A Canadian-born researcher is back on her home soil after she says her study on transgender athletes received pushback and lost funding south of the border.

For two decades, Joanna Harper has been studying the ways hormone therapy makes a difference in trans people’s athletic performance.

In early 2024, she started working on a new project at a university in Portland, Ore., where she was researching fitness performance levels in trans youth before and after they started puberty blockers or hormone therapy.

The project was supposed to take five years. It ended in just 18 months.

“Once [U.S. president] Donald Trump got elected, it was certainly understood by all of us that many things concerning trans people in the U.S. were in danger,” Harper said.

“They were clearly targeting the tran

See Full Page