Joanna Harper is a research scholar advising the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and a transgender distance runner herself. She said it was possible to make sports fair to all. This story begins more than half a century ago. At that time, a six-year-old child living in a small town in Canada asked a friend if he ever wished he could try being a girl. The friend's response was shock and jeering enough that the kid would never ask anyone that question again. It was the 1960s, and Joanna Harper was born in a boy's body.
She was named after her father, and she knew early on that her identity felt a little different. As a girl trapped in a boy's body, Joanna describes it banner design as being a left-hander in a world built for right-handers. 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.
natural athlete 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 own identity, she knows she's trans. "I always knew I was a girl, even though I lived as a boy during those years," she said. After graduation, Joanna started working as a scientific researcher at a large medical institution in the United States. change.