Dr. Renée Richards is 92 years old. In 1977, Richards sued for the right to play in the U.S. Open as a male-to-female transgender competitor, won that lawsuit, and spent the next four years on the women's professional tennis circuit. Nearly fifty years later, Richards now says the whole thing was wrong.

"I was selfish. I was looking out for myself."

That's Richards' own assessment, delivered in connection with a new biography published this week — "Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis's Trans Pioneer," written by sportswriter Julie Kliegman. The book revisits the career that launched a half-century of debate over male bodies in women's athletics. And the subject of that book just handed the other side a verdict.

Richards didn't just dabble in women's tennis. After a judge ruled that the U.S. Open had violated New York State's Human Rights Law by barring Richards from competition, the door opened to the full women's tour. Richards was knocked out in the first round of singles at the 1977 U.S. Open but reached the women's doubles final. In 1979, Richards defeated Hall of Famer Nancy Richey in a women's 35-and-over championship at Flushing Meadow. After retiring from professional tennis in 1981 at age 47, Richards went on to coach Martina Navratilova to two Wimbledon championships.

The career was real. The advantage was too.

Richards now argues that male puberty creates lasting physical advantages — "larger long bones and bigger chest cavities and larger hearts" — that hormone therapy cannot fully reverse. Richards still identifies as "a steadfast supporter of trans rights" but now directly opposes transgender women and girls participating in women's sports. The person who started the entire debate has switched sides on the central question.

That 1979 win over Nancy Richey was the turning point. Beating a Hall of Fame women's player in a women's championship apparently raised a question that took another four decades to answer out loud: Was this fair?

The left's position on trans athletes in women's sports has always rested on the premise that the science is complicated, the advantages are debatable, and anyone who disagrees is motivated by bigotry. That argument gets significantly harder to make when the original test case — the person whose lawsuit created the legal precedent — looks back and says the advantages are real, the competition was unfair, and the motivation was personal.

Richards' gender identity was originally outed by journalist Richard Carlson — Tucker Carlson's father — and the ensuing controversy was backed by tennis legend Billie Jean King, who supported Richards' right to compete. The cultural establishment lined up behind the idea that inclusion trumped biology. That was 1977. We've been living with the consequences ever since, through Title IX battles, Olympic eligibility fights, and high school girls losing scholarships to competitors who went through male puberty.

What Richards is describing isn't some nuanced middle-ground position. It's the straightforward conservative argument: biological sex creates athletic advantages that no amount of hormone therapy erases, and women's sports exist to protect fair competition for women. We've been called bigots for saying it. Richards lived it and arrived at the same conclusion.

The person who made the legal case for trans women in sports now makes the biological case against it. Both arguments came from the same body of evidence — one just took forty-nine years longer to admit.