Post contributed by Julie Kliegman, a writer and editor in Queens, New York. Kliegman received a Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grant in 2024. Their new book Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer was published earlier this month by Harper Collins.
As a sports journalist, I knew titling my new book Finding Renée Richards would put me in a bit of a bind. Richards, the transgender woman who successfully sued for her right to play professional tennis alongside other women at the 1977 U.S. Open, is not an easily findable person in every sense. I located her just fine and visited her many times over the course of writing the biography, which is due out August 18 from HarperCollins. But Richards, now 92, and I knew she would be figuratively quite difficult to pin down in book form. After all, she herself had spent nearly half of her life searching for what she considered her true identity.
When I arrived in Durham in March 2024, having received the Harry H. Harkins, Jr. T’73 travel grant, I wasn’t sure what I’d discover. I had an idea from the finding aid that the Eleanor Foa Dienstag papers were promising, but I had no idea just how key they’d prove to be in my quest to understand and relay to readers botRichards’s psyche and life story.
Dienstag, a feminist writer and activist, had once been contracted with Richards to help write the tennis player’s autobiography. The book never came to fruition, but Dienstag eventually gave her research, correspondence, interview transcripts, and manuscript draft to the Rubenstein Library, along with her other papers. I suddenly had a window into Richards’s thinking from decades before I was born through hundreds of pages of interview transcripts, as well as insight into what her friends and physicians — many of whom have since passed — made of her story at that time.
Among other treasures and important historical records, I found, in full, the statement Richards gave to the (often less than compassionate) press after she was outed as trans by none other than Tucker Carlson’s father. “Anatomically, functionally, socially, emotionally, and legally, I am female,” she told the assembled crowd. “I do not feel that I have an unfair advantage over other women in athletic competition.”
So much has changed since that brave, confident declaration, both for Richards personally and for society at large. But thanks in large part to Dienstag and the Rubenstein Library, I have put forth my best, richest effort toward Finding Renée Richards.