N=8: The miscarriage of science that allows trans-identified males to compete in women's sports

How the IOC used a compromised scientist to further their agenda of male inclusion at the cost of fairness for females

Eight non-elite trans-identified male runners self-reported their race performances from pre-transition when they raced as men, and post-transition when they raced as women. All of the participants had an idea of what the outcome should be—that they would slow down post-transition. Testosterone levels, training, injury, diet, mental and physical health were not recorded. There was no control group. The collector of this data was participant #6, a medical physicist who had no expertise in sport science, and had never conducted human research before.

Yet this deeply flawed “study” became the foundation that allowed men who identified as women to compete in all women’s sports, at levels from the NCAA to Olympic, and is still used by some sports federations today. Joanna Harper, the trans-identified male who collected the data, was elevated to expert status by the International Olympic Committee, and is still quoted by mainstream media, though his work has been thoroughly discredited. How this outrageously flawed collection of self-validating anecdotes could have been used to give away half the world population’s right to fair sport, and continue to mislead the public is a decidedly ignoble trip through the sausage factory—flawed people, self-serving interests, secret deals, and women’s sports as collateral damage.

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Throughout his childhood, Harper recalled wearing his mother and sister’s clothes, but he buried those feelings by throwing himself into sports. He excelled at basketball and ran cross country in high school, but being too short to be competitive in college, he turned to distance running. Running continued to play an important part in his life—he chose to be a medical physicist because it wouldn’t require long hours. He’d still have time to train. In 2004, at the age of 47, Harper took his first dose of estrogen and testosterone blockers, after completing the Hood To Coast Relay because, he said, he knew he’d never run as fast again. Harper mentioned the loss of running speed in multiple interviews as deeply unsettling, and implied that competing in the women’s category should thus be a consolation prize for the “sacrifice” (a term he used) he’d made, a right. Describing it as the hardest but most rewarding thing he’d ever done, Harper told Science magazine that it caused his divorce (no previous mention that he was married), and a strained relationship with his mother.

The hormone therapy started affecting his pace and energy within three weeks, and by nine months, Harper reported running 12% slower than he had before HRT. That’s the approximate performance gap between equally matched men and women. Notably, he found his age-graded performance (performance in relation to other men his age) as a 47-year-old man was about the same as his age-graded performance as a 48-year-old woman after he’d had one year of HRT. This prompted him to think that the hormonal cocktail of estrogen and testosterone blockers would allow him to compete fairly in the female category, something he wanted very much to be true. Though he didn’t buy into the idea that he’d actually changed sex, Harper raced in the female category and made no mention of how his participation might impact women. The feelings or rights of women seemed not to register with him at all. In fact, that any woman might question the fairness of a male racing in the female category, that female athletes might not welcome him with open arms is evidenced in this remarkably tone deaf statement in a 2015 opinion piece in the Washington Post: “…some of my fellow runners have been accepting, other runners are notably chilly toward me. Or they tell me that it’s fine for me to race — as long as I don’t beat them. Such comments leave me feeling in­cred­ibly defensive. How slow would I need to be for them to be happy?”

There was very little existing research on transgender sports performance at the time (around 2007): One study measured some factors like muscle mass and hemoglobin level after three years of testosterone reduction, but Harper found there was nothing that compared actual speed, strength, explosiveness, or endurance pre- and post hormone treatment. And he was convinced, based on his own experience, that one year of T reduction would be plenty. Self-interest fully intact, Harper set out to prove that reducing testosterone for one year would allow a man to compete equitably with women. Mind you, he was not asking the scientific question of whether this was possible, but rather starting with the desired outcome and crunching the numbers and mashing the methods to get there. Whatever that is, it’s not science.

Undeterred by his lack of expertise in sport science, or experience in conducting human research, Harper said, “Obviously physicists excel in pattern recognition and analyzing data. There is probably no other profession better at logical thinking than being a physicist.”

In a 2016 exchange with sport scientist Ross Tucker, Harper described himself as a scientist first, an athlete second, and a transgender person third. As time has demonstrated, he’s not as good at compartmentalizing as he professed.

The “Study”: N=8

“I would call it an ad hoc survey, an off-the-cuff, ask-some-friends-what-their-times-were-in-running sort of thing,” said Linda Blade, Canadian sport performance coach and co-author of the book Unsporting, about Harper’s “study”. Searching social media, it took Harper years to find just seven other trans-identified men who had run marathons both before and after HRT. Given the information he was asking for, the subjects all had to be aware of the “expected” outcome. He included his own data in the survey—hardly scientific—bringing the total sample size to eight. N=8. It’s laughably, meaninglessly small. You can read the whole thing here. The participants self-selected and self-reported their best times pre- and post- hormone replacement therapy in distances from 5K to marathon. Some of the runners only consented to participate anonymously, which made it impossible to verify those times. Some had not run a marathon or half-marathon, only shorter races. The intervals between the participants’ pre- and post-HRT performances varied from two years to 29 years. Think about that. Even in two years, a lot can happen that might cause your running performance to decrease aside from hormone replacement: illness, injury, decrease in training. Imagine all the things that could happen over the course of 29 years that might cause you to get slower. For example, one of the eight participants simply lost interest in running and stopped training. That could certainly make you slower. Change in diet, health, training—none of those factors was taken into account.

British sport scientist and elite athlete coach Tony Lycholat, using a pseudonym to protect his athletes from aggressive trans activists, voiced an opinion that other sport scientists held: “I’ve written about the methodological flaws in the work of IOC consensus meeting participant, Joanna Harper before. Let me be as clear as possible: if you decide to do an observational study, you need to follow the appropriate, recognised and demanding observational study guidelines. Failing to do so means that, “any claim coming from an observational study is likely to be wrong”. I have nothing against Harper personally; my point is that she is neither an epidemiologist nor a sports scientist and simply doesn’t seem to know how to carry out meaningful health or sports science research.”

Harper used a mathematical proxy called age grading to compare the the pre- and post-HRT times of the participants. Age grading is often used with masters runners to compare performances, controlling for age and sex. For example, a 76-year-old woman who runs a 4-hour marathon will have a higher age-grade time relative to the top runner of her age group than a 56-year-old man who runs a 3:30 marathon, even though the man ran faster in absolute terms.

“Age grading is not accurate. It’s never been a precise thing,” said Linda Blade. “It’s a way to sort out who gets bragging rights, but is in no way scientific.”

The eight subjects probably knew from talking with Harper about the survey that they “should” slow down after HRT, and since they self-selected and self-reported races and times, they could very well have chosen two race performances that best demonstrated that scenario. But one runner, #7, improved vastly after HRT. Oops, awkward. Harper explained it away by saying that, after HRT, the runner started training with determination and lost weight—so in other words, a lifestyle change. But lifestyle changes were not considered in the others who conveniently slowed down as they “should.” That one data point in a sample size of eight would have skewed the resulting average so much as to disprove Harper’s claim. So he threw it out. Just didn’t use it. And was able to shamelessly come out with such contradictory statements as this: “Largely as a result of their vastly reduced testosterone levels, transgender women lose strength, speed, and virtually every other component of athletic ability,” while a few sentences down admitting, “Transgender women carry more muscle mass than 46,XX women (Gooren and Bunck 2004, 425–429). This extra muscle mass might cause increased speed when compared to cisgender women, and hence faster times and higher AGs [age graded] at shorter distances.” Harper also said that, since reducing testosterone had no effect on things like height, trans-identified males “might” have an advantage in shot put and high jump. He did not mention the many other sports in which being bigger and stronger is also an advantage. Even when he designed the survey to achieve the result he wanted, it didn’t answer.

Harper did concede three points. None of the participants were elite athletes (so testosterone reduction might not apply to an elite level trans-identified male participating at, say, the Olympic level). Second, speaking to his realization that, no matter surgery or hormone therapy, “neither can alter karyotype (chromosomes); hence it is questionable whether one could claim a change in sex as a result of any intervention.” And most importantly, that his claim that trans-identified males can compete equitably with females after one year of HRT applied only to distance running. “… the author makes no claims as to the equality of performances, pre and post gender transition, in any other sport. As such, the study cannot, unequivocally, state that it is fair to allow transgender women to compete against 46,XX women in all sports, although the study does make a powerful statement in favor of such a position.”

Let’s review. A deeply biased trans-identified male who lacked experience in sport science but made up for it with hubris set out to prove that a year of hormone therapy could allow a man to compete fairly with women. He personally had a stake in his collection of anecdotes—he didn’t want to give up racing, and never even considered racing as a man, after he self-ID’d as a woman (have cake, eat it too). He used unscientific methods with a meaninglessly small pool of subjects; explained away, ignored, or simply didn’t use inconvenient findings; and concluded that he was right! But just for distance running! Probably!

He published his findings in 2015 in the Journal of Sporting Cultures and Identities, an entity that apparently allows authors to pay to submit manuscripts and agree, in return, to review those of others, each of whom has also paid to submit a manuscript.

Joanna Harper and his “study” should have been ignored, forgotten. He was no doubt as surprised as sport scientists worldwide by what happened next.

Black Holes and the International Olympic Committee

As of 2003, Dr. Richard Budgett, then with the British Olympic Association, voiced this opinion on allowing trans-identified males into women’s sport: “The effect of allowing male transsexuals to compete as women would be to make competition unfair and potentially dangerous in some sports and would undermine women’s sports.” Note that not only his thoughts on the subject but his use of language—”male transsexuals”—show that he had not been captured (yet) by gender ideology.

While not quite as pointed as Budgett, the International Olympic Committee nonetheless adopted a harsh policy for “male transsexuals” to compete in the female category, requiring a gonadectomy, legal female status, and reduction of testosterone for two years before and throughout competition.

But public opinion changes. Gay rights were widely accepted, and trans activists were working very hard to make Trans and Queer the new social justice cause celebre. Mandating that any athlete cut off body parts to be eligible to compete is very poor optics, and let’s not forget that the IOC, sports federations, sports at all levels are run by dudes, for dudes. Even now, the top committees and decision-making groups are largely male. Women have had to fight for sports at all levels from high school to Olympic, and are rarely represented or consulted in policy decisions. Forcing males, even trans-identified males, to cut off their balls did not sit well with the IOC, but it would take more than a little squeamishness for this ultra conservative group to care about trans-identified men who wanted to compete with women.

Let’s think about the International Olympic Committee. The Olympic brand is one of the most recognizable in the world. Kings, billionaires, scions of business want to be involved with this vaunted club. And it’s very secretive—their funding and deals take place behind closed doors with no accountability. The only thing that is known for sure about the Olympic movement is that the nobility of the human spirit is a bunch of marketing BS. The IOC is about personal profit for those at the top. It’s history is one of corruption. The idea that this group of profit-driven businessmen would suddenly take an interest in the plight of a miniscule population of men with identity issues is ludicrous.

And yet, by 2015, the same year that Harper published his very limited, very biased, unscientific eight-person collection of running times, the IOC had adopted both the cause and the language of gender ideology. They were suddenly determined to include trans-identified men in women’s sports. We may never know how that radical shift in priorities happened, but knowing what we know about the IOC, it’s not outrageous to think money was involved. Large sums of money, quietly moving from billionaires who have backed transgenderism to some IOC members’ Swiss bank accounts is a viable thought experiment.

Reporter Jennifer Bilek has spent years following the money behind transgenderism— it’s huge and universal. Governments, the tech industry, pharmaceuticals, asset management giants are all backing the trans movement, she says, with an eye to owning human reproduction. Male and female sex categories would be extraneous, even a stumbling block, to that goal, so these mammoth industries have decided to “care” about trans people who are conveniently erasing sex categories for them. As an example of how that might play out at the IOC, let’s look at Beth Brooke-Marciniak. She works with transgender billionaire Martine Rothblatt, who wrote a book entitled From Transgender To Transhuman, spelling out his vision for tech-owned human reproduction. Brooke-Marciniak is an extremely powerful woman, the Global Vice Chair of Public Policy and sponsor of Diversity and Inclusiveness at Ernst & Young. She’s also a committee member at the IOC.

“It was like a black hole,” said Blade. “We knew it existed. We knew something was there exerting enormous power to make the IOC behave in such an absurd way. Somehow, they discarded every gatekeeping effort for safety and fairness for women by trying to wedge men into women’s sports,” said Linda Blade. “They’d decided it was so oppressive to require men to have a gonadectomy. How can we find a way to let men compete with women without cutting their balls off? And then Harper’s survey came along. Yay! They lapped it up.”

Despite it’s obvious flaws, despite it’s clearly stated limitation to distance running, despite the fact that Harper was patently unqualified as a sport scientist, the IOC removed the requirement for surgery, and extended Harper’s male inclusion protocol of testosterone reduction for one year to all women’s sports. Naturally, the IOC’s policies carry a lot of weight, so Harper’s testosterone reduction protocol filtered down across all sports, to national and local federations, race organizations, college, even high school sports. Harper was elevated to “expert” and immediately listed on the IOC’s medical and science committee. He had exclusive access to decision makers at the IOC, though there were, of course, plenty of sport scientists who could and did conduct legitimate research on the topic of trans-identified males in sports. And this research pointed to the fact that testosterone reduction did not remove male advantage, that such a policy was unfair to female athletes. It’s just that, for some reason, the IOC did not want to hear those results.

The story of how the IOC set the reduced testosterone level at 10nmol/liter (five times the highest level for women) is a bit of a detour but just too good to pass up. Prior to 2015, when a ball-ectomy and T reduction was the ticket for a trans-identified man to compete as a woman, Canadian cyclist Kristin Worley followed the rules. Cut off his balls. But lo and behold, when he started training, he sucked. Felt awful, no energy. Because a male body needs testosterone to function. Worley complained that he’d followed the rules and now couldn’t train at all. He eventually sued Cycling Canada, Ontario Cycling Association, and the UCI for a Therapeutic Use Exemption to inject testosterone. As eye-wateringly stupid as that is, the kicker is that he won the lawsuit and was granted a TUE to use testosterone (thus, doping) to compete in the women’s category! And because of this embarrassing incident, the IOC set the testosterone level for trans-identified males at 10nmol/liter, which is within the healthy male range. So that trans-identified males could remain healthy as they competed in the female category. Other sports federations followed suit. You can’t make this up.

The Hill To Die On

Thanks to the IOC’s broad shouldered, deep pocketed support, Harper went instantly from an unknown medical worker to a consultant to the biggest sports brand in the world and expert quoted in all the major media. Heady power, yes, but he recognized almost immediately the overreach, the false claims for which the IOC was crediting his work. In his 2015 opinion piece for the Washington Post, his IOC-sponsored confidence had an asterisk: “The question is whether trans women can compete equitably against other women. And in many sports, the evidence supports an emphatic yes.” The emphasis is mine. No mention of those sports in which he knew even then that trans-identified men would have huge advantage, but were nonetheless allowed to compete in the women’s category because of his “study.”

A year after the IOC hailed Harper’s eight-person survey as the answer to trans inclusion, Harper and two fellow IOC committee member said, “Given the paucity of relevant research and the likely impact of decisions relating to transgender and intersex athletes, there is now an urgent need to determine not only what physical advantages transgender women carry after HRT but also what effect these advantages may have on transgender women competing against cisgender women in a variety of different sports.” In other words, Harper suspected back in 2016 that his theory of testosterone reduction was, in fact, unfair to female athletes.

With every interview, he gave contradictory information, first saying T reduction vastly reduced trans-identified males’ strength, speed, and endurance, and then saying more research was required, or outright negating his initial claims, as in this 2020 review of literature over the past 21 years: “In transwomen, hormone therapy rapidly reduces Hgb to levels seen in cisgender women. In contrast, hormone therapy decreases strength, LBM and muscle area, yet values remain above that observed in cisgender women, even after 36 months. These findings suggest that strength may be well preserved in transwomen during the first 3 years of hormone therapy.”

Tony Lycholat had this to say about an equally flawed follow-up survey Harper conducted with a small number of athletes, including a cyclist: “Whilst not suggesting this is necessarily the case, the cynic might make this simple observation: rather than provide meaningful, longitudinal data, the most basic of tests has been performed to show what the researcher wanted to show. The reporting of these tests omits all the essential, additional physiological data required to indicate that a cyclist, having since transitioned, now has 11% less power than they did at one single point five years ago. Contrary to established physiological testing and reporting procedures (9), observational study guidelines and best practice (6), no details of the test protocols, the cyclist’s training history prior to the first and second tests, or throughout the five-year gap between the tests is given. It’s nonsense. I can see scientific reasons why power output would likely fall in the transitioning athlete; but without good science being performed and accurately reported, what exists is emotionally driven, bias-confirming guesswork.”

Every public statement Harper made revealed a deeply conflicted, compromised person, unwilling to give up a sweet deal with the IOC (Harper quit his job as a medical physicist in Portland, OR and accepted an IOC grant to continue to try to prove that testosterone reduction would allow trans-identified males to compete fairly* with women. He planned to study 20 world class trans athletes but three years later, there is only one athlete in the study). *Harper began in 2015 by saying that T reduction would allow fair competition with females, then by 2019 admitted that there would be retained male advantage but it would be small, and now has hedged still further, saying that trans-identified males can still have “meaningful” competition with women. Meaningful apparently means that women must accept some unfairness.

Though he’s got more funding now to conduct legitimate research, Harper continues to focus narrowly on things like reduction of hemoglobin and lean body mass that come with HRT. “Testosterone reduction just doesn’t work,” said Linda Blade. “Let’s talk about VO2 max. Any sport scientist will know it’s the capacity of blood to carry oxygen. Hemoglobin affects the ability of blood cells to carry oxygen, and hemoglobin is reduced with T reduction, but males have massively bigger hearts with many more blood cells, more blood volume, than females. Even with T reduction males will have higher VO2 max than females. Harper doesn’t mention that.” Lean body mass decreases slightly from male values but is still well above females’. Harper never mentions the larger lungs, stronger connective tissue, more muscle mass, greater strength, narrower hips, and other structural features that are not mitigated by testosterone reduction.

Since 2015, there have been at least 18 robust, peer-reviewed studies that show that testosterone reduction, to any level, does not mitigate the myriad physiological and structural differences males have that provide sports advantage over women. None of those studies was considered by the IOC, nor were any women’s sports organizations consulted. They still relied on Harper, and on trans-identified male philosophy professor Veronica Ivy in drafting their trans inclusion policy. Though he advised the IOC in 2017 to reduce the required T level to 5nmol/liter and continued to point out its limitations, Harper never came out and said he had been wrong. He openly admitted instances in which trans-identified males would have an advantage, but still advocated for their inclusion. As earlier in his life, he has never expressed concern or empathy for the rights and feelings of female athletes. Remember, trans-identified male inclusion is something he personally wanted, and it seemed, something the IOC was determined to make happen regardless of evidence of unfairness that Harper pointed out. What could he do, right?

In 2021, Harper actually became alarmed by how his benefactors had run amok with his original little survey. The IOC came out with new trans inclusion guidelines that, mind-blowingly, declared trans-identified males should have “no presumption of advantage” over women. This was too much even for Harper. He told the Guardian: “It is important that the IOC has come out in favour of inclusion of trans and intersex athletes, but I think sections five and six of the framework are problematic. Transgender women are on average, taller, bigger and stronger than cis women and these are advantages in many sports. It is also unreasonable to ask the sports federations to have robust and peer reviewed research before placing restrictions on trans athletes in elite sport. Such research will take years if not decades.”

Harper is personally tangled up in this. He is a trans-identified male who wants to compete as a woman. He doesn’t want to fall out of favor with the IOC to which he owes his career. He doesn’t want to admit he was wrong, both to save face and to avoid the wrath of the IOC. Dang it, he wants to have his cake and eat it too.

As of 2023, four international sports federations have rejected Harper’s testosterone reduction scheme, and banned trans-identified males from the women’s category—swimming, track & field, cycling, and rugby. Even in sports that have moved to protect the women’s category, damage has been done. Records have been set, awards won, and opportunities taken by trans-identified males that belonged to women. And now that trans-identified males have been allowed into the female category, resetting those boundaries has not been easy. Despite a mountain of credible scientific evidence that T reduction does not mitigate male advantage, many federations including World Triathlon, USA Track & Field, and USA Tennis still have this policy in place. Women are still being forced to accept unfairness. Harper still has a place of prominence on IOC and other international sports federation committees. He is interviewed less frequently, but he sticks with “science” he wishes to be true. That choice has not only done irreparable harm to women’s sport, but has compromised him as a scientist and a person. This is apparently the hill he has chosen to die on.

I’ve had a few exchanges with Harper and he’s been pleasant, but I can’t stop thinking about his Washington Post opinion piece from 2015: “…some of my fellow runners have been accepting, other runners are notably chilly toward me. Or they tell me that it’s fine for me to race — as long as I don’t beat them. Such comments leave me feeling in­cred­ibly defensive.” An unknown scientist with a chip on his shoulder suddenly thrust into a position of global power? What could go wrong?

In a 2016 discussion about the inclusion of trans-identified males in women’s sports, Harper said, “How do we support and protect women’s sport and, at the same time, honor the rights of a marginalized segment of humanity?” Though he claimed to be a scientist first and foremost, he has never questioned the “right” of trans-identified males to compete in the category of their choice. That’s not science. Somewhere along the way, his personal and professional priorities got mixed up with ego and his identity as trans. Trans-identified males do not go into women’s sports with the intent of cheating but that is the result, so intent doesn’t matter. Harper did not intend to sacrifice the safety, fairness, and dignity of half the world’s population but that was the result.

“No matter how kind he is, he’s perpetrating a fraud. And it’s been disastrous,” said Linda Blade.