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Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer
Not yet published
Expected 18 Aug 26The candid, definitive biography of professional tennis’s first openly transgender player, Renée Richards, featuring never-before-seen archival photos and untold stories nearly lost to history, until now.
Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women’s draw of the 1976 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament in 1977, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner.
Finding Renée Richards chronicles Richards’s extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Renée remains a complex A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested—and condemned—than ever before.
Finding Renée Richards includes a 20-page photo insert featuring never-before-seen archival images.
Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women’s draw of the 1976 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament in 1977, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner.
Finding Renée Richards chronicles Richards’s extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Renée remains a complex A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested—and condemned—than ever before.
Finding Renée Richards includes a 20-page photo insert featuring never-before-seen archival images.
272 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication August 18, 2026
About the author
Julie Kliegman
2 books7 followersJulie Kliegman is a writer and editor. Previously, she was the copy chief for Sports Illustrated and a copy editor at The Ringer. Her writing on a wide variety of topics has appeared in outlets including Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, The Ringer, Bookforum, Vulture, BuzzFeed, Vox, The Verge, Bustle, Washington Monthly, The Week, and more. She lives in Queens, New York.
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
No Right of Final Edit
Julie Kliegman’s “Finding Renée Richards” is most compelling when it refuses to turn tennis’s trans pioneer into a settled symbol, asking instead who gets to own the meaning of a life that outgrew its precedent.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 13th, 2026
“The Serve That Gave Her Away” – A motion learned too deeply to disguise becomes the first breach between the life Renée Richards means to keep for herself and the meanings strangers, institutions, and history will begin attaching to it.
Don Rubell warned Renée Richards that anonymity had one formidable enemy: her serve. She could change her name, cross the country, begin again as an ophthalmologist in California, and enter a small tennis tournament as “Renée Clark,” but the left-handed motion would give her away to anyone who had watched Richard Raskind play. Serves, Rubell told her, were as individual as fingerprints. Julie Kliegman opens “Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer” with that bodily tell, and it proves more useful than any grand metaphor. Richards keeps trying to decide what in her life is hers to name. Reporters, doctors, tennis officials, judges and, eventually, historians keep answering too.
Even “trans pioneer” turns slippery once Richards starts talking. A television reporter outs her in 1976; tennis authorities demand chromosomal testing before admitting her to the women’s draw of the U.S. Open; she challenges them and wins. The case makes her a landmark figure in trans sports history. Nearly fifty years later, Richards tells Kliegman that trans women who have undergone male puberty generally should not compete against cisgender women. She even questions whether she should have brought the case that made her famous. Kliegman, a trans and nonbinary sports journalist, disagrees. The easy book would circle the irony in red and stop there. Kliegman keeps asking what happens after the pioneer begins arguing with the uses made of her.
Much of the book’s tension comes from a custody dispute over meaning. Richards has one claim because she lived the history. Trans people who saw her victory enlarge what seemed possible have another. Tennis institutions once claimed authority over her body; Kliegman now claims the biographer’s right to interpret the record, even when the subject objects. No claimant quite wins. Movements prefer pioneers preserved at the moment of maximum usefulness, like insects in amber, only with better press clips. Richards has had the poor manners to remain alive, opinionated and revisable.
“The Public Question” – Cold broadcast light enters a private room before any person does, turning publicity into something architectural: a new illumination under which Richards can still occupy her own life, but can no longer control who is looking.
Early chapters return from the controversy to Richard Raskind’s Queens childhood: two physician parents, considerable family volatility, childhood abuse, girls’ clothing, unusual athletic talent, Horace Mann, Yale tennis, medical school, psychoanalysis. Kliegman also reconstructs the search for language to describe a desire mid-century psychiatry largely treated as pathology. Richards’s later certainty can make transition look inevitable in retrospect. The chronology corrects that illusion. Raskind repeatedly approaches and retreats from transition, including a trip to Morocco that reaches the threshold of surgery before fear sends him home.
The life Raskind then tries to build is not treated as a waiting room. He marries Barbara Mole, fathers Nick, works punishing hours as an eye surgeon, undergoes breast-reduction surgery after years of hormones, and keeps playing high-level amateur tennis. Kliegman is particularly alert to the danger of turning achievement into diagnosis. Medicine and sport are not merely camouflage for gender conflict; they are real vocations, pleasures and identities. When the marriage fails and Renée becomes the life Richards chooses to sustain, transition solves something enormous. It does not politely dismiss everything that came before.
Richards’s return to competitive tennis gives the book its quickest pulse. In California, she means to keep the game recreational, but competitiveness is not a faucet she knows how to leave at half pressure. Bobby Riggs recognizes her and cheerfully folds her into a gambling hustle; friends push her toward more serious play; “Renée Clark” starts attracting attention. Then comes La Jolla, where winning a modest tournament leads reporter Richard Carlson to uncover and broadcast her former identity despite her pleas for privacy. Kliegman is exact about the cruelty and inaccuracy of the coverage. Richards wanted to play tennis. She became a public dispute with a backhand.
Institutions quickly turn that dispute into procedure. Tennis authorities seek to decide whether Richards is sufficiently female for women’s competition by requiring sex verification. Kliegman sets the episode beside the longer history of sporting bodies inspecting, measuring and testing women whose bodies trouble official expectations. In 1977 a judge rules that Richards must be allowed to compete at the U.S. Open without submitting to the disputed chromosomal test. She loses to Virginia Wade in the first round but reaches the doubles final with Bettyann Stuart. The panic had imagined domination. Richards instead becomes a very good professional player, eventually ranked around the top twenty, neither fraud nor apocalypse.
“Sufficiently Female” – The nearly colorless institutional geometry gives procedure the unnerving calm of certainty, while its incomplete thresholds leave open the question the rules themselves cannot settle: what kind of knowledge entitles an institution to define a person.
Perhaps the strangest turn comes decades later, when Richards tells Kliegman that bringing the lawsuit may have been a mistake. The woman whose victory became evidence that exclusion could be challenged no longer accepts the broad claim many readers attach to it. Kliegman refuses the two easiest edits: discard Richards as a hypocrite, or crop away the later opinions and keep the hero. The reversal is more interesting than either. An action can outgrow its author. A person can revise the meaning of her own courage. History, inconveniently, offers no right of final edit.
A quieter fight over pronouns becomes the sharpest miniature of the book’s method. Kliegman initially writes Richards’s pre-transition life using her current name and pronouns, following contemporary journalistic practice. Richards objects. She understands those years as a struggle between Dick and Renée and believes that retroactively calling the boy, husband and father “she” falsifies that struggle. Kliegman resists, then changes course. No one leaves the disagreement theoretically spotless. A rule meant to respect trans people collides with one trans person’s account of herself, and the biographer has to decide whether consistency or attention matters more.
“The Rule and the Person” – Pages, erasures, hands, and unusually generous white space turn an editorial disagreement into a quieter ethical problem – the moment a rule designed to show respect discovers that attention to one particular life may require the rule itself to bend.
Past 1977, Kliegman lets Richards escape both kinds of court. She returns to ophthalmology; coaches Martina Navratilova; remains funny, difficult and fiercely competitive; depends on others for household tasks despite being capable of intricate eye surgery; and, in old age, still diagnoses acquaintances because retirement has not persuaded her that she is anything other than “Doc.” These details do not “humanize” Richards, a word that often means a famous person has been issued a pet and a breakfast order. They change the hierarchy of the biography. Tennis no longer gets first claim on the life.
After the playing career ends, the scale changes again. Richards rebuilds her ophthalmology practice in Manhattan, encounters professional prejudice, and assumes leadership in eye-muscle surgery. Arleen Larzelere becomes assistant, housemate, caretaker, companion and the durable center of her domestic life. The later chapters return to Nick, the child Richards had desperately wanted. His adulthood is marked by addiction, instability and estrangement; he dies by suicide at forty-seven. Kliegman does not conscript that death into a theory of Richards’s transition or parenting. Nick is allowed to remain Nick, not evidence.
Details around Nick’s death are more piercing than the public history because they cannot be converted so easily into precedent. Richards visits the monastery where some of his ashes are kept; anniversaries pull her back; the celebrated surgeon and athlete becomes a parent for whom accomplishment offers no immunity from sorrow. By then the U.S. Open case still matters, enormously, but it has lost the right to organize the whole life. Heroism feels less false than simply too small.
In sentence after sentence, Kliegman prefers clear carriage to flourish. Interviews, archives, medical history and political context move with little wasted motion. The best voltage often comes from Richards herself, whose speech can be blunt, funny, imperious and unexpectedly self-aware. Kliegman usually knows when to leave one of her remarks alone. The prose falters when qualification gathers in parentheses or when an interpretation arrives a beat after the evidence has already done the work. The writing is lucid enough that these small acts of over-explanation become unusually visible.
Metaphor is rationed, and wisely. Kliegman resists the obvious temptation to turn an eye surgeon’s life into an extended performance about seeing and being seen. Instead the book trusts objects and procedures: a serve that gives its owner away, a disputed test, a hospital boardroom, a doubles draw, a golf league, a memorial terrace. That restraint suits a subject repeatedly turned into an emblem by other people. The sentences themselves are rarely the main event. At their best, they set out the inconvenient particulars and let admiration move around them. At their weaker moments, they tell us where to put it.
“Doc” – Cool blue light belongs here not to spectacle but to competence, restoring the ordinary authority of practiced work to a life so often remembered through the more dramatic vocabulary of courts, categories, and precedent.
Inside the chronology, Kliegman makes one shrewd wager: tell us the present-day contradiction first. Ordinary biographical suspense disappears. We know the lawsuit is coming; we know Richards will later dispute part of what others believe it means. The question is no longer what happens but how one person comes to contain both positions without either erasing the other. Just as importantly, the biography keeps going after 1977. Touring, coaching, debt, medicine, partnership, fatherhood, grief and old age continue to press against the neatness of the breakthrough story. The victory gets a chapter in the life. It does not get the deed.
The trouble begins when the book briefly forgets that lesson. Kliegman insists, persuasively, that Richards should not be reduced to a generalized debate over trans athletes, yet passages on governing bodies, research, legislation and contemporary politics sometimes turn her back into the vehicle for explaining precisely that debate. Most of this context belongs: without it, Richards’s later position would shrink into personal eccentricity instead of an intervention in a live institutional fight. The problem is acreage. Biographical years can pass in pages while policy arguments open like accordion files. Kliegman is better when Richards makes a framework wobble than when the framework settles over Richards and tells us what to see.
Richards’s argument with sporting institutions has not stayed safely in 1977. Questions about who belongs in women’s competition, which bodily facts institutions consider decisive, and who gets to certify them remain live enough that the history keeps brushing against the present. Michael Waters’s “The Other Olympians” is a useful neighboring account of gender policing in sport. Josh Levin’s “The Queen” offers a more oblique kinship: both books examine the distance between a person and the political symbol made from one. Richards cannot explain the present. The present keeps trying to enlist her.
Once Kliegman enters the interpretive quarrel, the biography becomes more interesting and less comfortable. Their first person is not memoiristic garnish. They admit intimidation, disagreement, editorial revision, bad arguments, affection and continued political refusal. Intimacy does not produce conversion, and disagreement does not give Kliegman an automatic claim to moral superiority over the person being described. Richards worries about Kliegman as the political climate grows harsher; Kliegman is moved by that care and frustrated by the limits Richards places on her solidarity. Neither feeling cancels the other. The book is at its most adult here, when knowing someone better makes judgment harder without making judgment disappear.
Public history prefers cleaner endings. The pioneer recognizes the future she enabled; the biographer returns her to the proper shelf; gratitude travels neatly forward. “Finding Renée Richards” denies itself that comfort. Richards does not become the trans elder Kliegman might have wished to inherit, and Kliegman does not pretend otherwise. Nor do Richards’s later politics erase the courage required to stand against institutions that tried to define her body for her. Both facts remain on the page, irritating each other. Good.
On a 100-point scale, I land at 84/100, which maps to 4/5 stars. The contextual sprawl and occasional habit of explaining what the book has already shown keep it from the highest tier; so does prose that is more lucid than singular. But Kliegman chooses the harder version of the biography. They could have recovered a neglected pioneer and polished the contradiction away. Instead they restore a woman capable of arguing with her own monument.
Underneath the title is a verb that keeps changing its meaning: find. At first it sounds archival, as though Richards were simply a missing figure to be returned to the record. Then it becomes investigative: find out why she thinks as she does. By the late chapters, the verb has lost its possessive confidence. Kliegman knows more and owns less. Richards is still on the golf course, still “Doc,” still visiting her son, still proud, still regretful, still unwilling to become whatever symbol the present requires.
“Anniversary at the Monastery” – Nearly emptied of both figure and color, the final watercolor lets absence occupy the space that public history cannot, leaving achievement, argument, and even biography briefly powerless before the private persistence of return.
Left-handed, unmistakable, the serve returns differently by the end. At La Jolla it is the motion that betrays Richards’s attempted anonymity, proof that the body remembers what a new name cannot conceal. After Kliegman has followed that body through medicine, marriage, courtrooms, tennis, grief and old age, the serve looks less like a clue to be solved than a limit on everybody else’s claims. Spectators may recognize it. Institutions may test the player attached to it. Historians may cite what followed. But the motion still begins with one person tossing the ball.
Compositional Thumbnail + Negative-Space Sheet
Serve Anatomy + Racket-Mechanics Study
Cover-Derived Pigment + Proportional Wash Ledger
Border Architecture Study – Contain / Interrupt / Leak / Release
Hand-Lettering System Specimen
Alternative Full Dust-Jacket Study with Flaps
First Underdrawing Pencil Drawing
[image error]
First Underdrawing Pencil Drawing with First Wash of Watercolor
Julie Kliegman – Author Portrait: Julie Kliegman stands among manuscript margins and court lines that almost align, a visual reminder that biography can arrange the evidence of another person’s life without ever acquiring final ownership of what that life means.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
Julie Kliegman’s “Finding Renée Richards” is most compelling when it refuses to turn tennis’s trans pioneer into a settled symbol, asking instead who gets to own the meaning of a life that outgrew its precedent.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 13th, 2026
“The Serve That Gave Her Away” – A motion learned too deeply to disguise becomes the first breach between the life Renée Richards means to keep for herself and the meanings strangers, institutions, and history will begin attaching to it.
Don Rubell warned Renée Richards that anonymity had one formidable enemy: her serve. She could change her name, cross the country, begin again as an ophthalmologist in California, and enter a small tennis tournament as “Renée Clark,” but the left-handed motion would give her away to anyone who had watched Richard Raskind play. Serves, Rubell told her, were as individual as fingerprints. Julie Kliegman opens “Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer” with that bodily tell, and it proves more useful than any grand metaphor. Richards keeps trying to decide what in her life is hers to name. Reporters, doctors, tennis officials, judges and, eventually, historians keep answering too.
Even “trans pioneer” turns slippery once Richards starts talking. A television reporter outs her in 1976; tennis authorities demand chromosomal testing before admitting her to the women’s draw of the U.S. Open; she challenges them and wins. The case makes her a landmark figure in trans sports history. Nearly fifty years later, Richards tells Kliegman that trans women who have undergone male puberty generally should not compete against cisgender women. She even questions whether she should have brought the case that made her famous. Kliegman, a trans and nonbinary sports journalist, disagrees. The easy book would circle the irony in red and stop there. Kliegman keeps asking what happens after the pioneer begins arguing with the uses made of her.
Much of the book’s tension comes from a custody dispute over meaning. Richards has one claim because she lived the history. Trans people who saw her victory enlarge what seemed possible have another. Tennis institutions once claimed authority over her body; Kliegman now claims the biographer’s right to interpret the record, even when the subject objects. No claimant quite wins. Movements prefer pioneers preserved at the moment of maximum usefulness, like insects in amber, only with better press clips. Richards has had the poor manners to remain alive, opinionated and revisable.
“The Public Question” – Cold broadcast light enters a private room before any person does, turning publicity into something architectural: a new illumination under which Richards can still occupy her own life, but can no longer control who is looking.
Early chapters return from the controversy to Richard Raskind’s Queens childhood: two physician parents, considerable family volatility, childhood abuse, girls’ clothing, unusual athletic talent, Horace Mann, Yale tennis, medical school, psychoanalysis. Kliegman also reconstructs the search for language to describe a desire mid-century psychiatry largely treated as pathology. Richards’s later certainty can make transition look inevitable in retrospect. The chronology corrects that illusion. Raskind repeatedly approaches and retreats from transition, including a trip to Morocco that reaches the threshold of surgery before fear sends him home.
The life Raskind then tries to build is not treated as a waiting room. He marries Barbara Mole, fathers Nick, works punishing hours as an eye surgeon, undergoes breast-reduction surgery after years of hormones, and keeps playing high-level amateur tennis. Kliegman is particularly alert to the danger of turning achievement into diagnosis. Medicine and sport are not merely camouflage for gender conflict; they are real vocations, pleasures and identities. When the marriage fails and Renée becomes the life Richards chooses to sustain, transition solves something enormous. It does not politely dismiss everything that came before.
Richards’s return to competitive tennis gives the book its quickest pulse. In California, she means to keep the game recreational, but competitiveness is not a faucet she knows how to leave at half pressure. Bobby Riggs recognizes her and cheerfully folds her into a gambling hustle; friends push her toward more serious play; “Renée Clark” starts attracting attention. Then comes La Jolla, where winning a modest tournament leads reporter Richard Carlson to uncover and broadcast her former identity despite her pleas for privacy. Kliegman is exact about the cruelty and inaccuracy of the coverage. Richards wanted to play tennis. She became a public dispute with a backhand.
Institutions quickly turn that dispute into procedure. Tennis authorities seek to decide whether Richards is sufficiently female for women’s competition by requiring sex verification. Kliegman sets the episode beside the longer history of sporting bodies inspecting, measuring and testing women whose bodies trouble official expectations. In 1977 a judge rules that Richards must be allowed to compete at the U.S. Open without submitting to the disputed chromosomal test. She loses to Virginia Wade in the first round but reaches the doubles final with Bettyann Stuart. The panic had imagined domination. Richards instead becomes a very good professional player, eventually ranked around the top twenty, neither fraud nor apocalypse.
“Sufficiently Female” – The nearly colorless institutional geometry gives procedure the unnerving calm of certainty, while its incomplete thresholds leave open the question the rules themselves cannot settle: what kind of knowledge entitles an institution to define a person.
Perhaps the strangest turn comes decades later, when Richards tells Kliegman that bringing the lawsuit may have been a mistake. The woman whose victory became evidence that exclusion could be challenged no longer accepts the broad claim many readers attach to it. Kliegman refuses the two easiest edits: discard Richards as a hypocrite, or crop away the later opinions and keep the hero. The reversal is more interesting than either. An action can outgrow its author. A person can revise the meaning of her own courage. History, inconveniently, offers no right of final edit.
A quieter fight over pronouns becomes the sharpest miniature of the book’s method. Kliegman initially writes Richards’s pre-transition life using her current name and pronouns, following contemporary journalistic practice. Richards objects. She understands those years as a struggle between Dick and Renée and believes that retroactively calling the boy, husband and father “she” falsifies that struggle. Kliegman resists, then changes course. No one leaves the disagreement theoretically spotless. A rule meant to respect trans people collides with one trans person’s account of herself, and the biographer has to decide whether consistency or attention matters more.
“The Rule and the Person” – Pages, erasures, hands, and unusually generous white space turn an editorial disagreement into a quieter ethical problem – the moment a rule designed to show respect discovers that attention to one particular life may require the rule itself to bend.
Past 1977, Kliegman lets Richards escape both kinds of court. She returns to ophthalmology; coaches Martina Navratilova; remains funny, difficult and fiercely competitive; depends on others for household tasks despite being capable of intricate eye surgery; and, in old age, still diagnoses acquaintances because retirement has not persuaded her that she is anything other than “Doc.” These details do not “humanize” Richards, a word that often means a famous person has been issued a pet and a breakfast order. They change the hierarchy of the biography. Tennis no longer gets first claim on the life.
After the playing career ends, the scale changes again. Richards rebuilds her ophthalmology practice in Manhattan, encounters professional prejudice, and assumes leadership in eye-muscle surgery. Arleen Larzelere becomes assistant, housemate, caretaker, companion and the durable center of her domestic life. The later chapters return to Nick, the child Richards had desperately wanted. His adulthood is marked by addiction, instability and estrangement; he dies by suicide at forty-seven. Kliegman does not conscript that death into a theory of Richards’s transition or parenting. Nick is allowed to remain Nick, not evidence.
Details around Nick’s death are more piercing than the public history because they cannot be converted so easily into precedent. Richards visits the monastery where some of his ashes are kept; anniversaries pull her back; the celebrated surgeon and athlete becomes a parent for whom accomplishment offers no immunity from sorrow. By then the U.S. Open case still matters, enormously, but it has lost the right to organize the whole life. Heroism feels less false than simply too small.
In sentence after sentence, Kliegman prefers clear carriage to flourish. Interviews, archives, medical history and political context move with little wasted motion. The best voltage often comes from Richards herself, whose speech can be blunt, funny, imperious and unexpectedly self-aware. Kliegman usually knows when to leave one of her remarks alone. The prose falters when qualification gathers in parentheses or when an interpretation arrives a beat after the evidence has already done the work. The writing is lucid enough that these small acts of over-explanation become unusually visible.
Metaphor is rationed, and wisely. Kliegman resists the obvious temptation to turn an eye surgeon’s life into an extended performance about seeing and being seen. Instead the book trusts objects and procedures: a serve that gives its owner away, a disputed test, a hospital boardroom, a doubles draw, a golf league, a memorial terrace. That restraint suits a subject repeatedly turned into an emblem by other people. The sentences themselves are rarely the main event. At their best, they set out the inconvenient particulars and let admiration move around them. At their weaker moments, they tell us where to put it.
“Doc” – Cool blue light belongs here not to spectacle but to competence, restoring the ordinary authority of practiced work to a life so often remembered through the more dramatic vocabulary of courts, categories, and precedent.
Inside the chronology, Kliegman makes one shrewd wager: tell us the present-day contradiction first. Ordinary biographical suspense disappears. We know the lawsuit is coming; we know Richards will later dispute part of what others believe it means. The question is no longer what happens but how one person comes to contain both positions without either erasing the other. Just as importantly, the biography keeps going after 1977. Touring, coaching, debt, medicine, partnership, fatherhood, grief and old age continue to press against the neatness of the breakthrough story. The victory gets a chapter in the life. It does not get the deed.
The trouble begins when the book briefly forgets that lesson. Kliegman insists, persuasively, that Richards should not be reduced to a generalized debate over trans athletes, yet passages on governing bodies, research, legislation and contemporary politics sometimes turn her back into the vehicle for explaining precisely that debate. Most of this context belongs: without it, Richards’s later position would shrink into personal eccentricity instead of an intervention in a live institutional fight. The problem is acreage. Biographical years can pass in pages while policy arguments open like accordion files. Kliegman is better when Richards makes a framework wobble than when the framework settles over Richards and tells us what to see.
Richards’s argument with sporting institutions has not stayed safely in 1977. Questions about who belongs in women’s competition, which bodily facts institutions consider decisive, and who gets to certify them remain live enough that the history keeps brushing against the present. Michael Waters’s “The Other Olympians” is a useful neighboring account of gender policing in sport. Josh Levin’s “The Queen” offers a more oblique kinship: both books examine the distance between a person and the political symbol made from one. Richards cannot explain the present. The present keeps trying to enlist her.
Once Kliegman enters the interpretive quarrel, the biography becomes more interesting and less comfortable. Their first person is not memoiristic garnish. They admit intimidation, disagreement, editorial revision, bad arguments, affection and continued political refusal. Intimacy does not produce conversion, and disagreement does not give Kliegman an automatic claim to moral superiority over the person being described. Richards worries about Kliegman as the political climate grows harsher; Kliegman is moved by that care and frustrated by the limits Richards places on her solidarity. Neither feeling cancels the other. The book is at its most adult here, when knowing someone better makes judgment harder without making judgment disappear.
Public history prefers cleaner endings. The pioneer recognizes the future she enabled; the biographer returns her to the proper shelf; gratitude travels neatly forward. “Finding Renée Richards” denies itself that comfort. Richards does not become the trans elder Kliegman might have wished to inherit, and Kliegman does not pretend otherwise. Nor do Richards’s later politics erase the courage required to stand against institutions that tried to define her body for her. Both facts remain on the page, irritating each other. Good.
On a 100-point scale, I land at 84/100, which maps to 4/5 stars. The contextual sprawl and occasional habit of explaining what the book has already shown keep it from the highest tier; so does prose that is more lucid than singular. But Kliegman chooses the harder version of the biography. They could have recovered a neglected pioneer and polished the contradiction away. Instead they restore a woman capable of arguing with her own monument.
Underneath the title is a verb that keeps changing its meaning: find. At first it sounds archival, as though Richards were simply a missing figure to be returned to the record. Then it becomes investigative: find out why she thinks as she does. By the late chapters, the verb has lost its possessive confidence. Kliegman knows more and owns less. Richards is still on the golf course, still “Doc,” still visiting her son, still proud, still regretful, still unwilling to become whatever symbol the present requires.
“Anniversary at the Monastery” – Nearly emptied of both figure and color, the final watercolor lets absence occupy the space that public history cannot, leaving achievement, argument, and even biography briefly powerless before the private persistence of return.
Left-handed, unmistakable, the serve returns differently by the end. At La Jolla it is the motion that betrays Richards’s attempted anonymity, proof that the body remembers what a new name cannot conceal. After Kliegman has followed that body through medicine, marriage, courtrooms, tennis, grief and old age, the serve looks less like a clue to be solved than a limit on everybody else’s claims. Spectators may recognize it. Institutions may test the player attached to it. Historians may cite what followed. But the motion still begins with one person tossing the ball.
Compositional Thumbnail + Negative-Space Sheet
Serve Anatomy + Racket-Mechanics Study
Cover-Derived Pigment + Proportional Wash Ledger
Border Architecture Study – Contain / Interrupt / Leak / Release
Hand-Lettering System Specimen
Alternative Full Dust-Jacket Study with Flaps
First Underdrawing Pencil Drawing
[image error]
First Underdrawing Pencil Drawing with First Wash of Watercolor
Julie Kliegman – Author Portrait: Julie Kliegman stands among manuscript margins and court lines that almost align, a visual reminder that biography can arrange the evidence of another person’s life without ever acquiring final ownership of what that life means.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This book is such a bummer for me. I DNF'd at 25%. I played tennis through high school and a bit into college, and I always try to be an ally and support the LGBTQ+ community when I can. That said, I would be open to reading Renee Richards's memoir that she wrote in 2007, but this isn't the book for me. Renee Richards is the first trans woman to have won a court case allowing trans women to play in competitive sports, tennis specifically. She has since changed her views and while she is still openly trans, she does not believe that trans women or trans men should play men and women's sports. While my views don't necessarily reflect that, I would be over-the-moon to read a trans person's take on the opposite view from what I have. My issue isn't the views here but rather how they were addressed in this book. Julie Kliegman who identifies as both non-binary and trans should be the perfect voice to address this conversation and tell Renee's story. However, I didn't enjoy the approach they took. It read more as criticizing Renee for having harmful views which can be fair, but then maybe this isn't the person you write about. Also, they made their views very clear, which I highly agreed with, but the story isn't really meant to be about them. It's meant to be about Renee. Last, early on, Renee requested that when speaking about the past, that Julie use their dead name and address that person as he/him. Julie mentioned having an issue with this and struggling with it. While not the norm, everyone has their own truths and their own preferences, so I don't feel like Renee's should have been judged. All said, this had the premise to be an excellent and informative read, but I find that focusing on Renee's childhood trauma as a basis for her transition and the differences between Julie's and Renee's views could potentially come off as more harmful than helpful.
I appreciate NetGalley and HarperOne for this read, and if anyone else has finished this book and found that my review is way off base, please let me know. I would be willing to go past 25% if it's found that this is just a weak intro. I'm also open to suggestions for similar books that are memoirs from the trans athlete regarding their transition and experience in professional sports.
I appreciate NetGalley and HarperOne for this read, and if anyone else has finished this book and found that my review is way off base, please let me know. I would be willing to go past 25% if it's found that this is just a weak intro. I'm also open to suggestions for similar books that are memoirs from the trans athlete regarding their transition and experience in professional sports.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
A candid definitive biography of a transgender woman who broke barriers in pursuit of her passion for tennis.
The book actually starts with an interesting discussion about whether transgenders should participate in sports as women. Over the years Richard’s has changed her position on this. After her “bottom down surgery” (as it’s called in the book), as later described, she went through a “re-adolescent period” as described by her doctor which is why she felt she should be able to compete as a woman. Now she feels that once transgenders have reached puberty before making the change, they shouldn’t. A lot of convincing arguments were made around that.
Richards calls his birth family as “a hot-bed of craziness” and while there is no corollary for his mother and sister dressing him like a girl, Richards was drawn to dressing like a girl from a early age. She describes her confusion as Richard vs Renee. She served in the navy as well as having a distinguished career there and as an ophthalmologist. She also fathered a son, Nicky.
Richards suing to play in the 1977 US Open - which did happen - also subjected to homophobia players who’d wear T-shirts saying I AM A REAL WOMAN. The discussion for how to determine if the play is they are sex on their birth certificate is crazy. And the craziness of all the legislation around this issue I think is mired in people’s fears about their own sexuality
As of this writing Richards is 91!
I gave this book five stars for the author’s efforts in researching her topic to present a factual and fair biography, for honoring Richards’s requests to write in a certain way - which might not fit current writing about transgenders, and for presenting an important issue from the perspective of one who’s lived it.
My thanks to NetGalley and Harper One for allowing me access to this ARC.
The book actually starts with an interesting discussion about whether transgenders should participate in sports as women. Over the years Richard’s has changed her position on this. After her “bottom down surgery” (as it’s called in the book), as later described, she went through a “re-adolescent period” as described by her doctor which is why she felt she should be able to compete as a woman. Now she feels that once transgenders have reached puberty before making the change, they shouldn’t. A lot of convincing arguments were made around that.
Richards calls his birth family as “a hot-bed of craziness” and while there is no corollary for his mother and sister dressing him like a girl, Richards was drawn to dressing like a girl from a early age. She describes her confusion as Richard vs Renee. She served in the navy as well as having a distinguished career there and as an ophthalmologist. She also fathered a son, Nicky.
Richards suing to play in the 1977 US Open - which did happen - also subjected to homophobia players who’d wear T-shirts saying I AM A REAL WOMAN. The discussion for how to determine if the play is they are sex on their birth certificate is crazy. And the craziness of all the legislation around this issue I think is mired in people’s fears about their own sexuality
As of this writing Richards is 91!
I gave this book five stars for the author’s efforts in researching her topic to present a factual and fair biography, for honoring Richards’s requests to write in a certain way - which might not fit current writing about transgenders, and for presenting an important issue from the perspective of one who’s lived it.
My thanks to NetGalley and Harper One for allowing me access to this ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This was such a compelling read! I had heard of Renée Richards before and how she was a trans woman in the 1970s who sued for, and won, the right to compete in the women's division of the tennis US Open. However, I didn't know much of her story before or after that point. So this was an eye-opening read to see how in the present she doesn't think that other trans women should have the same right to compete in sports that she won back in the day.
I really appreciated the way that this book was written with the author Julie Kliegman providing their thoughts on Renée's statements and pushing back on different points. The book isn't unquestioningly providing Renée's point of view. You get to see moments and transcripts that depict Julie and Renée's generational differences or disagreements, which was very interesting.
I loved getting to learn about Renée's life before her transition, her career as a doctor, and her time as Martina Navratilova's coach. But of course it's also frustrating and upsetting to read Martina's present attitude and opinions when it comes to trans athletes.
I'd definitely recommend this book to people who are interested in the history of trans rights and a nuanced biography of a complicated figure. I flew through the book in just two days because I found it to be such a fascinating read.
Thank you to the publisher for providing an advance copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
I really appreciated the way that this book was written with the author Julie Kliegman providing their thoughts on Renée's statements and pushing back on different points. The book isn't unquestioningly providing Renée's point of view. You get to see moments and transcripts that depict Julie and Renée's generational differences or disagreements, which was very interesting.
I loved getting to learn about Renée's life before her transition, her career as a doctor, and her time as Martina Navratilova's coach. But of course it's also frustrating and upsetting to read Martina's present attitude and opinions when it comes to trans athletes.
I'd definitely recommend this book to people who are interested in the history of trans rights and a nuanced biography of a complicated figure. I flew through the book in just two days because I found it to be such a fascinating read.
Thank you to the publisher for providing an advance copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you, HarperOne, for providing the copy of Finding Renée Richards by Julie Kliegman. This was an interesting, well-researched book. I had heard about Richards, but didn’t know much about her. Now I do! I’m a casual follower of tennis, and I even recognized many names in this book. I wasn’t a fan of the writing style and how the author often inserted themself into the narrative. Did we find Renée Richards? I’m not sure. If you want to read about the early days of trans participation in sports, this is the book for you. 3 stars
July 11, 2026
This book is fascinating, especially given the current political climate. A trans athlete was allowed to compete in women’s sports 50 years ago! And maybe more astounding is how her views have changed now that’s she’s 90. Really interesting story. The author inserts herself quite a bit, which adds some context to the research and interview process but also feels self-serving at times. Great read for the times, though.
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