Julie Kliegman’s new book, Finding Renée Richards, is set to come out on August 18, and it is already available for pre-order. The book takes on a life that has never fit neatly inside one label: Renée Richards was a tennis pioneer, an eye surgeon and, at 91, a still-sharp presence who turns 92 next week.
That is part of why the book lands now. Richards remains one of the clearest real-life examples of a trans woman competing at the highest level of a major women’s sport, and that history is being read in a moment when participation in women’s sports is under intense debate again. Kliegman’s book puts Richards back at the center of that argument, not as a symbol alone but as a person whose public life has been argued over for decades.
The arc is unusual even by sports standards. Richards played in the men’s U.S. Championships four times from 1953 to 1960, then, after transitioning, returned to competition in women’s tennis tournaments around the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s. She climbed as high as No. 20 in the WTA rankings, a result that made her difficult to dismiss as an exception or a curiosity.
Kliegman’s book covers that full span, including Richards’ very successful ophthalmic surgery career, but the tennis chapter carries the sharpest edge. Richards won a court battle to break down the doors of the sport nearly 50 years ago, then later argued that she should not have been allowed to compete after all. That contradiction is the kind of detail that can’t be smoothed away. It is also the reason her story still resists easy slogans.
There is another layer that helps explain the book’s reach. After Richards stopped playing, she coached Martina Navratilova for a stretch of Navratilova’s dominant career. Over time, that relationship shifted from one of player and coach to something more revealing about the sport itself: Richards was first treated as a controversy, then more often as a person, and eventually as someone many on the WTA Tour came to know as a popular presence rather than a talking point.
That is what makes Finding Renée Richards more than a retrospective. It is a new reading of a woman whose life touched medicine, law and tennis, and whose legacy remains unsettled because the facts of her career contain both breakthrough and doubt. The book arrives on August 18 with the old argument still open, but with Richards herself still here to answer it.
