Renée Richards is a rather typical woman who was born in upscale New York City in 1934 from a surgeon father and psychiatric mother, according to simonandschuster.com. She grew up with her very affluent Jewish family and took a liking to tennis. She would go on to attend Yale and became the captain of the tennis team in 1954. Afterward, she married and subsequently had a son. She picked tennis back up and excelled in the above 35-and-over national championship in 1972. She would later go on to compete in multiple U.S. Opens and had moderate success in doubles. Richards is now a retired eye surgeon and has lived a life that many women would most likely aspire to live. But her name is forever plagued by an asterisk. Richards was born as a male.
Richards underwent sex reassignment surgery and successfully transitioned into a female in 1975. She did not receive national attention until she attempted to participate in the Women’s U.S. Open in 1976, the year immediately following her transition. The Women’s U.S. Open banned Richards from competing in the tournament unless she submitted to chromosomal testing. Richards sued the U.S. Tennis Association and won the suit, allowing her to participate in U.S. Open tournaments without testing from then on. She became an icon for transsexual athletes and paved the way for transgender athletes when she took the courts in 1977, despite criticism from announcers, spectators and opposing players. “”I made the fateful decision to go and fight the legal battle to be able to play as a woman and stay in the public eye and become this symbol,” Richards said in an article published on the site “Equality Forum.”
Transgenders and transsexuals are often the forgotten sexuality in the recent upswing of LGBT rights and movements. Gay and lesbian athletes who have come out of the closet have gained national acclaim and are often praised by the media for their brave and courageous outspokenness. But transsexual athletes have not received such praise when coming out and standing up for themselves. Transsexual athletes are often subject to gender testing and forced surgeries in order to compete in sporting events. They typically face claims of having unfair advantages and face criticism on all fronts.
Richards was the first notable transsexual athlete, but had she not won her suit against the U.S. Tennis Association, she would have faded away and been forgotten. The defense of the USTA was an unprecedented women-born-women policy. The aptly named policy stated that only women who were biologically born as women would be allowed to enter the Women’s U.S. Open. Richards’ challenge was that she defined herself as a woman regardless of her biology and chromosomes.
This is the conflict that arises between transsexual athletes and sports organizations. The USTA may not have thought of Richards as a woman, but she certainly saw herself as a woman. The USTA ultimately lost the suit and had to allow transsexual athletes to compete. Other sports organizations did not institute similar changes in policy, preferring to take changes when the time comes.
That time has been going on for decades for the International Olympic Committee as they have faced transsexual athletes looking to compete in the prestigious games. The IOC had successfully denied transsexual athletes from competing until tensions came to a boiling point in 2004. They created the Stockholm Consensus to give ruling standing to follow. The Stockholm Consensus demanded that transsexual athletes must have sex reassignment surgery, legal recognition of their gender and at least two years of hormonal testing. This became a breakthrough for transsexual athletes as the Football Association of England accommodated similar policies. Soon the LPGA was welcoming Lana Lawless, a 57-year-old male-to-woman transsexual, into competitions after a lawsuit. Lawless first ventured into fighting the LPGA when she won the Long Driving Competition in her local areas as an amateur, defeating skilled golfers half her age.
This begs the question of whether or not transsexual athletes have an advantage in sports against women-born-women and men-born-men. Many doctors state that transsexuals have the same muscle mass growth rate and hormones as those who haven’t underwent sex reassignment surgery. But other experts in the medical field claim that the skeletal structure never changes and that, despite the change in growth, the muscle mass gathered while being a man carries over after the surgery. According to Dr. John Gerber of fightmedicine.net, “Genetic males tend to have higher amounts of lean muscle mass, less fat, and more dense bones than their genetic female counterparts.”
It is also worth noting that there are rare woman-to man athletes. This is most likely caused by the crackdown in performance enhancing drugs, and man-to-woman transsexuals must be given testosterone in order to compete, which contradicts the crackdown in the same drugs for their competitors. The debate of fairness of transsexual athletes has reached a point with the emergence of Fallon Fox.
Fox is a man-to-woman transsexual who has recently been fighting in Mixed Martial Arts. MMA involves hand-to-hand combat and is already criticized publicly for its violence as competitors can beat each other senseless until one submits. Fox has already fought with females and started 5-0 in her bouts with all five wins coming in the first round. However, the criticism has come from outside sources such as the media and presidents of the MMA. Fox’s opponents have voluntarily fought her, but some fighters have already expressed concern that Fox does not belong.
UFC star Miesha Tate stated, “I wouldn’t feel comfortable getting in with someone who is a woman but developed as a man. I wouldn’t feel safe.”
Opposition of Fox boils their argument to that point: the safety of fighters. If a fighter doesn’t feel safe, should the reason behind this fear be removed to ensure the safety of other players? That’s the question that MMA must answer. But for the time being, Fox is fighting women and criticism to make her own stake in the sports world.
With too little knowledge about the medical difference between transsexual athletes and non-transsexual athletes and too little precedence for future policy, transsexual athletes are finding their genders blurred by sports. Whether this blur in gender identification is benign and equal or discriminatory has yet to be seen but the stage is set.
Marcus Mitchell can be reached at mitchell.marcus31@yahoo.com.