PEN0065 READING PROJECT T2220 Academic English (PEN0065) Trimester 2, 2022/2023 (T2220) Reading Project (30%) Instructions: Read the text and answer the questions that follow. The Future of Transgender Athletes 1 2 3 4 Donna de Varona, the Olympic swimmer who lobbied for Title IX’s passage in 1972; Donna Lopiano, the former chief executive of the Women’s Sports Foundation; and Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic swimmer and law professor who wrote a book on Title IX were universally respected as pioneers in the long fight for women’s equality in sports. They unveiled their project ─ changing the way transgender girls and women participate in women’s sports. Almost immediately, their proposal drew bitter criticism in the fraught debate over transgender rights. For starters, they planned to lobby for federal legislation requiring transgender girls and women, in high school sports and above, to suppress testosterone for at least one year before competing against other girls and women, making universal a policy already in place in some states and some higher levels of sports. For transgender girls in high school who do not suppress testosterone, they suggested “accommodations,” such as separate races, podiums or teams. They called themselves the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group. “To give girls and women an equal opportunity to participate in sports, they need their own team because of the biological differences between males and females,” said Hogshead-Makar, CEO of Champion Women, a women’s sports advocacy organisation. They portrayed their proposals as a science-based compromise between two extremes: right-wing politicians seeking wholesale bans of transgender athletes and transgender activists who argue for full inclusion and who even dispute what some view as settled science about the relationship between testosterone and athleticism. They quickly drew fierce backlash, illustrating how the issue of transgender athletes has become the most vexing and emotionally charged debate in global sports and why it may prove impossible for schools and sports organisations to craft policies that are both fair to all female athletes and fully inclusive of transgender girls and women. Transgender and women’s equality activists denounced their proposals as transphobic and accused the women of having a myopic focus on sports at a critical time for the transgender equality movement. In addition, the Biden administration fights to expand federal anti-discrimination protections for transgender people, and conservative lawmakers push bills in more than 20 states seeking to ban transgender athletes and criminalise gender-affirming hormone therapy for transgender youth. Although inside the world of sports, where careers are built on split-second wins and governed by rules that measure testosterone by the nanomole, these 1 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 1 PEN0065 READING PROJECT T2220 5 6 7 8 women’s proposals have gained some surprising voices of support. Many (even advocates) view their proposed policies as sensible for collegiate and professional athletes wonder whether these women have truly grappled with the impact their policies would have on the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of transgender girls across the country. “The folks who are pushing these anti-trans bills don’t believe transgender people exist. They think they’re faking it for an advantage in sports,” said Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director at the Human Rights Campaign. “I don’t know how you find a middle ground between a hate group and people pushing for equality.” Before 2010, few college or high school athletic associations had policies on transgender athletes, according to a report published that year by the Women’s Sports Foundation and the National Center for Lesbian Rights. Noting that there’s an increasing number of high school and college-aged young people are identifying as transgender, the report proposed a set of policies. In college sports, transgender women should undergo one year of hormone therapy before competing against other women, a rule rooted in scientific research that suggested such an approach would mitigate any athletic benefits. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) quickly adopted the policy. For high schools, the report recommended letting transgender girls compete in sports as soon as they transition socially and begin dressing and acting in accordance with their gender identity. Requiring hormone therapy for adolescents is potentially harmful, experts said in interviews, because not all transgender teens have supportive families or access to gender clinics. Ones who do may not want to undergo hormone therapy, which for transgender girls typically involves puberty blockers that pause developmental changes followed by a combination of testosterone suppressors and estrogen. According to information compiled by transathlete.com and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 10 states let transgender girls compete in high school sports after undergoing some treatment. Twelve states prohibit them entirely, including four that passed new laws and executive orders this year. Nine states have no policies at all, and 19 states, as well as the District of Columbia, let them compete regardless of testosterone level. For the past decade, this policy patchwork has developed largely without controversy. Transgender youth are a very small minority of the United State’s population with 1.8 percent of high school students, according to a 2019 Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report. The number of those transgender girls likely to play sports and compete at an elite level is even smaller. Running on the boys’ team as a ninth-grader in suburban Hartford, Terry Miller was an average track athlete, online records show, failing to qualify for any postseason events. However, in 2018, Miller came out as a transgender girl. In her first season running against other girls, as a sophomore, Miller dominated. She won various championships and titles. In interviews, Miller and her supporters discussed how important track was for her confidence and stability as she transitioned. “Track helps me forget about everything, and I love it,” Miller said in a 2019 story on DyeStat, a website that covers high school track and field. Support for Miller, however, was not unanimous. Girls who lost to her and their coaches complained that she had an unfair advantage. Parents of other girls 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80 2 PEN0065 READING PROJECT T2220 9 10 11 started online petitions demanding state high school officials add a testosterone suppression requirement for transgender girls. It has to be controlled to avoid injustice. The Alliance Defending Freedom argues that transgender girls and women always have physiological advantages in sports, even if they have suppressed testosterone. Benjamin Levine, a professor of cardiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, stated he understands why this topic stirs intense emotions, but there is no debate over whether post-pubescent transgender teenage girls and women have advantages in sports until they suppress testosterone. Regardless of gender identity, Levine said, people who go through puberty with male levels of testosterone, on average, will grow taller and stronger than cisgender girls and women, with more muscle mass, larger hearts and advantages in several other physiological factors that affect athleticism. Puberty in boys typically begins by 12 and ends by 18. “This is why, for every single record that you see in athletic competitions, boys and girls before puberty are about the same, and then everything diverges afterward,” said Levine, whose scientific research is cited by the women’s policy group. In an interview, Katrina Karkazis, a cultural anthropologist and bioethicist, emphasised many complexities in scientific research of testosterone and athleticism. It is concerned that testosterone is the main reason of difference performance of these athletes during competitions. Testosterone alone does not build a better athlete, researchers have found, but did not dispute that transgender girls and women who do not suppress testosterone have advantages in sports. Joshua Safer, who serves as the Executive Director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York Said Safer, said “the important thing to consider here is, as it relates to high school sports and teenagers, are we addressing a problem that actually exists, or are we simply addressing a fear?” The key concerns involved in transgendered athletes' participation at the highest levels of sport are traced back to issues of fairness – fairness and non-discrimination to transgendered athletes, and fairness to their competitors. It appears that there are several areas that schools and colleges’ management, sports competition organisers, cisgender schools and colleges’ athletes and transgender schools and colleges’ athletes need to improve for the benefits of cisgender and transgender athletes physically and psychologically. Adapted from Hobson, W. (2021, April 15). The fights for the future of transgender athletes. The Washington Post . https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/04/15/transgender-athletes-womens-sports-title-ix/ 85 90 95 100 105 110 3 PEN0065 READING PROJECT T2220 Instructions: Based on the text, answer all the questions below. 1. i. Describe the response that the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group receive after they reveal their proposal (1 mark). ii. Provide reasons why people react in that manner to the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group’s proposal (2 marks). 3 marks 2. What are stated in the policy proposed by the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group? 2 marks 3. How does the Women’s Sports Policy Working Group portray their proposals? 3 marks 4. What are transgender women required to do prior to competing against other women in college sports? 1 mark 5. What is the main idea of paragraph 8? 1 mark 6. Who does the word ‘ her ’ (line 78) refer to? 1 mark 7. Describe how does the performance of transgender girls and women in sports differ after puberty. 4 marks 8. State if these statements are facts or opinions. Justify your answers. a) Transgender and women’s equality activists denounced their proposals as transphobic and accused the women of having a myopic focus on sports at a critical time for the transgender equality movement. (line 26) b) Many (even advocates) view their proposed policies as sensible for collegiate and professional athletes wonder whether these women have truly grappled with the impact their policies would have on the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands of transgender girls across the country. (line 34) c) Twelve states prohibit them entirely, including four that passed new laws and executive orders this year. (line 61) d) Transgender youth are a very small minority of the United State’s population with 1.8 percent of high school students, according to a 2019 Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report. (line 65) 4 marks 9. Provide a word for the reading passage for each definition below. 4 marks 4 PEN0065 READING PROJECT T2220 a) people who are the first to study and develop a particular area of knowledge or culture ( paragraph 1) b) to decide or say officially that something is not allowed (paragraph 3) c) agreed or shared by everyone in a group (paragraph 8) d) an argument between two people, groups or countries; discussion about a subject on which people disagree (paragraph 10) 10. i. State the author’s intended audience. (2 marks) ii. Provide support from the text for your answer. (1 mark) 3 marks 11. i. What is the author’s tone in paragraph 10? (1 mark) ii. Provide supports from the text for your answer. (3 marks) 4 marks -end- 5