Trans athlete Joanna Harper: ‘I’m trans and want to protect women’s sport’ – BBC News

She would play with her sister’s toys and tend to dress in girls, but she couldn’t put into words more than that at the time. It was the 1960s after all, and who would give Joanna any advice on gender identity? What’s more, it’s a sparsely populated town called Parry Sound in Ontario.

So Joanna had to hide these thoughts herself and turned her attention to sports. Running seems to be a talent, she runs every day, twice a day.

Her father was the athletic director at a local middle school, and by the time she was a teenager, Joanna had outperformed her father at long-distance running. She also excelled in her academics, especially in the sciences. By the time she graduated high school, she was the best runner in the district.

While studying science in college, Joanna also joined the cross country team. By the age of 25, she was already one of the top 20 best distance runners in Canada. While sports have given Joanna an opportunity to break free from thinking about her identity, she knows she’s transgender.

“I always knew I was a girl, even in those years I lived as a boy,” she said.

After graduation, Joanna started working as a scientific researcher at a large medical institution in the United States.

It wasn’t until 2004, in her 40s, when both her father and sister had passed away, that Joanna started hormone therapy and started changing her biological sex to female.

Within a few weeks, she felt visibly slower, and nine months into the session, she was running 12 percent slower than before. According to a study by the running sports website RunRepeat, men run a marathon about 11 percent faster than women.

“I naively thought that this would mean that I would be allowed to compete in women’s distance running,” Joanna said.

This is not the case. Few people in the running world would speak to her face to face, but some whispers came back to Joanna. Many women feel that she still has an unfair advantage over her past male physiology.

It was around this time that the issue of transgender people in elite sports entered the mainstream discussion. By 2005, the International Olympic Committee and the governing body of U.S. track and field announced that transgender athletes would be allowed to compete as their gender after surgery and two years of hormone therapy.

“On an intellectual level, this thing appeals to me,” she said. “As a scientist, I want to analyze the athletic performance of trans athletes.”

Although she was not specializing in exercise science at the time, Joanna used her academic background in medical physics to gather data. She started looking for male-to-female trans athletes and was eventually able to collect performance data on eight long-distance runners before and after the gender reset.

In 2015, Joanna published the world‘s first peer-reviewed study of transgender athletes, which found that transgender women who received hormone therapy to lower their testosterone levels did not show signs of long-distance running relative to athletes who were born female. Advantage.

Some criticized the study’s sample size, saying eight people were too few to draw any meaningful conclusions, but others called it “groundbreaking” research, such as geneticist Eric Villein ( Eric Vilain).

Joanna expanded her research into her autobiographical book, Sporting Gender, and in 2019 began her PhD at Loughborough University’s School of Sport and Health Sciences, specialising in transgender athletes.

Her recent study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that transgender women’s haemoglobin (the protein that carries oxygen in the blood throughout the body) decreased after about four months of hormone therapy. to a level consistent with those born with a female sex. However, her research also concluded that transgender women still have higher net and muscle mass than those born female after at least 36 months of hormone therapy.

“I’m in favor of protecting women’s sports,” Joanna said. “If you go back 100 years, the rise of women’s sports was one of the most important parts of women’s march toward equality with men.”

She added that the IOC did not accept women until the 1928 Amsterdam Games, and only in five events.

“So, women’s sport needs to be developed, and that means there must be eligibility requirements.”

Today, the discussion about eligibility for transgender people in sports is hot and emotional. In 2018, trans cyclist Rachel McKinnon said she received more than 100,000 tweets after winning the UCI Masters Track World Championship message.

The decision sparked controversy in 2021 when New Zealand’s Laurel Hubbard became the first ever transgender athlete to be selected for the Olympics.

“Anyone who has trained at a high level of weightlifting knows in their bones that this is true: this situation is unfair to the sport and the athletes,” Belgian weightlifter Anna Vanbellinghen said at the Tokyo Olympics Commenting on Hubbard’s participation earlier, “For some athletes, life-changing opportunities — medals and Olympic qualifications — are lost, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Before the Olympics, Joanna had said she believed Hubbard wouldn’t have an overwhelming advantage because weightlifting is about weights. This means that athletes are subdivided into categories based on their weight. Hubbard ultimately failed to qualify for the final in her Tokyo Olympics in the over-87kg lift.

“However, we are in the very, very early stages of this type of research. The truth is, it will be about 20 years before we have accurate data on trans women in elite sports.”

In 2019, Joanna served as a consultant to the International Olympic Committee, advising on how this could all move forward.

“Every sport needs to have proper eligibility requirements. The lowest level of testosterone in men is still four places higher than the highest in women,” Joanna said. “Qualifications should include one or more biomarkers to differentiate athlete.”

One such biomarker could be testosterone levels, she said.

“In place of the binary categories of males and females, testosterone levels can be differentiated, i.e. high and low testosterone levels.”

In theory, this would include intersex (aka intersex, intersex) athletes such as South African middle distance runner Caster Semenya, who was born with high testosterone levels to ordinary. In 2018, Semanya was banned from the Olympics after the World Athletics ruled that “to ensure fair competition, women with high levels of natural testosterone must be drugged to lower their levels in order to compete in middle distance events”.

In 2021, Namibian track stars Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi were both banned from competing in the women’s 400 meters at the Tokyo Olympics due to high natural testosterone levels.

However, the existing rules cover a narrow range and only apply to middle-distance runners: 400, 800 and 1500 meters. This means that Indian 100-meter sprinter Dutee Chand, who has high testosterone levels like Semanya, was allowed to compete in the Tokyo Olympics.

“But I also realize that the category of ‘women’ is very important to a lot of women,” Joanna added, “ideally, if we can find a way to create an equal Ways to include transgender athletes in women’s sports.”