Renée Richards, who won the legal right to play in the 1977 US Open as the first openly trans woman in professional tennis, now says her lawsuit was selfish and that trans women should not compete in women's sports. Her change of position is complicated, human, and worth understanding. It is not, however, a reason to exclude trans women from sport.

Who Renée Richards is, and what she did

In 1977, Richards was 43 years old, a well-regarded ophthalmologist and a serious amateur tennis player with a tricky left-handed serve. She sued the US Open for barring her from competing. A judge found that the tournament had violated New York State's Human Rights Law. She played, lost in the first round of singles, and reached the doubles final. She went on to play professionally until she retired in 1981 at 47. Now 92, she has a new biography written by the trans and nonbinary sportswriter Julie Kliegman: Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis's Trans Pioneer.

She describes herself as a steadfast supporter of trans rights in almost every area of life. She is scathing about the locker-room argument, "that's all just stupid," she says, pointing out that male masseurs were walking freely through the women's locker room at the French Open when she was there with Martina Navratilova. She is clear that being trans is "a right and should be respected." And she is clear that the panic about trans people overrunning women's sports is political theatre driven by people who simply do not like trans people existing.

But she also now says she should not have competed, that she was selfish, and that trans women who went through male puberty have a physical advantage that hormone therapy does not fully resolve.

What changed her mind

Richards is specific about the moment. In 1979, she played in the women's 35-and-over championship at Flushing Meadow and beat Nancy Richey, a Hall of Fame player and French Open champion, in the final. Richards was only ten years older than Richey. Until then, she had told herself that the age gap between her and the top players she competed against, players like Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, and Tracy Austin, all significantly younger, offset whatever physical advantage her history might have given her. Beating Richey by a margin she could not explain away made her reconsider.

That is a genuinely honest piece of self-reflection. I am not going to dismiss it. She observed something about her own experience, reconsidered it for years, and changed her view. That is not something everyone is willing to do, and I respect it.

What her experience is, and what it isn't

Here is where I want to be careful, because Renée Richards' account of her own body and her own performance is hers. It is not a study. It is not a data set. It is one person's retrospective reading of matches played nearly fifty years ago, in a body that was 43 when she turned professional, in a sport where she never ranked in the top twenty.

The science on trans women in sport is genuinely complicated and genuinely contested. Some research suggests that trans women retain measurable physical advantages in certain metrics after hormone therapy; other research suggests those advantages diminish significantly over time. What the science does not support is the sweeping claim that every trans woman, in every sport, at every level, has an unfair advantage that makes inclusion impossible. That claim runs well ahead of the evidence, and Richards herself does not make it crisply, she draws on personal experience and reasoning, which is legitimate, but which is also not the same as evidence about the population of trans women athletes.

Kliegman makes a point in the book that strikes me as important: Richards was accepted in part because she was seen as a "one-off." People like Martina Navratilova liked her personally. It is easier to accept someone from a marginalised group when you know them, when they are not an abstraction, when they are not imagined as a wave arriving to take something from you. That dynamic has not changed. The hostility directed at trans women athletes today is not primarily driven by careful analysis of biomechanics. It is driven by the same discomfort that made the Italian Open rescind Richards' invitation days before she was due to play.

The thing that troubles me most

Richards draws a firm line between her position on sports and a broader anti-trans stance. She is right that those are conceptually distinct. She is also right that the locker-room argument is nonsense, that trans congresspeople have no physical advantage over anyone, and that the political frenzy around trans athletes is wildly disproportionate to the actual number of trans women competing in sport at any level.

But Kliegman is also right that conceding the sports question does not win ground anywhere else. The people using sport as a wedge are not interested in a careful carve-out. They are interested in the wedge. Every concession becomes the next starting point. The argument is not really about fairness in the 400 metres. It is about whether trans women are women, and whether trans people deserve to exist in public life on the same terms as everyone else.

What I feel most strongly, reading all of this, is something like tenderness for the difficulty of Richards' position. She came out publicly in an era when doing so was genuinely dangerous. Her identity was outed against her will by a journalist. She fought for the right to be herself in the most public arena imaginable. And now, at 92, she is trying to reconcile her own integrity and her honest assessment of her body and her performance with her genuine commitment to trans rights. That is not a contradiction I want to mock or dismiss. It is a human being doing their best with a complicated legacy.

What I cannot do is let her personal reckoning become a policy argument. One person's honest doubt about their own athletic career is not grounds for barring trans women from sport. It is grounds for a more careful, more nuanced, more evidence-led conversation, which is exactly what Kliegman's biography invites.

The door Richards opened in 1977 was hard-won. The people who walked through it after her deserved to be there. Whatever she now thinks about whether she should have pushed it open, it is not hers alone to close.

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Dr Helen Webberley is a Gender Specialist, Medical Educator, writer, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP.