白娘子打麻将 笑抽:我们是否要面临一个无性别化的未来？

有一小群人拒绝被贴上“男性”或“女性”的标签，这群人的数量正不断增多。

>今年春天，新南威尔士州出生死亡婚姻登记处向悉尼市民发了一张含有“既非男（M）也非女（F）”的证件，袋鼠国人氏Norrie May-Welby作为世界上第一个合法的无性人占尽了全世界的目光> 

For a few days, it appeared that the 48-year-old activist and performer had won a long legal battle to be declared “sex not specified”—the only category that felt right to this immigrant from Scotland. May-Welby’s journey of gender identity can only be characterized as a long and winding road. Registered male at birth, May-Welby began taking female hormones at 23 and had sex-change surgery to become a woman, but now doesn’t take any hormones and identifies as genderless. The prized piece of paper May-Welby sought is called a Recognised Details Certificate, and it’s given to immigrants to Australia who want to record a sex change.

几天来，这位48岁的行为艺术家、演员赢得了一场旷日持久的“性别不详”合法战争的胜利——对于这位苏格兰移民来说唯一正确的性别类型。May-Welby追求性别认证的道路算的上漫长而曲折。May-Welby在出生时被登记为男性，在23岁时开始使用雌性激素并做了变性手术从而成为了一枚女人，而TA现在不再使用任何激素并被鉴定为无性别。May-Welby所追求的这张珍贵证件叫“个人资料认证证”，它是发给那些想记录变性的澳大利亚移民的。

But the victory was short-lived. After so much publicity, it was perhaps inevitable that the New South Wales government would backtrack—which it did a few days later, saying the Recognised Details Certificate didn’t have the legal authority to issue a certificate with anything but male or female. May-Welby (who now goes by the single name Norrie) has filed an appeal with the Australian Human Rights Commission.

但这个胜利非常短命。在如此多的宣传后，新南威尔士州政府撤销的举动似乎就变成了必然。而政府几天后确实这样做了，并表示这个证件并不来自一个能够核发一张“既非男也非女”证合法机构。May-Welby（现在被称呼为单名Norrie）已经向澳大利亚人权组织递交了一份申请。 

It’s easy to dismiss this case as just one more bizarre news story from Down Under, but May-Welby’s case could also represent the future of gender identity. Although no one is keeping statistics, researchers who study gender say a small but growing number of people (including some who have had sex-change operations) consider themselves “gender neutral” or “gender variant.” Their stories vary widely. Some find that even after surgery, they simply can’t ignore previous years of experience living as another gender. Others may feel that their gender identity is fluid. Still others are experimenting with where they feel most comfortable on what they see as a continuum of gender. “For some, it’s a form of protest because gender is such a strong organizing principle in our society,” says Walter Bockting, an associate professor and clinical psychologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has been studying transgender health since 1986. “Their identities expand our thinking about gender.”

In fact, some researchers compare the evolution in thinking about gender to the struggle that began a generation ago for gay and lesbian rights. Dr. Jack Drescher is a member of an American Psychiatric Association (APA) committee that is currently reviewing changes to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is used around the world by clinicians, researchers, regulatory agencies, and insurance companies to classify mental disorders. DSM-5, as it’s called, won’t be published until 2013, but Drescher’s committee is reconsidering the diagnosis of gender-identity disorder, which encompasses people who do not identify with the gender assigned to them by biology.

事实上，一些研究者将这场性别思维上的革命与上一代人为同性恋权益所作的斗争对比。Jack Drescher博士是一个美国精神病学协会（APA）的委员，该协会目前正在审阅第十五版《诊断统计手册》。全世界的临床医生、研究人员、调控部门和保险公司都有使用这本书来将精神疾病归类。该书第五本，如其名，将会与2013年出版，但Drescher所在的委员会正在重新考虑将自我性别认识混乱（即包括那些不认同其自然生理身份的人）写入诊断中。

The current debate echoes the controversy over the APA’s 1973 decision to modify the second edition of the DSM by declaring that homosexuality could be considered a mental disorder only if it was disturbing to the patient. Drescher’s committee thought about dropping the diagnosis of gender-identity disorder altogether, but realized that if it did, people who wanted treatment (sex-change surgery, hormones, or talk therapy) wouldn’t be able to get the diagnosis they need for insurance coverage. Instead, Drescher says, the committee is proposing changing the name to “gender incongruence” and making the diagnosis contingent on the person feeling significant distress over their gender confusion. “We didn’t want to pathologize all expressions of gender variance just because they were not common or made someone uncomfortable,” Drescher says.

现在的争论让人想起了APA（澳洲通讯）1973年修改第二版《诊断统计手册》的决定。此次修改宣布了同性恋仅在干扰到患者时才可以被视为一种精神疾病。Drescher所在的委员会想过把有关自我性别认识混乱的诊断统统删去，但后来认识到这样做的话那些想得到治疗（变性手术、外加激素或交谈治疗）的人就不能得到其就诊所需的保险费了。Drescher说，委员会正提议把病名改为“性别失统”并且把确诊条件设为该人对其性别认识的混乱使其感到显著不适时。“我们不想仅仅因为那些人与众不同或令一些人感到不爽而将所有关于性别失统的表现归为病态。”

But that seemingly simple change of language could help usher in a new era, in which a person’s gender could be expressed or experienced as male, female, “in between,” or “otherwise.” “People who work in this area have very flexible notions of gender,” Drescher says. “We don’t want to force people to fit into a doctor’s categories,” even though, he concedes, most cultures “tend to think in binaries.”

但这个看似简单的语言变化可能会在一个人的性别可以被表示或被体现为男、女、“中性”或“其他”的新时代里帮到招待员。“在这种地方工作的人对性别的观念很灵活。”Drescher说。“我们不想强令人们填入医生所划的分类中。”即便如此，他承认，大多数文化“倾向于非此即彼地思考。”

Bockting predicts that such binary thinking will eventually disappear. Many scientists, he says, see gender as a continuum and acknowledge that some people naturally fall in the middle. Gender, Bockting says, “develops between the biological and the environmental. You can’t always detect gender by physical evidence. You have to ask the person how they identify themselves; in that sense, it’s psychological.

 

Bockting认为这种非此即彼的思想将会最终消失。“许多科学家，”他说，“将性别视为一种连续统一体并且承认一些人确实天生就是中性的。”“性别，”Bockting说，“在遗传与环境之间发展变化。你不能老是凭借生理证据来判定性别。你必须去问问这个人是怎么界定自己的。那样的话，就是从精神上了。”

And gender isn’t synonymous with sex, he says, although the distinction may elude the layman. Sex, Bockting says, is assigned at birth based on the appearance of external genitalia. But, he says, “to determine a person’s gender identity, you have to wait until they grow up and can describe how they identify their gender.” And being genderless or gender-neutral isn’t the same thing as being asexual. “If you are asexual,” he says, “you are not interested in having sex with other people,” while gender-neutral people may be attracted to men, women, both sexes, or other people who are gender-neutral.

“还有，性别与性并非同义词，”他说，“尽管门外汉可能不知道其区别。”“性，”Bockting说，“是生来便由外生殖器的样子注定的。但是，”他说，“要想判断一个人自我的性别认识，你就必须等到其长大成年，才能描述其如何界定其性别的。”并且“无性”或“中性”与无性欲并不是一回事。“如果你没有性欲，”他说，“你就对与其他人发生性行为毫无兴趣，但中性的人就可能会对男人或女人或双性或其他中性人感兴趣。”

And while May-Welby’s story may seem out there, Bockting says it’s not uncommon for people undergoing sex changes to find that surgery doesn’t resolve all their gender-identity issues. “With time,” he says, “they accept a certain amount of ambiguity … We have this idea that people take hormones and undergo surgery and become the other gender. But in reality it’s more complicated.”

尽管May-Welby的案例似乎已足够直面，Bockting说这对于那些正在经历性别转变却发现手术并不能解决他们全部的性别认识问题的人来说并不具普遍意义。“随时间流逝，”他说，“他们接受了一些模糊的信息...我们认为人们外加激素和做变性手术后就会变为另一种性别。但事实要复杂得多。”

Even before the advent of sex-change surgery, there were always people who felt they didn’t fit into either gender. In India, a group of people called hijra have existed for centuries. They are typically biological males who dress as women but consider themselves to have neither gender, Bockting says. There is also a long tradition of eunuch culture. Even today, other countries are more comfortable with the idea of gender variance. Drescher says that France has removed transsexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders and put it in the category of rare diseases. The British government has also declared that transsexuality is “not a mental illness,” but people who want a sex-change can get treatment under the National Health Service.

即使在变性手术前，也总有些人感觉他们不适合任何一个性别。在印度，一群叫hijra的人已经存在存在了数百年之久。他们是典型的伪娘，但却认为他们不属于任何一个性别。Botcking说。宦官文化也有很长的传统。即使在今天，其他国家对于性别失统的思想也宽容些。Drescher说法国已经将变性从精神病的列表中移除，而将其放在罕见病的目录之下。英国政府也已宣布变性“不是精神疾病，”但那些想变性的人们还是能在国家公共健康机构里得到治疗。

How all the debate will play out in this country is still unclear, but college students may be among those leading the charge for change. Many campuses—including Harvard, Penn and Michigan—now offer gender neutral housing and more unisex bathrooms to accommodate students who don’t fall neatly into male or female categories. The Common Application, which is used by most college applicants, just announced that it is considering adding voluntary questions that would give students a broader array of choices to describe their gender identity and allow them to state their sexual orientation, after gay advocates urged the change. How long before such changes begin to show up in other parts of society is unclear. But Drescher says he is certain of one thing after a lifetime of working with gender: "There is no way that six billion people can be categorized into two groups." Now if we could only figure out the pronoun problem.

这种争论将在这个国家种扮演何种角色还不清楚，但大学生们可能参与到领导改革的行列中了。许多学校——包括哈佛，宾大和密歇根——现在都为住校的非男非女的学生提供了中性公寓和更多不分男女的浴室。大多数大学申请者最普遍的请求仅仅是在同性恋拥护者强烈要求变革之后宣布正在考虑增加义务服务，这些服务将会给予学生们更多在其自我性别认知上的选择权，并且允许他们公开声明他们的性倾向。至于那些变革还需要多久才能出现在社会的其他地方，我们还不知道。但Drescher说在和性别问题打了一辈子交道后，他有一件事情是确定的：“没办法就把六十亿人划分为两类的。”现在我们可以解决这个代词问题了。

【本文由希神之后独家授权给译言