Nike and Wu Tsai Alliance don't want you to know about this study on trans kids as young as 12

Amid harmful findings on "gender affirming care," a conflicted female athlete expert studies ever younger medicalization of trans kids

The drumbeat of negative findings about pediatric “gender affirming care” continues—this past spring’s damning Cass review, the retreat from puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors in the UK and Scandinavian countries, Gerald Posner’s expose of puberty blockers, several New York Times blockbusters, and most recently, an attempt by a trans advocate/scientist to bury results from her nearly $10M NIH-funded study that showed puberty blockers did not improve kids’ mental health. The long-term effects of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery, including cognitive impairment, osteoporosis, infertility, and sexual dysfunction, to which children cannot fully conceive of much less consent to, are only just starting to be publicized in this country. But the chill is being felt.

Much like the practice of gender treatment for minors, studies involving pathologizing children’s healthy bodies with off-label drugs do not play well with the public, nor members of the medical and scientific communities who are still masters of their ethical domain.

There is one such third rail study going on right now in my purview. Nike, the world’s largest sports apparel company, and Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a billionaire-backed research organization, have funded Dr. Kathryn Ackerman to conduct the first-ever study on transgender youth to see how early suppression of puberty (children as young as 12) and administration of cross-sex hormones affects sports performance as compared to adolescents not going through treatment.

“That is the million dollar question,” Ackerman said. “I think if we start people at a younger age with treatment, we don’t know how much of an effect that’s going to have on performance compared to someone who transitions at the age of 35.”

Given that Ackerman is a strong supporter of inclusion of trans-identified males in female sports, it appears she is hoping that early hormonal “transition” will eliminate male advantage, and thus circumvent some sports policies that ban males who have been through any part of puberty.

Ackerman has been very open about using funds from Nike and Wu Tsai for the transgender study. But the funders and the institutions where the study will take place? Not so much. Mum’s the word from them. They don’t seem to want to be associated with it. There is nothing about this study on Nike’s or Wu Tsai Human Performance’s websites. No press releases, no announcements. The transgender study is to take place at four institutions: Boston Children’s Hospital, Oregon Health & Sciences University, Colorado Children’s Hospital, and Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. It’s not listed on any of their websites, though academic institutions typically acknowledge clinical trials on their website.

Though Ackerman makes clear she is not directing the treatment of study participants, a protocol that nonetheless involves this experimental intervention on children as young as 12 and may provide a perverse incentive to medicalize young children—wow, public relations black flag. This study uses a protocol that comes with known risks to minors to advance an anti-science, anti-sport ideology that’s blatantly misogynistic, and I think all involved know that, which is why it's very much on the down low.

Why any of these actors—Nike, Wu Tsai Alliance, Ackerman, or any of her co-investigators—Kara Connelly, Jeremi Carswell, Natalie Nokoff, Tandy Aye, Joanna Harper, and Kerri Winters—are pursuing a project with no apparent upside for anyone is one of the self-destructive contradictions of those serving gender ideology.

Let’s look at each entity, and the yawning contradictions between what they’re saying and what they’re doing.

Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance

Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance is a project of billionaire philanthropists Clara Wu Tsai and her husband, Joe Tsai. Clara Wu Tsai is co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets, the New York Liberty, the San Diego Seals, and Barclays Center, and one of the most powerful women in sports. Joe Tsai is the cofounder of the Chinese tech company Alibaba Group. Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance’s tag line is “Transforming Human Health Through the Science of Peak Performance.” What sets them apart from other research organizations, they say, is that instead of focusing on disease or injury, they focus on “studying the human body at its healthiest and most vital, to enable the thriving of all people.” It therefore seems a foundational contradiction to fund research that involves chemically interrupting the critical puberty stage and pathologizing a healthy teenage body with cross-sex hormones, which, in the case of males, is designed to hobble performance. The goal for male athletes undergoing hormone treatment is to reduce their performance to female levels, which has shown to be scientifically unobtainable. This seems to run counter to the Alliance’s mission of seeking peak human potential, it introduces a state of illness into a healthy body, and is antithetical to the spirit of sport. To say this doesn’t fit with the organization’s vision is an understatement of galactic proportions.

According to Ackerman, Wu Tsai Alliance contacted her in 2020 about joining their group as director of the Female Athlete Program, based at her home institution, Boston Children’s Hospital. Looking at that website, it’s 100% devoted to the female athlete at all levels, throughout her lifespan—menstruation, RED-S, amenorrhea, anemia, osteoporosis, pregnancy, female specific injuries, menopause. All of these issues are sex-based. The very raison d’etre for the Female Athlete Program is to serve the female athlete’s sex-based needs. It defies imagination that, even if it didn’t have unsavory overtones, Wu Tsai would allow funding meant specifically for women’s sex-based needs to be diverted to study hormonally suppressed boys. (Ackerman mentions trans-identified girls will be part of the study, but there is a marked lack of interest from trans-identified girls in competing in boys’ sports, to say nothing of the fact that the East German doping programs of the 1980s demonstrated beautifully that testosterone can make a woman into a gold medalist, but it falls far short of making her into a competitive man.) Certainly, Wu Tsai Alliance is not talking about it. Nor have they defined girls and women in ideological terms, or visibly supported any other transgender issues.

And yet, the screen shot below was taken from a presentation on Care of the Transgender Athlete Ackerman gave in October 2023. As you can see, it lists Tsai Foundation as a funder. I reached out to Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance and Ackerman to confirm or deny whether this information is still accurate, but have not gotten a response.

Below, Ackerman talks to gender clinicians in 2021 about how she’s using some of the Wu Tsai funding she received for the Female Athlete Program to study transgender youth. She plans to recruit participants from gender clinics, so children will be under the medical direction of the clinic, not Ackerman’s study. Please watch the video for the most lighthearted description ever of extreme and risky medical interventions on people who are into drawing ligers and other awesome creatures with sparkly markers.

If indeed Wu Tsai Alliance is supporting Ackerman’s youth transgender study, they sure don’t want anyone to know about it.

Nike

No one will ever accuse Nike of altruism or supporting women’s sex-based rights. Frankly, they could give a flying Air Jordan about trans people either but, for the moment, LGBTQIA (and no, they don’t recognize that those populations have utterly disparate agendas, and they don’t care) causes are earning them some social capital. The retail giant shamelessly women washes EVERYTHING, only investing in organizations that think a boy can be a girl, like the Tucker Center, featured in my previous three posts. In Nike’s mind, that’s a two-fer—boys and girls for the price of just girls.

Here’s Ackerman in 2023 talking about “Nike approaching us and saying, ‘We want to study transgender youth.’” Elsewhere she quoted the grant amount as $1M, which in Nike’s world, is change they found in the couch cushions.

Considering that Ackerman ticked all their boxes—top-of-the-heap researcher who has done legit female athlete work thus has a lot of cred with people who care about women, but also believes men should be included in women’s sports and has already been influential in male inclusion policies, and is not a trans-identified man with unresolved facial hair—a million clams was a bargain.

And yet, even Nike, tone deaf enough to send Dylan Mulvaney out there in a sports bra, appears to have some qualms about this study. It’s not alluded to in their support of other LGBTQIA programs, nor does any connection come up in a search. The Nike legal strategists undoubtedly advised vagueness, simply calling a study on early hormonal treatment of boys so they can play in girls’ sports Support for Girls and Women. Without getting into the details.

Dr. Kathryn Ackerman

“Title IX was this unbelievable legislation that required that there be equal sporting opportunities for girls and women in federally funded programs,” Ackerman gushed in a 2022 TedxBoston talk about investing in female athletes. She went on to say how, because of the opportunities Title IX afforded her, (did not mention Title IX was based on sex, not gender identity) she is a “fierce advocate” for women’s sports. She talked about walking on to her college rowing team, that would be the women’s team with only women on it, and the life-changing benefits she got from being involved in sports, how girls in sports have higher GPAs and graduation rates, and even greater success later in life. Periods, pregnancy, menopause. It was an XX fest. Keep in mind, she was speaking to a general public audience, the majority of which does not support males in female sports.

This is the same woman who, as chair of the US Rowing Sports Medicine Committee and a non-voting member of World Rowing Sports Medicine Commission, has been a vocal supporter of gender self-identification in the women’s category. She stated on a webinar that she’s in favor of youth competing in their self-selected gender category without having to be on any gender affirming hormone treatment, which, she admits, has negative side effects (see her slide below). That way, a boy could try on being a girl without having to suffer the side effects of puberty blockers.

The unspoken antecedent to this stance is that boys up to age 18 (so, they’ve gone through puberty) could compete in the female category with unadulterated male advantage. US Rowing now has one of the most misogynistic male inclusion policies of any sport. Youth, masters, senior, intermediate, U23, virtually any rower who is not collegiate or elite can self-identify into the female category with no testosterone suppression. Straight up male. In other words, there is no female category. Men can compete as is in the female category. Not satisfied with that level of contempt for women, in mixed boat events, 50% of the rowers can be any gender (assumed male) and 50% must be assigned female at birth. Because of course a boat with 50% men and 50% men who identify as women is 100% men and will have an advantage over other mixed sex boats. US Rowing wanted to make sure it was fair when men were involved. This is Ackerman’s legacy for women in the sport she loves and in which she still competes.

Kate Ackerman’s contradictions are head-spinning. In a recent conference, she said, “Men are not women.” At the cellular level, she, of all people, knows this to be true. That’s the foundation of her career. Undergrad at Cornell, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Harvard Medical School, she’s an endocrinologist and sports medicine doctor because she saw a gap—most sports studies and treatment models are based on male athletes. She got into this field to serve female athletes, and has made a name for herself as such.

“Men are not women.” The slide below is from a 2023 presentation Ackerman gave showing indeed, even at young ages, males are not females.

And yet, in the same presentation to American sports medicine physicians about transgender athletes, Ackerman made the meaningless claim that people with transgender identities had brain scans that were more like their gender identity than their sex. As she knows, gender identity and brains have nothing to do with sports performance, but sex does. Why would an expert in her field, a legitimate scientist, proffer such crap?

Men are not women, but she seems to believe that simply tinkering with testosterone will make a male athlete into a female athlete? She knows better than almost anyone on this planet that that’s not possible. And yet, Ackerman presented this absolute joke (below), that she knows very well does not rise to the level of fourth grade science, from her “good friend” Joanna Harper. I wrote about Harper and his self-identified study in N=8: the miscarriage of science that allows trans-identified males to compete in women’s sports. Typical of middle-aged male athletes who begin taking testosterone blockers and estrogen, Harper was distressed by becoming slower. It seemed to him he slowed by about 12%, which is the average difference between male and female running performance. Harper sought to show this was a legitimate phenomenon that would allow him to compete equitably in the female category, which he did even before he had any evidence that this was fair. Because he wanted to. Man=entitlement. Eventually he found seven other trans-identified male runners who had run pre- and post-transition. Harper included himself in his data survey, ending with a pool of eight participants. Absurdly small. No control group. He asked the other runners what their times were pre- and post-transition, and he scored them by age grade—comparing them with other males their age and post-transition, with other females their age. His data pool self-reported their times (they may have conveniently forgotten a race that showed they were finishing with a higher age grade as a female). The time span between pre- and post-transition data points varied from two years to 29 years, so, many many things could have accounted for the runners slowing down, aside from hormone treatment, but Harper assigned all decrease in performance to HRT. That is, except for runner #7 who actually got quite a bump up by running in the female category. In that case, Harper said the runner just started training more, and then tossed out that data point! This meaningless survey of seven unverifiable numbers was picked up by the International Olympic Committee as proof that testosterone suppression eliminated male advantage, and allowed males to compete in the female category.

That was in 2015. Though Ackerman knows the ignoble story behind this “study,” she presented it in 2023 as the ONLY study in trans athletes. She also knows that is not true. The many other legitimate studies and reviews simply don’t show what she wanted them to show; they all demonstrate that male advantage is retained despite testosterone suppression. Interestingly, Ackerman, as deputy editor at British Journal of Sports Medicine has likely had a hand in rejecting those studies that show male advantage is retained. Normally, I’d say Ackerman was being disingenuous in presenting this “study,” but considering her expert status and the impact her views have on policy and on women’s rights, using this as legitimate proof that testosterone suppression is the answer to male inclusion in female sports is calculated misinformation.

More Ackerman contradictions: “We should let kids be kids.” Except of course, when they’re born in the wrong body, in which case, we can let boys take away fairness for female athletes. There are already many examples of teenage boys outperforming girls of the same age in girls’ sports. Most states that allow boys to compete in alignment with their gender identity do not require that they be on puberty blockers or testosterone suppression—unfairness for girls is apparently acceptable collateral damage, but requiring boys to take drugs they know to be harmful is a line they won’t cross. Ackerman, the fierce advocate for women, thinks male inclusion in girls’ and women’s sports is fine at all levels until: “As we go further and further into the elite world, there are scholarships and sponsorships, this is a career, these things get trickier and they’re more subtle, and we have to keep an open mind… and be kind in the process.” Which sounds an awful lot like someone who is not a fierce advocate for women, but rather thinks women should be nice about giving away their rights.

By the by, Ackerman has hired Joanna Harper to work on this youth transgender study with her. Since 2015, Harper, funded by the IOC, has continued to try to design a study that will show that testosterone suppression “works” for male inclusion in female sports. And he’s been unsuccessful, even though he works backward from the outcome he wants, which is not science. So, Ackerman has hired a bogus “scientist” to work with her on a project she knows is both impossible and harmful to women and women’s sports, AND involves medicalizing young children, a subject on which what she says and what she does are worlds apart.

Ackerman’s statements about youth “gender affirming care” are wildly contradictory. In the webinar called Care of the Transgender Athlete, she said: “Sometimes there can be compelling reasons to start cross-sex hormones before age 16.” She spoke of puberty blockers as “pausing” puberty, without mentioning any of their side effects or irreversibility. Blithely, she talked about children born female who “really don’t want to get their period. The period really reminds them of their biology. They really identify as a man, and then they have this monthly period to suggest otherwise and that’s very distressing, so we want to suppress that.” Similarly, Ackerman talked about “transfeminine” patients [she implies they are ill] who find body and facial hair distressing, “so we typically use spironolactone.” She went on to say that “gender affirming care” reduced anxiety and mental distress in children, a claim that was, even then, questioned (as we now know, that information was suppressed). In this case, Ackerman was disturbingly matter-of-fact about using dangerous drugs to treat children who are suffering from a catastrophic disconnect with reality, and often other mental health issues.

But she thought youth in rowing should be able to participate in their chosen gender without any hormone treatment, in part, because of the deleterious side effects of that treatment. Recall the slide higher up that showed risks of hormone treatment—blood clots, gallstones, stroke, heart attack, higher triglycerides, and that “treatment” would be lifelong. Now she wants to experiment on even younger children? That just seems like a gross failure of duty.

In the 2023 webinar, Ackerman alludes to World Athletics’ and World Aquatics’ policies that ban anyone who has been through male puberty, calling this an effective “ban on trans athletes.” That’s a tired lie (everyone is free to compete in their sex category) but hints at Ackerman’s motivation for “starting people at a younger age” on experimental off-label drugs—as a desperate and misguided work-around to policies that protect the female category.

Nike, Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, and Dr. Ackerman are conflicted, compromised, and connected by this well funded but under-the-radar experiment on children. They’d rather no one knew too much about it. And now, you do.