何为女人

Who We Are
我们是谁
By Susan Stryker
文/苏珊·斯特莱克
Stryker is a presidential fellow and visiting professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Yale University.
斯特莱克是耶鲁大学女性、性别及性行为研究方向的带头研究员兼客座教授。

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What is a woman?
何为女人？

An “adult human female,” according to a seemingly commonsense slogan seen on the Tshirts and laptop stickers of those who oppose the idea that transgender women are women. They argue that gender itself is a false ideology masking the truth of biological sex difference.
根据反对跨性别女性也是女性这一理念的那些人的T恤和笔记本贴纸上那些看似常识的标语来看，女人就是“成年的人类女性”。他们声称，性别这一概念本身就是一种错误的意识形态，它掩盖了生理性别差异的真相。

But “woman” is complicated in ways that have little to do with transgender issues. Only the delusional would deny biological differences between people, but only the uninformed can maintain that what the body means, and how it relates to social category, doesn’t vary between cultures and over time.
但是，“女人”这一概念之复杂与跨性别问题并无太大关联。只有凭空臆想之徒才会否认人与人之间的生理差异，但只有一知半解之徒能声称，身体的含义以及这一含义与社会范畴的关系，不会随着文化或时间的推移而变化。

The Caribbean novelist and intellectual Sylvia Wynter opposes the “biocentric” ordering of the world that emerged from European colonialism; the transatlantic slave trade depended, after all, on the idea that certain biological differences meant a person could be treated like property.
加勒比海小说家智者西尔维亚·温特反对欧洲殖民主义带到当地的“以生物为中心”的世界秩序；毕竟，跨大西洋的奴隶贸易依赖的便是这样一种观念：某些生物差异便意味着一个人也可以被视为一笔财产。

The black 19th-century freedom fighter Sojourner Truth’s famous, perhaps apocryphal, question “Ain’t I a woman?” challenged her white sisters in the struggle for the abolition of slavery to recognize that what counted as “woman” counted, in part, on race.
在争取废除奴隶制的斗争中，19世纪黑人自由斗士索杰娜·特鲁斯那句著名（但真实性存疑）发问“我不是女人吗？”便是向她的白人姐妹们发出的一项挑战，看她们是否会意识到“女人”一词的含义一定程度上还要视种族而定。

A century later in the Jim Crow South, segregated public toilet doors marked men, women and colored underscored how the legal recognition of a gender binary has been a privilege of whiteness.
一个世纪后，在“吉姆·克劳（过去美国社会对黑人的蔑称）的南部”，门上标有男性，女性，有色人种的隔离公厕便凸显了法律对二元性别的承认不过是白人才有的特权。

In 1949, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir asserted that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”; in doing so, she grasped how the raw facts of our bodies at birth are operated on by social processes to transform each of us into the people we become.
1949年，法国哲学家西蒙妮·德·波伏娃宣称，“一个人并非一生下来便是女人，而是出生之后才变成了女人”；自出生之日起，我们的身体便被社会社会伦理操控了并最终将我们每个人变成了我们今天的样子，波伏娃的上述定论堪称准确地把握了这一残酷的事实。

Who gets “womaned” by society and subjected to misogynistic discrimination as a result, and who answers yes to the question, posed publicly or in the innermost realms of thought, as to whether they’re a woman or not?
是谁被社会“变成了女人”并因此遭受厌女人群的歧视？又是谁对社会公开提出或是在内心深处暗自发出的，她们究竟是否是女性这一问题给出了肯定的回答？

The intersection of those two conditions arguably marks the status of belonging to womanhood in ways that do not depend on reproductive biology.
可以说，这两种情况的相互交织代表的是属于女性，但并非是从生殖生物学的角度获得了这一身份的属性。

The “What is a woman?” question can stretch the bounds and bonds of womanhood in messy yet vital directions—as in the case of Marsha P.Johnson, a feminine gender-nonconforming person who graced the streets of New York City as a self-proclaimed “street transvestite action revolutionary” for decades.
“何为女人”这一问题让“女性”这一概念的范畴与纽带往一个混乱却又十分重要的方向做
了延伸——玛莎·P·约翰逊的情况便是如此，几十年来，与传统二元性别相斥的她一直自诩“街头异装癖革命人士”，也一直以这样的形象穿梭在纽约的大街小巷。

She’s now hailed as a transgender icon, but Johnson fits awkwardly with contemporary ideas of transwomanhood, let alone womanhood more generally.
如今，她被世人誉为“跨性别人士的偶像”，问题是，她与当代跨性别女性观念难以对应，更不用说广泛的女性观念了。

She called herself “gay” at a time when the word transgender was not common, and lived as a man from time to time.
在她那个时代，“跨性别人士”一词尚不常见，她给自己的称呼是“（男）同性恋”，她也会时不时以男性的身份生活。

She used she/her pronouns but thought of herself as a “queen,” not as a “woman,” or even a “transsexual.”
她会用代词“她”，但她认为自己是一个“女王”，并不是一个“女性”，甚至连“跨性别人”也不是。

While some people now embrace a rainbow of possibilities between the familiar pink and blue, others hew even tighter to a biological fundamentalism.
尽管部分人现在已经接纳了大家熟悉的“粉色”（代表女性）和“蓝色”（代表男性）两大象征之间还存在其他种种可能性的观点，但也有一些人选择了向生物原教旨主义进一步靠近。

Those willing to recognize new forms of gender feel anxious about misgendering others, while those who claim superior access to the truth are prepared to impose that truth upon those who disagree.
那些愿意承认新的性别形式的人会对弄错他人性别感到担忧，而那些声称自己获取真相的途径高人一等的人却时刻准备将他们的真相强加于与他们看法相左的人身上。

What’s right—even what’s real—in such circumstances is not always self-evident.
这些时候，何为正确？甚至是何为真实？答案都已经不再那么明显。

Labeling others contrary to how they have labeled themselves is an ethically loaded act, but “woman” remains a useful shorthand for the entanglement of femininity and social status regardless of biology—not as an identity, but as the name for an imagined community that honors the female, enacts the feminine and exceeds the limitations of a sexist society.
给他人贴上与他们自己所贴的标签相反的标签是一种充满道德色彩的行为，但“女性”一词依然有效概述了女性气质与不考虑生理因素情况下的一种社会身份之间的纠葛，此语境下，“女性”不再是一种身份，而是一个想象中的群体，一个尊重女性，塑造女性，超越存在性别歧视的社会的重重局限的群体。

Why can’t womanhood jettison its biocentrism to expand its political horizons and include people like Marsha P.Johnson?
“女性”一词何不抛弃其“生物中心主义”论调，扩宽其政治视野，将玛莎·P·约翰逊之类的人也接纳过来呢？

After all, it’s we the living who say collectively what “woman” means, hopefully in ways that center the voices and experiences of all those who live as women, across all our other differences.
毕竟，“女性”一词的含义，是要我们活着的人集体来定义的，而我希望，我们在定义的时候，能够超越我们在其他方面的所有差异，把目光放在以女性身份生活的所有人的心声及生活经历上。