Renee Richards

I thought this book would give me some good tennis tips, such as how to improve my second serve. Only trouble is that Renee Richards, formerly Dick Raskind is a "leftie." Only kidding. I knew it wasn't a sports-coaching book though she did coach Martina Navratilova .

I found this book in my beloved father-in-law's library. My father-in-law was his classmate and tennis-teammate at Yale, and close lifelong friend. Dr. Richards has other deep and abiding ties to my family. The book is definitely "R" if not "X" rated. Reading parts of the book is tinged with the fascination of driving past a multi-car pileup. That being said, the only way the book could make its point was to be brutally straightforward.

Dr. Richards describes rather graphically her adventures with gender confusion, which were not aided by certain people in her family. Dick Raskind decided a fair amount of time that he would be best served by changing genders. He had gone through years of fruitless therapy, with doctors who basically tried to convince him to, in short form, forget about his problems. Despite those problems, he had risen to great accomplishments in both the medical and athletic fields as a male.

Forgetting about a deep-seated confusion, apparently, is easier said than done. Though the book ends in 1981, about six years after the gender-changing surgery, the book gives tantalizing hints of a better, more satisfying future. This book is definitely worth reading.… (meer)