来源：《经济学人》
原文见刊日期：2022年3月19日
Lia Thomas, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, is an excellent swimmer. She often beats her rivals by tens of seconds, breaking records. Her success is based on three things. One is natural talent. Another is relentless training. And the third is biology.
宾夕法尼亚大学的学生利亚·托马斯是一名优秀的游泳运动员。她经常以数十秒的优势击败对手，打破记录。她的成功基于三件事。第一是天赋。第二是坚持不懈的训练。第三是生理。
For although she identifies as a woman, Ms Thomas was born male. She finds herself at the centre of the bad-tempered debate about whether trans women—males who identify as women—should compete in women’s sports. That, in turn, is part of a broader argument: should brute biological facts sometimes override people’s deeply held feelings about their identities?
尽管托马斯女士自认为是女性，但她生来就是男性。她发现自己处于一场激烈辩论的中心，这场辩论的主题是：跨性别女性——即自认为女性的男性——是否应该参加女子体育比赛。反过来，这又是一个更广泛的争论的一部分：赤裸裸的生物学事实是否有时会凌驾于人们对自己身份的深刻感受？
However, it is almost always unfair to allow transgender women to compete in women’s sports. The advantages bestowed by male puberty are so big that no amount of training or talent can enable female athletes to overcome them. Florence Griffith Joyner’s 100-metres world sprinting record has stood for three decades. A male matching it would not even make it to the Olympics, let alone the final. In 2016, at an American event for high-schoolers, four of the eight boys in the 100-metres final ran faster.
然而，允许跨性别女性参加女子体育比赛几乎总是不公平的。男性青春期所赋予的优势是如此之大，以至于任何训练或天赋都无法使女性运动员克服这些优势。弗洛伦斯·格里菲斯·乔伊娜的100米世界短跑纪录已经保持了30多年。如果是男性选手，这个成绩连奥运会都进不去，更别说决赛了。2016年，在美国一场高中生比赛中，参加100米决赛的8名男生中有4人跑得比乔伊娜的记录更快。
Much of the male advantage is granted by testosterone whose levels rise sharply in male puberty. For many years many sporting bodies, following the lead of the International Olympic Committee, hoped to finesse the issue by allowing trans women to compete in women’s events provided they took testosterone-suppressing drugs. But the science suggests this does not level the playing field. Suppressing testosterone in adults, it seems, does little to undo the advantages granted by a male adolescence.
男性的优势在很大程度上是由于睾酮激素水平在男性青春期急剧上升。多年来，在国际奥委会的领导下，许多体育机构都希望通过允许跨性别女性参加女子比赛来解决这个问题，前提是她们服用抑制睾酮激素的药物。但科学表明，这并不能创造公平的竞争环境。抑制成人体内的睾酮似乎并不能抵消男性青春期所带来的优势。
Sports must therefore choose between inclusion and fairness; and they should choose fair play. That does not mean, as is sometimes alleged, that trans women would be barred from all sport. One way to make that clear would be to replace the “men’s” and “women’s” categories with “open” and “female” ones. The first would be open to all comers. The second would be restricted on the basis of biology.
因此，体育必须在包容和公平之间做出选择；他们应该选择公平竞争。这并不意味着，就像人们有时所说的那样，跨性别女性将被禁止参加所有体育比赛。一个明确的方法是用“不限性别”和“女子”分类取代“男子”和“女子”分类。前者来者不拒，后者则仅限生物学女性参赛。
Sport is public, and results can be measured objectively. That means the argument that the material facts of biology should sometimes outrank a person’s subjective sense of identity is easier to make. Most of the time, it costs little or nothing to respect people’s choices about how they wish to present themselves. In the rare cases where rights clash, society must weigh the trade-offs sensitively and with open eyes.
体育赛事是公开的，其结果也是可以客观量化的。个人的主观认同感有时需让位于生物学上的关键事实，如此看来并无不妥。绝大多数情况下，个人的自我意愿和自我表达与他人无关。在极少数存在权利冲突的情况下，社会则需要做出谨慎细致的权衡了。