By Kalle Oakes,Staff Writer

Officials at Bates College don’t consider Keelin Godsey’s female-to-male transgender status anything that other schools haven’t encountered.

“There have certainly been other cases of NCAA athletes who are in the middle of transgender procedures,” said Bates athletic director Suzanne Coffey.

Perhaps, but there certainly aren’t a preponderance of examples in the sports world. And there is no current documentation anywhere of another championship-level female athlete announcing her intentions to become a man while in college.

In fact, only one other transgender athlete, Dr. Renee Richards, has been front-page news in the United States.

Born Richard Raskind, the ophthalmologist and amateur tennis player underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1975. One year later, Richards, then 42 and well past any male or female professional tennis player’s prime, was barred from entering the women’s bracket of the U.S. Open when she refused to submit to a chromosome test.

Richards sued and won a court order that allowed her to compete in the 1977 Open. She lost a first-round match to Virginia Wade, almost 17 years to the day that Raskind lost in straight sets in the U.S. Open men’s draw.

“I’m not a full-time major league tennis player,” Richards said to the New York Times during her legal proceedings. “I’m here to make a point. It’s a human rights issue. I want to show that someone who has a different lifestyle or medical condition has a right to stand up for who they are.”

Richards later wrote an autobiography, “Second Serve,” which was made into a TV-movie starring Vanessa Redgrave.

In her later years, Richards has expressed some regrets.

“If you’re 18 or 20 and never had the kind of (advantages) I had, and you’re oriented in that direction, sure, go ahead and make right what nature didn’t,” Richards told the Associated Press in 1999. “But if you’re a 45-year-old man and you’re an airline pilot and you have an ex-wife and three adolescent kids, you better get on Thorazine or Zoloft or Prozac or get locked up or do whatever it takes to keep you from being allowed to do something like this.”

Three more recent cases of transgender athletes:

• Mianne Bagger, a Danish golfer competing on the Ladies European Tour. Bagger, now 39, was born male. The United States Golf Association announced a new policy last spring permitting transgender golfers to compete, as long as it has been more than two years since reassignment surgery.

• Michelle (born Michael) Dumaresq, a Canadian mountain biker who became a woman in 1996 and finished 24th in the downhill at the 2002 World Championships.

• Alyn Libman, a figure skater at the University of California. Libman, like Godsey, is a pre-operative female-to-male transgender. While Godsey is not undergoing hormone therapy in order to remain eligible by NCAA standards, Libman began taking hormones and identifying as a male at 18. Skating at UC-Berkeley is not a varsity sport subject to NCAA sanction.