LETTER: A tennis lesson

Andy Windes Las Vegas

2 months ago

Renee Richards poses for a portrait at her home in Carmel, New York March 25, 2015. More than t ... — Renee Richards poses for a portrait at her home in Carmel, New York March 25, 2015. More than three decades after putting down her tennis racquet, Renee Richards, 80, told Reuters she is still astonished she possessed the moxie to join the women’s professional tennis tour after living the first 34 years of her life as a man. For all the frenzy around Olympian Bruce Jenner’s reported decision to transition to a woman, the transgender pioneer Richards, born Richard Raskind, believes nothing could be tougher than what she endured in the 1970s. Picture taken March 25, 2015. To match Feature USA-TRANSGENDER/RICHARDS REUTERS/Mike Segar

While reading recent articles about the UNLV and UNR women’s volleyball teams confronting the issue of playing against transgender athletes, I was reminded of an experience 44 years ago that demonstrates the issue is anything but new.

In September of 1980, I was a senior at Chaparral High School and elected to skip class for several days so I could attend the Buick-Riviera Women’s Tennis Classic. One of the first-round matches featured Dr. Renee Richards, who had been born male but had surgically transitioned to female. The courts ruled she could not be excluded from women’s tennis, and here she was at the Riviera. She was 6-foot-1, all sinew and muscle, and her first-round match was against 15-year-old Andrea Jaeger, who was about five-foot nuthin, weighed around 98 pounds and sported long pigtails. Not fair!

Jaeger demolished Richards, 6-3, 6-0, and went on to win the tournament. So what did it mean? Heck if I know, except perhaps that the issue isn’t as cut and dried as people on the extreme ends of this controversy wish it were. It seems unlikely, but if we spent as much time talking to each other as we spend talking past each other, we might reach some sort of consensus.