized that my sexual orientation wasn't gonna be changed by my sex change. And I think probably a lot of formerly heterosexual men who become transgendered are in that category. Not all of them; some of them are gay to begin with, and then it was easier for them. They started dated men, and the men were objects all along. But it wasn't for me. And then I had another suitor. I used to like to date him, but he was a widower and had children, and we couldn't see each other very much. He took me to the racetrack once. [laughs] It was wonderful.

It's interesting that people talk about Bruce Jenner: What's his love life gonna be after he's transitioned to a woman? He's been married a couple of times—he's basically a heterosexual man—and I find it hard to believe that he's suddenly all of a sudden become oriented towards men. It's conceivable, but it makes for a complicated life.

Forty years ago, you were fighting to have your rights in the mainstream; now the issue is in the mainstream. What do you think of it all, with four decades of perspective?
The present climate of increased awareness of transgender as a subject—social and legal—will educate the public and benefit those 'afflicted,' for sure. Greater protection from rape, battery and murder, greater acceptance in the home and workplace—and legal statutes to ensure this—are happening. I don't see much taking place, however, in the area of causation, etiology, 'why' this happens. There's very little research from the scientific community. But from a personal standpoint, fresh from my 60th reunion at Yale, socially conservative by nature, there are some aspects to the current frenzy and popularity of all things transgender that give me pause. I am not overly happy with the word 'transgender.' It is very inclusive. I was a 'transsexual' — I changed from man to woman. Not something in between. Transgender suggests, and does in many instances refer to, an in-between — part way from one sex to the other. And the idea of androgyny is not appealing to me. 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.

If you met 10-year-old Richard Raskind now and he told you what was in your heart then at that age, what would you say to him?
You have to be very careful, because not all of these kids that are professing their identity at 6 or 7 stay with it. You can't just say to that 8-year-old, "Yes, you can go on the path now of becoming a transgender," because it's too early. The most extreme ones, who are putting themselves forth in the world even at the age of 6 or 7, yes, they probably will be. But there are a lot of kids in the middle there who profess one day and don't profess it the next day, and you can't start treating them too early. One big advantage that has come about is what started in Holland a few years ago. Holland is often ahead of the curve in a lot of social and ethical issues. They started with the hormonal blockers in the boys that profess they wanted to grow up as girls. These hormonal blockers block puberty for a few years, to give these preteens and teens time to really decide whether that's what they want to do. They don't grow beards. They don't have male faces. They don't have male bone-skeleton development. It blocks the formation of testosterone, so they don't develop the male body, which is so hard to deal with at a later age. And then, when the boys get to be 16 [and still want to proceed], the surgery is a much easier way to go. So what do I say to an 8-year-old? I say, "Be careful. Explore the operation, explore the opportunities, explore the options. But hold off on anything that's not able to be undone."

What is your legacy?
I have no doubt that when I die, the obituary headline is gonna be "Transsexual Tennis Player Renée Richards Dies." I realize that being the pioneer for other transsexual people or for other downtrodden, disenfranchised people of any type is very important, but it's really a very small part of my life.


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