‘Renée’ Tested the Norms of Professional Tennis

The pressure on Renée was insane. I mean, there were times when I couldn’t even breathe.

— Renée Richards

“We’ve never played a person like this and we weren’t sure if the rumors were true, and so my mind wasn’t really that much on tennis. I was thinking, ‘Is she really a man or, you know, what kind of person am I playing?'” Tennis player Robin is speaking to an off-screen reporter during a 1976 amateur women’s tournament in La Jolla, California. At the time, Harris and other players were indeed dealing with rumors: Renée Richards was new to the women’s tournament circuit, but, people were whispering, she had played professional tennis before — as Dr. Richard Rankin.

It wasn’t long before the rumors turned into a full-blown sensation. News might have traveled a little more slowly back in 1976, before Twitter and Facebook, but news was yet easily transformed — distorted, inflated, exploited — then as now. And the story of Renée Richards was easily made alarming, as she embodied challenges to gender categories, categories that were at the time utterly binary. You were male or female, masculine or feminine, and there was no in-between. This rigidity made Richards’ life especially difficult, even as she helped to expose fundamental problems in social, political, and legal systems of identification.

Richards’ story is the focus of Renée, premiering on ESPN on 4 October. Eric Drath’s documentary begins a little obliquely, as he lays out his own search, the outsider’s effort to narrate a sensational story, wherein someone has changed “who they are.” Drath begins with a familiar gesture: “Whatever happened to Renée?” he asks, as he knocks on a door. Behind it, Renée and her sister Josephine von Hipple are waiting for him, and their conversation with him reveals that, in fact, the old challenges remain unresolved — for Drath, at least. When Josephine refers to Renée as her brother, he asks if this bothers Renée. “If it were my sister,” I’d say ‘she,'” he suggests. “I don’t really care,” says Renée, glancing away from Drath and at the camera that frames them all rather closely. “If it were somebody else, I’d be very upset. My sister, she can call me whatever she wants.”

This brief exchange indicates the lingering dilemma Renée lives each day. The film goes on to consider the various costs of her decision to undergo sexual reassignment surgery in 1975, and then to wage a public fight to be allowed to play tennis as a woman. The tennis world’s struggles over Renée Richards are, to an extent, well known. The United States Tennis Association sought at first to bar her from playing professionally — specifically at the U.S. Open — by instituting a new rule whereby all players’ chromosomes had to be tested in the same way the Olympics tested athletes.

When Richards fought the new rule ion court, she found support — gradually — from other women on the circuit, including Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, as well as Arthur Ashe. The film includes a snippet of an interview with Ashe, who says, “My only comment is that, if she cannot play the Women’s U.S. Open, and she obviously cannot now play as the Men’s U.S. Open because she is legally a woman, then where can she play?” Here Ashe raises a key question that the film doesn’t so much answer as it presents, again and again: the two categories of gender, in the U.S. and in the West more generally, limit descriptions of lived experiences, and frequently limit those experiences too, in that individuals come to see themselves in accordance with others’ views, assumptions, and needs.

Renée hints at this broader cultural and political framework as it follows Richards’ personal history, her efforts to repress her desire to wear her sister’s clothes in secret, her marriage to a woman, Barbara, and their decision to have a child, Nicholas. As Renée looks back now, her deepest regrets concern her son, who appears in the film as well, plainly angry. Nicholas submits that Richards’ decision was “selfish,” and the film includes comments by Richards that suggest he didn’t see effects at the time: he wore a short wig when he visited Nicky, Richards says, and “It didn’t seem to make much difference to him, I was still his daddy to him, still ‘him.'”

In another moment, Richards appears engaged in another sort of activity, washing her car. As she describes a mix of regret and resentment (her tone is mixed as she repeats the question she’s been asked more than once: “Do I feel guilty because I had a sex change?”), she adds that she’s felt suicidal. In the next scene, the scene makes very visible the effects Richards might have missed, as Nicholas appears in a brief scene where he throws knives as he speaks. “I think there’s something to be said for testosterone,” Nicholas says, “When you lose the ability to produce it, you become a wussy, I hate to say it.”

As Nicholas uses a familiar prop to act out a stark distinction between male and female, Renée suggests that Renée Richards’ thinking was also shaped by cultural expectations, even outdated expectations. “Renée’s image of herself was really of a ’50s woman, not a ’70s woman,” recalls Don Rubell. He describes a moment when the two of them were crossing a street, “and she grabbed my arm as if for support, and I thought this was one of the most bizarre things, because if anything this was a time in the world when the woman would carry me across the street, and not ask me to hold and support her. It was just so indicative of her perception of, if you will, the ideal woman.”

This sort of self-image remains an issue not only for TG persons, but also for the culture that continues to picture gender in oppositional terms. Certainly, current lines can be blurrier, but residual, even retro, imagery remains popular. Check most any Superbowl commercial, the “Man up!” campaign for Miller Lite, any Victoria’s Secret or Yoplait yogurt advertisement, the continuing efforts to feminize female athletes and explicit, very public worries over definitions of athletes like Kye Allums or Caster Semenaya. If the film only hints at this broader set of circumstances, the imagery is everywhere. Even in 2011, confusion over gender and fear of difference affect individual lives and shape communities.