American tennis player and activist Renée Richards was BOTD in 1934. Born in New York City, she was assigned male at birth. A star athlete by her teens, she won a scholarship to Yale University, where she captained the men’s tennis team. She trained as an ophthalmologist at the University of Rochester and served in the US Navy, while continuing to play tennis professionally. She began dressing in women’s clothes during college, and sought treatment for depression, leading her to begin hormone therapy with pioneering sexologist Harry Benjamin. In the mid-1960s, she travelled to Morocco to consider gender reassignment surgery, but changed her mind and returned to the United States. Resolved to continue life as a man, she married model Barbara Mole in 1970, with whom she had a son. In 1975, she divorced Mole, completed gender reassignment surgery and relocated to California. The following year, her gender reassignment was outed on television. Richards subsequently applied to play in the US Women’s Open but refused to take a chromosome test to verify her gender, and was banned from competition. She sued the US Tennis Association for gender discrimination. The New York Supreme Court ruled in her favour, which became a landmark case in transgender rights. Richards played professionally until 1981 and later coached Martina Navratilova to win the Wimbledon tennis championship. She published a memoir, Second Serve, in 1983, which was adapted into a 1986 TV biopic starring Vanessa Redgrave. In 2015, Renee expressed ambivalence about her legacy, commenting that her genetics had given her an unfair advantage over her female competitors. She lives in New York with her platonic partner and assistant Arleen Larzelere.