变过性后还能公平竞争吗？
Joanna Harper swallowed a few pills in late August 2004, a day after running in the Hood to Coast relay race between Oregon's highest mountain and the Pacific Ocean.
乔安娜.哈珀于2004年八月末服下了几枚药丸，一天前她刚刚在俄勒冈的高山和太平洋之间举行的海岸接力赛上跑过步。
They delivered a small dose of estrogen and a testosterone blocker and set in motion changes that Harper, who was designated male at birth and raised as a boy, had imagined since childhood.
这些药丸含有小剂量的雌激素和一种睾丸酮抑制剂，剂量会随时调整，因为哈珀，在出生时比指定为男性，从小又是当男孩养的，她自己从童年开始也是这么以为的。
Harper's timing was deliberate—the 47-year-old nationally ranked runner wanted one more race before disrupting her hormones because she knew she'd never run as fast again.
哈珀服药的时机是故意算好的—这名47岁的国家级跑步运动与想要在打乱自己的荷尔蒙之前最后跑一次步，因为她知道她很可能不能再跑得这么快了。
The testosterone that courses through a man's body after puberty triggers and maintains a slew of physical changes: Men, whose levels of the hormone are usually some 10 to 15 times those of women, typically have larger muscles, denser bones, and higher fractions of lean body mass than women.
在成年后睾丸酮会引发男性身体的一连串变化：男性，他们的这种荷尔蒙水平是女性是10到15倍，通常会比女性拥有更大块的肌肉，更结实的骨骼，更高的去脂体重比例。
That hormone-fueled transformation confers certain athletic advantages, and men on average run faster, lift more weight, and throw harder and farther than women.
这种荷尔蒙引发的转变会带来运动方面的优势，男性一般会比女性跑的更快，举得更重，投掷也更有力，更远。
Sporting events are therefore usually split into male and female categories to ensure fair competition.
因此体育项目通常分为男子组和女子组来保证公平竞争。
But this division of the sexes, which has existed for as long as women have competed as athletes, forces an important question: Who, at least from an athletic standpoint, is female?
不过这种自从女性成为运动员时就开始进行的对性别的划分提出了一个重要的问题：从运动员的角度来说，谁是女性呢？
Many people believe transgender women such as Harper have athletic advantages over non-transgender women—sometimes called cisgender women—because of their previous exposure to male levels of testosterone.
有很多人认为像哈珀这种变性的女人比那些没有变过性的女人更有优势—有时称为单性女人—因为变性人之前曾经体内有过高浓度的男性水平的睾丸酮。
But Harper, a medical physicist at a large medical center in Portland, Oregon, has been challenging that assumption with data.
不过哈珀，一名俄勒冈的波特兰市的一家大型医疗中心的医学物理学家，正用数据来挑战这种假设。
In 2015, she published the first study of transgender athletes' performances, finding that transgender women who received treatment to lower their testosterone levels did no better in a variety of races against female peers than they had previously done against male runners.
2015年，她发表了关于变性运动员成绩的第一篇研究论文，发现变过性的女性她们接受了降低睾丸酮的治疗后，再去参加跟女性竞争者比赛的跑步时，相比之前跟男选手比赛时，并没有什么优势。
Although Harper's study included only a few transgender women, Eric Vilain of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., a geneticist who specializes in gender-based biology, calls it "groundbreaking."
尽管哈珀的研究涉及的变性女性数目较少，位于华盛顿的乔治.华盛顿大学的艾瑞克.韦伦还是认为这是“突破性”的发现，艾瑞克是一名遗传学家，专门研究跟性别相关的生物学。
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