Tokyo Olympics: “I am a transgender athlete and I want to protect women’s sport”

Joanna felt at a young age that her gender identity was different; A girl in a boy’s body, the world for her was like a left-handed person living in a world designed for right-handed people.

She played with her sister’s toys and was drawn to women’s fashion, otherwise she couldn’t express her thoughts.

But after all, it was in the ’60s, who could have advised Joanna on gender identity? Especially in the small town of Barry Sound where she lived, which was about 150 kilometers from northern Ontario in Canada.

So Joanna kept those thoughts to herself and took up the natural sport of running, running twice a day.

Her father was the head of the physical education department at the local high school, and by the time she reached her teens, Joanna was better than him at long distance running and also excelled academically, especially in science.

By the time she graduated from high school, she was the top runner in the area.

Upon entering the University’s Faculty of Science, she joined a team that includes members from across the country.

By the time she reached her mid-twenties, she was among the top 20 national distance runners in Canada.

Granted, the sport gave Joanna a chance to escape the thought of who she was back then, but she knew she was transgender.

“I always knew I was a girl even though all these years I lived as a boy,” she says.

After graduation, Joanna began working as a research scientist at a large medical facility in the United States.

Joanna didn’t start taking hormone therapy until 2004, when she was in her 40s, after the deaths of her father and sister, to begin her physical transformation from boy to girl.

Within weeks, she felt noticeably slower than before, and over the nine months of her treatment, her speed was 12% slower than before.

According to a study by RunRepeat, men run marathons 11% faster than women.

“I just thought that meant that I would be accepted into the women’s long distance sprint,” says Joanna.

But this was not normally the case. While there were very few in the running community to talk about Joanna face to face, the whispers eventually reached her ear.

Many women felt that Joanna still had an unfair advantage due to her previous androgenic physiology.

Around the same time, discussions about transgender people in elite sport turned out to be the norm.

In 2005, the International Olympic Committee and the United States Athletics Administration announced that they would allow trans athletes to compete on the basis of their specific gender after surgery and two years after receiving hormone therapy.

“Intellectually, it allowed me to be a scientist,” says Joanna. “I wanted to analyze the performance of transgender athletes.”

Although she did not major in sports science at the time, Joanna used her university education in medical physics to collect data.

She started researching trans male to female athletes and was eventually able to collect performance data for eight runners, both before and after the gender-based transition.

In 2015, Joanna published the first expert-reviewed study of transgender athletes that found that transgender women who received hormone therapy to lower testosterone levels had no benefit over female long-distance athletes.

Some criticized the study’s sample size, arguing that 8 people were too small for a meaningful result to be based on, but others, like geneticist Eric Phelan, called it a “pioneer.”

Joanna expanded her studies to become a biographical book in the field of sports for both sexes.

In 2019, she began her doctoral studies at Loughborough University’s School of Sports, Exercise and Health Sciences for trans athletes in the UK.

Her latest study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that levels of hemoglobin (the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to various parts of the body) in transgender women reached levels similar to those of born women. biologically about four months after taking hormone therapy.

However, her article also concluded that muscle mass and body fat in trans women is higher than their levels in women born organically as a woman after at least 36 months of hormone therapy.

“I am a proponent of protecting women’s sport,” says Joanna. “If you go back a hundred years, you will see that the rise of women’s sport has been one of the most important elements in the march of women towards equality with men. “

She adds that the IOC only included women in 1928 in Amsterdam, and even then it was only five times. “So women’s sport needs sponsorship and that means there are eligibility requirements for admission.”

Today, conversations about the eligibility of transgender people in sport are emotionally charged.

In 2018, Rachel McKinnon, a transgender cyclist, said she received more than 100,000 hate messages on Twitter after winning the women’s team pursuit at the track cycling championships.

The selection of New Zealander Laurel Hubbard as the first transgender athlete to compete in the Tokyo Olympics this year was a controversial decision.

Belgian weightlifter Anna Vanbellingen has expressed her opinion on what happened to Laurel Hubbard in May, saying: “Anyone who has trained at a high level in weightlifting knows it’s true, this particular situation is neither fair nor for athletes or for sport. “

“Life-changing opportunities for some athletes, Olympic medals and qualifiers, are lost, and we are helpless.”

But Joanna says she thinks Hubbard doesn’t have a unique advantage because weightlifting falls into weight classes. This means that athletes divide and compete in subdivisions defined by their body mass.

“But we’re only at the beginning of these studies,” she continues. “In fact, it would take us about 20 years to get accurate data on transgender women in elite sport.”

In 2019, Joanna advised the International Olympic Committee on how this might work in the future. The results will be released after this year’s Tokyo Olympics.

“There should be an appropriate eligibility requirement for each sport, says Joanna. The minimum testosterone level in men is still four times higher than in women. Eligibility must include biomarker (s) to separate athletes . “

She suggests that testosterone levels are a vital indicator.

“Instead of dividing into male and female binary categories, there may be a gap in the level of testosterone (high or low levels of the hormone).”

In theory, that would include intersex athletes, such as South African middle distance runner Caster Semenya, who had naturally high levels of testosterone. In 2018, Semenya was banned from competing in the Olympics after world athletics ruled that “to ensure fair competition, women with high levels of natural testosterone should take drugs to reduce her levels during semi races. -fund”.

This year, Namibian athletics stars Christine Mboma and Beatrice Maselenge were banned from competing in the women’s 400m at the Tokyo Games, due to their naturally high testosterone levels.

However, the current rules are narrow and limited, and only apply to athletes competing over medium distances (400m, 800m and 1500m).

This means that an Indian runner who also has high testosterone levels like Semenya is allowed to run the 100m at the Tokyo Olympics.

“But I realize that the female category is very important to a lot of women,” adds Joanna.

“It would be ideal if we could find a way to integrate trans athletes into women’s sports in a way that is fair for all.”