爲什麼別人誤把我的兒子看成女兒,我卻不糾正他們呢

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."

我有個兩歲的兒子，他有着常常的睫毛、精緻的臉蛋、一頭金黃飄散的長髮，我們有時會給他扎個馬尾，有時會在頭頂扎個小丸子頭。所以當德克蘭在操場上玩時，有些大人會驚呼，“多漂亮的小女孩兒啊，你的女兒真可愛”，也就不足爲怪了。

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.

發生這種情況的時候，我們會表示謝謝，但我們很少會糾正他們這是男孩兒。我覺得，這是因爲在我兒子這個年紀，性別並不是很重要。我不想德克蘭在長大的過程中對男孩女孩、剛毅陰柔劃分界限；不想他認爲長髮的就是女生、短髮的就是男生；也不想讓他覺得被誤認爲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.

現在，我並不是說我想要讓我的兒子在一種進步的後性別烏托邦世界中長大。但我仍然想讓他生活在這樣的一個世界中：他可以在學校穿着他的芭蕾舞短裙，而別人卻不會說三道四。

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.

而且他現在才兩歲。幸運的是，過去30年，世界發生了很大的變化，希望他以後的生活會比我更加容易。

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.

當我還是小男孩的時候，我的長相遠不及我兒子，但是我的聲音特別尖，還有一些娘炮動作。所以我一邊長大，一邊十分在意自己是不是有男子氣概。在小學和初高中的時候，我脆弱的自尊心頗受蹂躪，我給自己試壓，強迫自己去迎合社會對男子氣的概念，直到上了大學纔有所放鬆，那時候迎合嚴格的性別刻板印象已不再是全球公認的好品質。

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，在兒子成長的過程中，我和妻子會和他進行有關性別的嚴肅對話，他也會承受我曾承受過的壓力。但現在，我們十分享受活在這樣一個他不需要知道或者不需要關注性別差異的世界中，我們也希望儘可能的維持這一純真時代。