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In a quiet and craven move, the United States Tennis Association recently updated its player-eligibility policy to ban transgender girls and women from competing in the category aligned with their gender identity. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported this on Dec. 3—two days after the policy had gone into effect. It applies to all junior and adult events.

Eligibility is set to be enforced primarily via birth certificates. (The boys’ and men’s categories remain open to transgender people for now.) The USTA’s move comes, of course, against the backdrop of a worsening political climate for trans people, not just in terms of access to sports but also access to appropriate health care, identifying documents, bathrooms, and more.

Currently, more than half of states have trans-athlete bans in place at the K-12 and/or collegiate levels. (Some laws are being challenged in court.) And not long after retaking office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for sports to be segregated by biological sex.

Independent governing bodies like the USTA are not federal agencies legally bound by such orders, but regardless, following the February directive, groups including the NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee banned trans girls and women from competition across all sports they oversee, sometimes citing Trump’s order. The USTA’s policy refers to an earlier Trump executive order in narrowly and incorrectly defining gender as based on biological sex alone. It also claims the USOPC’s own change prompted this update, so as to not risk the USTA losing status as the national governing body of tennis.

“While our Player Eligibility policy has changed, what has not changed is our belief that tennis is and will continue to be for everyone,” a USTA spokesperson wrote in a statement to Slate. “Inclusion remains a core value of the USTA and we remain committed to making tennis available and accessible to all who wish to participate.”

But this move to restrict the girls’ and women’s categories in tennis is a betrayal of tennis’ noted history of trans inclusion, coming almost half a century—48 years, to be exact—after trailblazer Renée Richards, a transgender woman, sued the USTA for her right to compete in the U.S. Open’s women’s draw. Richards and her powerful lefty serve had the support of the great Billie Jean King, her onetime doubles partner and the de facto leader of the women’s tour. King even submitted a crucial affidavit in the case.

In the momentous 1977 ruling in Richards’ favor, Judge Alfred M. Ascione of the New York State Supreme Court wrote that the USTA’s sex-testing policy was designed specifically to screen her out. After all, it had been put in place only the year before, when Richards was publicly outed after winning an amateur tournament. Ascione called the USTA’s new vetting process “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and violative of her rights under the Human Rights Law of this State.”

Richards (about whom I am writing a forthcoming biography) became a household name as the first out transgender professional athlete in the country. For five years, she played on the Women’s Tennis Association circuit, at one point cracking the top 20 in the singles rankings. Complaints about fairness from her competitors, while loud, were few and far between, proving that inclusion and fairness are not necessarily at odds in questions of sports eligibility.

Today, Richards holds surprising and controversial views on the matter of her own participation. She no longer believes she was in the right to pursue her legal battle against the USTA and WTA. Rather, she feels that girls and women like herself who transition after undergoing so-called male puberty should be barred from all elite sports.

A renowned ophthalmologist, Richards has made her case to the WTA itself, in a 2024 meeting with a working group examining the organization’s gender-eligibility policy. She told them about how she initially thought her participation on tour was fair because of her age—in her early 40s, she was quite a bit older and less spry than the WTA’s brightest stars. Then, in 1979, she won a 35-and-over event and had a change of heart. Richards explained:

I began to think to myself, ‘What if I had been 25? Would it have been fair for me to compete as a woman?’ I began to think more and more about age as a factor—from my experience and for the future. I began to consider that age was what had allowed me to compete on the WTA tour with minimal advantage, if any, and that my obsessive physical training during my time on tour was also contributory in helping me maintain some of the physicality I had lost during my transition—both important considerations in forming my opinions later on.

She went on to cite in her remarks the inherent physical advantages trans athletes are commonly thought to hold over cisgender girls and women post-puberty. But existing research on elite trans athletes so far paints a more complicated picture than Richards allowed, including areas in which trans women may even be at a disadvantage.

While Richards is more than entitled to share her own perspective on her past participation, she should not be seen as speaking for the desires and needs of all trans athletes. The USTA is taking a step she largely supports; the main difference is that she thinks younger, prepubescent children should be allowed to compete in the gender category they identify with. But by excluding transfeminine competitors, the organization is dishonoring its own progressive heritage.

The ban, which applies to competitors of all ages and skill levels, hurts not just adult professionals, but children as well. Access to sports can be beneficial and even life-saving for transgender youth, who face elevated risk of depression and suicide compared with their cisgender peers. Depriving kids of opportunities to play sports with their friends and reap the mental and physical benefits of exercise is nothing short of cruel.

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In addition to being the morally right choice, welcoming trans athletes would be the best move for fostering the highest possible level of competition. By contrast, restricting the field of eligible athletes amounts to stifling potential greatness. It’s stopping exciting rivalries and iconic moments before they even have a chance to develop.

Regardless of how Richards looks back on her playing days, she has been clear that she understands and opposes the larger attack on transgender rights by the Trump administration. I wish she could also see that her time on tour was unambiguously a triumph for the USTA and for all trans athletes. It proved that competitors of all stripes can coexist and thrive if you simply welcome them in. Like King and others of her generation, any serious competitor today, cis or trans, should seek out the toughest matches, regardless of biology. And any serious sporting organization should crave the best of the best facing off on its courts, no holds barred.

Unfortunately, with its poorly conceived policy change, it’s now clear the USTA is not serious—nor are the other sports governing bodies electing to follow the president’s exclusionary demands. The tennis organization is fully complicit in the country’s shameful rollback of transgender rights. And the damage clearly isn’t stopping with athletes.

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