My two-year-old son has long eyelashes, delicate features and long, flowing golden locks that we sometimes put in a ponytail or in a bun above his head. Consequently, it's not unusual for other adults at the playground to look at Declan and exclaim, "What a pretty little girl! You have such a lovely daughter."
我有个两岁的儿子，他有着常常的睫毛、精致的脸蛋、一头金黄飘散的长发，我们有时会给他扎个马尾，有时会在头顶扎个小丸子头。所以当德克兰在操场上玩时，有些大人会惊呼，“多漂亮的小女孩儿啊，你的女儿真可爱”，也就不足为怪了。
When that happens, we thank the complimenter but we rarely correct them. I suspect that's because, especially at my son's age, gender doesn't really matter. I don't want Declan to grow up drawing lines between boys and girls and masculine and feminine. I don't want him to grow up associating long hair with girls and short hair with boys. I also don't want him to think that being mistaken for a girl is, on any level, insulting.
发生这种情况的时候，我们会表示谢谢，但我们很少会纠正他们这是男孩儿。我觉得，这是因为在我儿子这个年纪，性别并不是很重要。我不想德克兰在长大的过程中对男孩女孩、刚毅阴柔划分界限；不想他认为长发的就是女生、短发的就是男生；也不想让他觉得被误认为女生是件侮辱人的事。
Now I'm not proposing that I'll raise my son in some sort of progressive post-gender utopia. But I do love that he lives in a world where he can wear his tutu for hours at school and no one thinks anything of it.
现在，我并不是说我想要让我的儿子在一种进步的后性别乌托邦世界中长大。但我仍然想让他生活在这样的一个世界中：他可以在学校穿着他的芭蕾舞短裙，而别人却不会说三道四。
Then again, he's only two. Thankfully, the world has changed an awful lot in the past 30 years, so hopefully it'll be easier for him than it was for me.
而且他现在才两岁。幸运的是，过去30年，世界发生了很大的变化，希望他以后的生活会比我更加容易。
I was nowhere near as pretty as my son when I was a boy, but I had a high-pitched voice and some feminine mannerisms. I consequently grew up super self-conscious about whether I was masculine enough. It played havoc with my fragile self-esteem and the pressure to conform to our society's idea of masculinity grew throughout elementary and high school and only really lessened during college, when conforming to rigid gender stereotypes stops being considered a universally positive quality.
当我还是小男孩的时候，我的长相远不及我儿子，但是我的声音特别尖，还有一些娘炮动作。所以我一边长大，一边十分在意自己是不是有男子气概。在小学和初高中的时候，我脆弱的自尊心颇受蹂躏，我给自己试压，强迫自己去迎合社会对男子气的概念，直到上了大学才有所放松，那时候迎合严格的性别刻板印象已不再是全球公认的好品质。
There's a good chance that my wife and I will have tough conversations about gender with our son as he grows up, and that the same pressures I faced will also affect him. But at this point we're loving living in a world where he doesn't seem to know or care about gender differences, and we'd like to sustain this period of dewy innocence as long as possible.
很有可能，在儿子成长的过程中，我和妻子会和他进行有关性别的严肃对话，他也会承受我曾承受过的压力。但现在，我们十分享受活在这样一个他不需要知道或者不需要关注性别差异的世界中，我们也希望尽可能的维持这一纯真时代。
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