1928 年阿姆斯特丹奥运会 800 米比赛中，人见娟枝（左）与德国女子田径运动员莉娜·拉德克（Lina Radke，该项目当年的金牌获得者）并排赛跑
近年来，有关跨性别运动员的讨论频繁出现在各大媒体头条，在体育界，因生理性别争议而导致运动员无法参赛的情况已经不止一次出现。即便运动员是顺性别，如拥有 XX 染色体的人在出生时被认定为女性，她现在也认同自己是女性，也可能因为生物学特征（性激素水平等）而被禁止参赛。高水平体育赛事中的性别验已经存在了近 100 年，最终发展出了一些令人震惊的现代政策。在很多时候，体育运动中“不公平优势”的具体体现可能会有点反直觉。以南非运动员奥斯卡·皮斯托瑞斯（Oscar Pistorius）为例，他是一位双腿截肢的男性短跑运动员，曾在 2012 年伦敦奥运会男子 400 米短跑比赛中与身体健全的运动员同场竞技，这引起了很大的争议，有些人怀疑他因假肢更为轻巧而拥有“不公平优势”，可能会比拥有完整双腿的人跑得更快。但根据美国科罗拉多大学博尔德分校（University of Colorado Boulder）在 2022 年发表的一项研究，与健全的短跑运动员相比，装有义肢（跑步假肢）的短跑运动员在 400 米竞赛上并不存在明显的竞争优势，甚至在起跑时存在很大的劣势。这种“不公平优势”是一个值得思考的问题，我们须要知道如何对其进行判断。一位名叫卡斯特·塞门亚（Caster Semenya）的南非女性短跑运动员也遭遇过类似的情况。她在 2009 年闯入了世界田径锦标赛的舞台，但因体内自然产生的睾酮水平高于普通女性，卡斯特的性别受到了公众质疑，人们说她占据了不公平优势。现在正值巴黎奥运会赛季，延续近 100 年的性别验证测试政策随时间的推移发生了一些变化，但仍然存在。在奥运会中，有关女性生理性别和社会性别的验证问题几乎无时无刻不在发生。1928 年的阿姆斯特丹奥运会是第一届允许女性参加田径项目的奥运会。在此之前，女性只能参加其他被认为更“女性化”的奥运体育项目，比如游泳和网球。很快，媒体和体育领域的官员就跳出来施压，声称“这些女人有问题”。那时人们更倾向于认为，“女性参与体育运动本质上就不符合女性特征”，甚至有人坚信，女性如果参加了太多田径运动，就可能变成男性。大多数时候，我们对性别的判断基于一种非常僵化的性别二元论——通过性染色体来判定生理性别，非男即女。这显然不是人类性别分布的真实模式，但在一百年前，社会上并没有形成非常明确的性别二元论概念。当时西方（至少在欧美地区）的主流性别观念是一种被称为平衡理论的观点：每个人出生时体内都有一定数量的“男性特质”和“女性特质”，比如，你可能具有 65% 的女性特质或 99% 的女性特质，而如果你做了某些事，这种平衡可能就会改变。女性可以通过参与一些具备“男子气概”的活动，比如参加体育运动，来让自己变成男人，特别是那些已经有点“倾向于”男性的女性，诡异的是，这也许歪打正着地贴近了现实世界里的性别特征谱系，虽然从本质来说还是错误的。如今，西方的政客们总爱发表一种言论：“过去人们认为世界上只有两种性别，而现在的人们迷失在了对性别的判断中。”但实际上，古往今来，性别一直都是个令人困惑的问题。从本质上看，人类生来就是矛盾体。旧时的掌权者认为，这些参加奥运会田径比赛的女性要么是游离在两性之间的边缘人，要么可能会把自己变成男人，所以他们决定，要出台一些规章制度来对运动员的性别进行测试和检查。这是一种父权家长制的“关怀”：“我们须要保护这些女性，使她们免受伤害，因为显然真正的女性不会想参加田径比赛。”1928 年，人们会认为田径赛场上的女性选手“不是女人”。比如来自日本的女子田径运动员人见娟枝，她在阿姆斯特丹奥运会的女子 800 米跑项目中夺得银牌，成为首位获得奥运奖牌的亚洲女性，还打破了当时的世界纪录，但美国媒体却将她描述为“拥有橄榄球中后卫的力量，应该为芝加哥熊队效力。”当时不止一家媒体称，“女运动员们赛后精疲力尽地倒在终点线附近”，并对此表示“担忧”，认为这项比赛对于女性来说太难了。这引发了社会各界对女性参与剧烈体育竞技运动的质疑，许多人对女性在奥运会田径赛事中的表现感到不适，进而促使国际奥林匹克委员会（The International Olympic Committee，IOC，下称“国际奥委会”）和 国际业余田径联合会 [International Amateur Athletics Federation，世界田径联合会（World Athletics）前身，下称“国际田联”] 投票决定取消女子 800 米赛跑项目，直到 1960 年，这一项目才回归奥运会赛场。但根据当时的影像记录，她们其实更像普通人，而非健壮的当代体育运动员。所谓的“虚弱地晕倒”、“崩溃”则是媒体的夸张报道，扭曲了事实，参赛的 9 名女子田径选手都完成了比赛，只有 1 人在到达终点后不慎摔倒，但也很快站了起来：她们的表现和任何参加过一场激烈田径比赛的运动员相比没有区别。在 1936 年柏林奥运会举办期间，美国短跑运动员海伦·斯蒂芬斯（Helen Stephens）在比赛中夺冠后被一位波兰记者质疑其女性身份，随后，她接受了一项未具体说明的测试，被柏林奥运会官员宣布为女性，拿到了金牌。当年的国际奥委会和国际田联通过了第一个官方政策，允许他们在没有确凿依据的情况下，将任何可疑的女性运动员拉到一边进行裸体检查。到 1966 年，赛事管理者决定将这种临时起意、随机应变的性别检验规范化，并将所有女性运动员都纳入测试。这种性别测试后来被称为“裸体游行”（nude parade）或“瞄瞄戳戳”（peek and poke）的性别测试：每个参加田径比赛的女性运动员都必须进入一个房间，在（通常由男医生组成的）检查小组（有时是一个人，有时不止一个人）面前赤身裸体，以确认她们的生殖器官和外貌特征符合“女性标准”。在运动员的抗议下，这些裸体检查的性别验证测试在 1968 年被取消。国际奥委会转而引入了染色体测试（又称“女性气质测试”），以确保参加奥运会的所有女性运动员都拥有 XX 性染色体。在测试后，女性运动员们会得到一份看起来有点像驾照的女性身份认证，每次参赛时都必须随身携带。尽管这项测试被运动员、科学界、医学界强烈谴责，但直到 2000 年悉尼奥运会前不久才被取消。医生和科学家认为这项测试起不到应有的作用，无法抓住所有试图参加女子田径比赛的男性，因为有些男性也可以拥有 XX 染色体；它只会“误伤”一些拥有 XY 染色体，但对此并不知情的女性，她们一直以女性身份备赛，终于站在奥运会的赛场上，却突然被告知：“其实你不是女性，你不能参赛了。”认为染色体测试行不通的科学家们，三十年来一直在给国际奥委会和国际田联写信抗议，但都被拒绝了。当被问及此事时，国际奥委会和国际田联的回应差不多是：“我们理解你们科学家在实验室里的思考方式，但这是体育比赛，我们在这里有我们自己的处理方式。”三十年间，类似的抗议发生过无数次，当局的态度大概是：“你说你们不喜欢裸体接受生殖器检查，那你们想要什么？”然后……[查看全文]
The Long History of Sex Testing in the Olympics and Other Elite Sports
Rachel Feltman: There have been a lot of headlines in recent years about transgender athletes. But this isn’t actually the first time debates over biological sex have caused controversy and exclusion in the sports world.Even athletes who identify with the sex they were assigned at birth, meaning people with XX chromosomes who were assigned female at birth and identify as women today, can find themselves banned from elite competition on the basis of their biology.For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today I’m talking to award-winning reporter and writer Rose Eveleth. They’re the creator and host of a new series called Tested, co-produced by CBC Podcasts and NPR’s Embedded.Tested follows the surprising 100-year history of sex testing in elite sports, which has culminated in some shocking modern policies.So, Rose, for listeners who aren’t familiar with your work, I would love to hear a little bit more about how you came to this story.Rose Eveleth: I was an intern in the ye olde days of Scientific American.Feltman: As was I! What a time.Eveleth: Yeah, in the blog minds of early science Internet. But so I was an intern at Scientific American, and I was looking for something to write about, and I had been writing a lot about prosthetics because, you know, when you’re an intern you say yes to literally anything anyone gives you to write.And as I was looking for something to write about, I came across the story of Oscar Pistorius, who is a South African man who is a double amputee and who, at the time, was actually trying to race against able-bodied runners, and this was a big controversy because, you know, there was this question of, “Does he have an unfair advantage because his legs are so light and he might actually be able to run faster than someone who has full legs?” And I found that super interesting ’cause I was like, okay, what do we mean when we say an “unfair advantage” in sports? And it seems a little bit counterintuitive, perhaps, to think that, like, a double amputee has an unfair advantage in running.Eveleth: Like, that’s sort of an interesting, like, you know, thing to think about. And also, how would you even test that? And so I was reading about that, and I came across some other precedent about a different South African runner named Caster Semenya, who in 2009 broke onto the world stage and was very publicly questioned about her sex and was told that she also had an unfair advantage because of her body’s biology. And I had heard about Caster when this all happened in 2009, but, like, I didn’t really follow it ’cause honestly I remember seeing the headlines and being like, “What? Like, this doesn’t make any sense.” But in, I think it was 2012, I started really researching it, and I was like, “Whoa, there’s this really long history. There’s 100 years of sort of sex-testing policies.” And then, as I’ve been following it, those policies have changed over time and are still active.Feltman: So looking back at the Olympics specifically, since ’tis the season, what did you learn about how these questions sort of, like, first arose?Eveleth: Yeah, so one of the really interesting things that I learned when I started researching this is that questions about the true sex or true gender of women in the Olympics happened immediately.In 1928 it was the first year that women are allowed to run track at the Olympics. They had been allowed in other events before that that were deemed more feminine—so, like, swimming and tennis—but track and field, absolutely not until 1928. And immediately you hear the press, you hear sports officials saying, “There’s something wrong with these women.”Feltman: It sounds like at that time it was more like, “Is it inherently unwomaning to be in sports?” [Laughs]Eveleth: I mean, they genuinely believed that these women could turn themselves into men if they competed too much in athletics, l ike, that was an actual thing that they believed.Eveleth: Now we have this ... very problematic idea around, like, a very rigid sex binary, right? That there’s, like, XX, XY, like, you know, biological male, biological female …Eveleth: … which obviously is not actually how humans are [laughs], you know, distributed—in this clear bimodal situation—but at the time they did not have that, right? At the time there was not this very clear sense of a very rigid sex binary. At the time the dominant idea—at least in the West: sort of Europe and the United States—was this idea called balance theory …Eveleth: … which was that every person was born with a certain amount of, like, male and female stuff inside of them and you could be, like, a 65 percent woman or a 99 percent woman, and that if you did certain things, that balance could shift.So you could actually turn yourself into a man if you did manly things like participate in sports, especially if you were already kind of, like, a cuspy woman, you know [laughs], which I feel like is actually, weirdly enough, maybe closer to reality in terms of, like, the spectrum of sex characteristics that exist ...Eveleth: But is not also correct [laughs].Feltman: Right, right. It’s still, it’s still wrong, but it’s—I’d love to, like, kind of go back to that drawing board and pick up a little bit of what they were putting down.Yeah, you know, when you hear politicians today be like, “We used to know there were only two sexes; you know, now people are so confused,” it’s like, “Actually, listen, it’s always been confusing, man.” [laughs]Eveleth: The whole time, yeah. Yeah, being a human, I think, is just inherently confusing in so many ways ...Eveleth: [Laughs] But, yeah, they really thought that these women were either really line cases, is what they would often say, or potentially gonna turn themselves into men, and so they decided that there needed to be rules and regulations to kind of test and check. And it all comes from a very paternalistic sense of like, “We need to protect these women from themselves because clearly no true woman would want to compete in athletics. That’s, like, sort of not correct in some way.”Feltman: So how did that shift over time?Eveleth: Yeah, so 1928 you immediately get people being like, “That’s not a woman. That’s not a woman.” [Laughs] You know, like, you hear people talk about Hitomi Kinue, who is a Japanese runner, and in the newspapers they say, you know, “She has all the power of a halfback. She should be playing for the Chicago Bears,” is a thing that they actually printed about this woman—which is also very funny, looking at it now, ’cause you, you know, you see photographs of these women, who are being described as, like, absolute units, and they just look like regular people ...Eveleth: Like, we look at athletes today, right, they’re, like, incredibly jacked ...Eveleth: Like, it’s 1928 ...Feltman: Because they’re not actively fainting, they’re [laughs] ...Eveleth: [Laughs] Right, exactly. And so it’s so funny just, like, how that line has shifted, but in 1936 the first official policy in that regard is passed by the International Amateur Athletic Federation [IAAF], which is now known as World Athletics, the governing body of track and field. And that policy allows them to pull aside any suspicious female, and they don’t really say what warrants suspicion—it’s sort of a very, like, “you’ll know it when you see it” kind of situation. And the policy allows for an examination of that athlete, so that would be a nude inspection.Eveleth: There are some intervening years where you have instructions like, “We really want you to go to your doctor and get examined and bring a little, like, note—like a doctor’s note that says, like, ‘diagnosed female,’” or whatever [laughs], you know?Eveleth: Yeah, and then in 1966 they decide that doing this on a case-by-case basis, or sort of this ad hoc kind of way, is not good; we need to do it to all women. And they institute what are now known as the “nude parades,” also sometimes known as the “peek and poke” tests, which were: every woman who competed in track and field had to go into a room and get naked in front of a panel—sometimes one person, sometimes more than one—to be confirmed that their body looked correct for a woman.Eveleth: In 1968 they switch, and they change the policy, and they go to a chromosome test. And from 1968 to 1999, which is a very long period of time, every single woman who competed in the Olympics had to take a sex test, a chromosome-based sex test, and get a certificate of femininity that looks a little bit like your driver’s license and bring it with you—everywhere you go, whenever you compete. And that lasts until 1999.And the thing that’s really interesting about this period of time is that immediately—like, as soon as the IOC [International Olympic Committee] and the IAAF start using these tests—you have doctors and scientists being like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on—this won’t do any of the things that you say it’s going to do. It will not necessarily catch all men who try to enter a women’s competition because some men can have XX chromosomes. All you’re going to do is catch women who have no idea there’s anything different about them, who have shown up to the Olympics, trained their whole lives to compete and all of a sudden are gonna be told, ‘Actually, surprise, you’re not a woman, and you need to leave.’”You know, there was a 30-year campaign by these scientists to write to the IOC, to write to World Athletics and be like, “Guys, like, don’t do this. This doesn’t work. It’s not scientifically sound.” The guy whose test they were using wrote to the IOC and the IAAF, being like, “Please stop doing this,” and they were like, “No thanks,” [laughs] you know?When asked about it they basically say, like, “Look, I understand that you scientists in your labs have this way of thinking about things, but this is sports, and we do things our own way here.”And that was really, basically, the answer for 30 years, and it took a ton of work to try and convince these organizations to drop these tests.Feltman: I can just kind of imagine someone being like, “Well, you didn’t like it when we poked them and made them get naked. What do you want?” It’s like...[full transcript]
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