New Books in Gender

Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women’s draw of the 1977 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner.

Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer (HarperOne, 2026) chronicles Richards’s extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Renée remains a complex figure: A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested—and condemned—than ever before.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.
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Queer theory and reproductive justice need each other—now more than ever. As liberals and leftists increasingly frame reproductive justice in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, often adopting the language of “queerness,” it has become difficult to see that their political demands and strategies are often quite conservative. In Reproductive Justice, Queerly (U California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen examines typical reproductive justice issues—including abortion, surrogacy, crisis pregnancy centers, paid parental leave, and parenting—in queer ways. She shows what can happen when we bring queer theory and reproductive justice together: a queerer, more powerful articulation of what we are fighting for.

Your host Yining Pan is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
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A woman miscarries—and is charged with murder. A new mother tests
positive for a drug her hospital administered—and loses custody of her
newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children
they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia—and spend
nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager
takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work—and is sentenced to 126
years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system
that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but
for who they are.

In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted
women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all. In Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity
(New Press, 2026), Dr. Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence
Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia
Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a
husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into
murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions
disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are
recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched
stereotypes.

Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Dr. Beety
exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and
cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe
v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the
reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal
system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood,
and queer identity itself.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the
decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, sports
scholars, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about
the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire. In The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University
of Texas Press, 2026), Murat Cihan Yıldız tells the story of how
Istanbul’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews—gymnastics teachers, football
coaches, weightlifters, journalists, athletes, and fans—created a
gendered and class-stratified civic project that promoted athletics as a
source of fun, beauty, and moral education. Influenced by the emerging
global vogue for organized sports, all boys from the expanding middle
class of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial
capital were expected to exercise and compete on the playing field in
order to develop into moral men. Yet even as the embrace of modern
athletics transcended ethnoreligious divisions, it did not erase them.
Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages,
Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team
affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing
Istanbul’s imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century
ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial
culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic,
multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen.
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Rahim Thawer and Maryam Khan's new edited volume Queer and Muslim: On Faith, Family and Healing (U Regina Press, 2026) is a powerful anthology that brings together writers, activists, and scholars who meditate, reflect, and share stories of queer Muslim life, that contains the complexity of rage, grief and resilience but also joy, love, and healing. In the process, Thawer and Khan deconstruct the limitations of western centric formulations of mental health and wellness, which is often individualistic and commodified, and invite readers to think through a decolonial approach that honours Muslim spirituality, religiosity, and culture, which can help us shift towards collectivistic and liberatory goals of healing. This anthology is a great resource for those who are mental health practitioners, and relevant to those who think about gender, sexuality, and Islam.
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