Source: Bigstock

Okay, sports fans, here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth: The year was 1957 or 1958 or perhaps even later. Those were the days of starched shirts, good manners, white rather than yellow tennis balls, and wooden rackets. The tournament was in New York City, and I was playing against Yale No. 1 Richard Raskind. He had a big left-handed serve that he used to come up to the net with, and an even bigger left-handed forehand. The match was on a fast cement court that favored his aggressive net play. I remember thinking that Raskind would have been putty in my hands were we playing on slow European clay, my best surface. Dick Raskind won that day, and as we shook hands at the net he looked the depressed loser. I remember almost commenting on that but did not. I found him unfriendly, almost unpleasant. Many years later I think I understood why. Raskind was obviously suffering from what today is known as “gender dysphoria,” although that particular definition did not exist back then.

Many years later Raskind surfaced yet again on the tennis tour, this time playing as a woman called Renée Richards. My first thought back then was that I had lost to a female. Well, not quite, but you know what I mean. While on tour for many years my favorite hitting partner was Althea Gibson, the first black woman to win Wimbledon, in 1957. Althea and I obviously played many sets against each other, and we were about even. But she was No. 1 in the world, whereas I was way down the rankings back in those halcyon pseudo-amateur days. Which brings me to the point I wish to make: Even in a nonviolent sport like tennis, men have an enormous advantage—speed, strength, endurance, you name it, we’ve got it.

“Many years later Raskind surfaced yet again on the tennis tour, this time playing as a woman called Renée Richards.”

By the time Raskind declared himself a female he was already fending off Father Time. As a woman, Renée Richards won a tournament but became far better known for transitioning than hitting a tennis ball. He/she was also a very good ophthalmologist and is still with us at 90. I turned her transition into a joke by telling all my tennis buddies that I had lost to a woman while at my peak.

This was long ago, and now, finally, the U.S. has acknowledged the truth: Sex change treatment endangers children. The Department of Health and Human Services issued the world’s most comprehensive report on the topic—something I knew from day one, and I am someone who has trouble putting on a Band-Aid. Over in that crowded rainy place called Britain, transgender women will be barred from playing for women’s soccer teams after the Brit Supreme Court ruled that Britain’s equality laws were based on biological sex and that trans women did not fall within the legal definition of women. Again, I could have told them this, and I don’t know how to read a legal brief about a parking ticket.

The irony is that I don’t even know what these terms are—transgender, agender, nonbinary—but what I do know is what nonsense is. Nonsense is wasting our precious and finite energies on trivial issues such as “What is a woman?” Maybe we should allow this issue to collapse under its own absurdity. This nonsense, as few of us call it, counts a lot only where sport is concerned. Let’s begin with women entering men’s sporting competitions: There are none and never will be. Enough said. The men entering women’s competitions are cheaters when posing as women. The entire fiasco is based on lies and opportunistic cheaters. You cannot change sex.

So, how should a parent feel seeing their daughter get knocked out almost immediately in an Olympic boxing competition by a trans woman who hits like the proverbial mule and looks very much a man? Or watching their daughter left half a swimming pool behind by someone who until recently was swimming for the men’s team? I know what I would do. I would enter the ring and try to stop the match. Or jump into the pool and get in the way of the cheater. But the Olympic Committee is as cowardly as they come, as are universities, with coaches too scared of the trans lobby to throw the cheaters out and keep the girls competing against girls.

Perhaps now these cowards who have allowed these outrages to take place will finally react and ban the cheaters. But the incessantly complaining, self-pitying trans lobby is well funded and supported by Hollywood types like that awful trio of Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, and Daniel Radcliffe, all three trying to cash in while advancing injustice against female athletes. But leave it to The New York Times to devote a very long and incredibly boring article on the trials and tribulations of a San Jose State University volleyball player, a trans, and how she was eventually “outed” as an ex-man by some magazine.

Never mind. Trans women should compete against other trans women in sport, but not biological women. In the meantime, I have joined the victims of trans women competing in women’s sport by outing myself as having lost to Renée Richards. I lost to Dick Raskind, but unknown enemies say I lost to Renée.