Professor Ada Cheung is a clinician-scientist focused on one goal: building robust evidence to improve the health and wellbeing of transgender and gender-diverse people. Although 0.9% of Australians are trans, they remain among the most marginalised and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities.
Her work in trans health began in 2015, when a local hospital declined to accept trans patients into endocrine clinics. With no formal training in the field but a commitment to equity, she began providing care off site and quickly saw the scale of unmet need: systemic discrimination, barriers to access, and resultant severe mental-health inequities, with suicide the leading cause of death. She also encountered a scant evidence base, with few high-quality studies to guide treatment or understand the long-term effects of gender affirming hormone therapy. These evidence gaps are routinely exploited to restrict access to healthcare or to justify exclusion of trans people from everyday life, from bathroom use to participation in sport.
In 2017 she founded the Trans Health Research Group to close these gaps, pioneering co-designed research (over half the team are trans) with clinical service innovation to improve the health and wellbeing of trans people. United by a vision for trans people to live without barriers, her research group now provides rigorous data, guidance, and advocacy that counter misinformation and politicisation, safeguard access to evidence-based healthcare, and support the human rights of trans people.