From The Advocate October 2011
Lost in Transition: Renée Richards
A new film provides a riveting look at Renée Richards, an older woman still struggling to cope with a life of contradictions and personal conflict.
By Diane Anderson-Minshall
http://www.advocate.com/Print_Issue/Advance/Lost_in_Transition__Renee_Richards/When ESPN's Emmy-nominated 30 for 30 documentary series begins its new season September 27, LGBT viewers may be conflicted over Renée, the sometimes-heartbreaking story of Renée Richards and her battle to compete in the 1977 U.S. Open as the first transsexual tennis player. Richards, an Ivy League–educated scholar and opthamologist (who prefers the term transsexual to transgender), is an unlikely trans hero, a woman who paved the way for trans athletes three decades ago but now insists that she shouldn't have been allowed to play. It's this Renée that is captured on-screen in the eponymous doc: slightly belligerent, proud, and often tragic, carrying the burden of having been a moving target, the first of her kind in the public eye.
