Like Color to the Blind

Attitudes toward vehicular child-safety have evolved considerably since the 1950s and early sixties. In those days, before the advent of laws mandating seat-belts and child restraints, the expansive back seats of Detroit’s leviathans were virtual playrooms. It was not uncommon to see children frolicking like tennis balls on a Forest Hills court while the parents would stare at the road in glazed oblivion. I do not recall my age at the time, but I was small enough to fit on the shelf under the back window of my Dad’s Pontiac. During the long journeys to and from the home of my grandparents – journeys which, according to my probably flawed memory, seem always to have occurred at night – I would lay on that shelf and gaze up at the stars, watching carefully to see if I could detect any movement. Already by that age I had some notion of the vast distances separating the earth from the stars, and I understood that the stars seem motionless because it is not possible to move far enough or fast enough to induce any apparent parallax.... But still, it took all night to drive home from Grandma’s house, so it had to be a great distance; and Dad always drove very fast (too fast according to Mom), so if I watched very carefully I just might see those stars creep ever so slightly across the night sky.
Laying there, scrutinizing the punctate abyss, trying not to blink lest I miss something, fighting sleep as I listen to the muted voices of my parents and the monaural crooning of Bobby Vinton, a strange thought emerges. Perhaps there was some chain of associations which led to this thought, perhaps somehow it arose from my astronomical observations, but the etiology is lost to time. “Beth.” I am speaking to my sister, two years younger than myself. She is huddled with her blankie against the passenger-side rear door (I wonder if it was locked), sucking her thumb with single-minded determination.
“Hm?” The thumb never leaves the mouth.
“What’s it feel like to be a girl?”
“Hm?”
“What’s it feel like to be a girl?”
The sucking becomes a bit more vociferous. In the darkness I can imagine the tiny furrows gathering between her brows. “I non’t know.”
Immediately my tone becomes exasperated, which is my usual sister-directed voice, “That’s stupid. How can you not know? You are a girl.”
“MOM!” Thumb expelled from pouting lips, “Sammy called me stupid.”
“Sammy....”
“I DID NOT!”
“Sammy, I heard you....”
“No Mom, I didn’t say she was stupid, I said that what she said was stupid.” Already I was a master of the fine, semantical distinction.
“Sammy, please don’t use that word, it’s a bad word.”
Not for one minute was I buying that. “But Mom, I was just asking her....”
“Don’t use that word, O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“Now what’s the problem?”
“I just asked her what it feels like to be a girl, and she said ‘I don’t know’, but she is a girl.”
“I’m a girl too, but I can’t answer that question.”
“Why not?”
“Well, what’s it feel like to be a boy?”
“It just feels normal.”
“To girls, it just feels normal to be a girl.”
“But....”
“Beth and I have never known anything but being girls, and you and Daddy have never known anything but being boys. We don’t have anything to compare it to, so we can’t really explain the difference.”
“But Mom, everybody’s always been a boy or a girl, so nobody would know what it feels like to be a boy or a girl.”
“I guess that’s true.”
It was one of those moments in my childhood – there were several – when I thought I had stumbled across a truth of cosmic proportions.
“I know what it feels like to be a girl,” Beth putting in her mandatory two-cents.
“What’s it feel like, baby?” I could hear the smile in my mother’s voice.
“Good.”
I remained very quiet in my rear-window perch, trying to fathom the possibility that nobody in the world, in the whole history of the world, knew what it felt like to be a boy or a girl. How could that be? And yet Mom, in her motherly wisdom, had a point. Though I could not quite put it into words at the time, I had begun to realize that a person’s experience of his or her own gender is like the back of one’s own head, too close to see. And the experience of the other, “opposite” gender is irredeemably invisible. Eventually sleep overcame perplexity, but in those final moments of consciousness I thought I saw the stars move.

It’s one of those dreams where you know it’s a dream during the dream. For me, this kind of self-consciousness within the dream is usually a precursor to awakening. Either the realization, “This is a dream!” itself startles me to wakefulness, or there is something eerie and ominous about the dream. I decide “I don’t want to have this dream,” and will myself awake. But not this time.
The dream is very simple. It consists of nothing but me standing naked in front of a full length mirror. The improbable, dream-like element arises because the image in the mirror is that of a woman. The primary emotion within the dream is stark, gape-jawed astonishment. Holy shit, I’m a woman!
My height seems unchanged – average for a man, tall for a woman. But my face is completely different, unfamiliar; it is not borrowed from any woman I know in real life and displaced onto my shoulders. She – I – the woman in the mirror, has red hair, smooth skin, very fair complexion, faint freckles, and green eyes. A stereotype of Irish beauty. Where does this come from? I’m neither red-headed, green-eyed, freckled nor Irish. I’m not above admiring red hair, but I have no particular fetish for it.
I appear to be young, early twenties maybe, and looking at the reflection with the eye of a man, I find the body most admirable. Slim, nice figure, well-tapered legs, flat stomach with a hint of definition in the rectus abdominus, prominent hip-bones and vaginal labia covered with a fine sheen of tawny hair. The breasts – my breasts – are small, pert and upturned. My fingers seem unusually long or slim, the nails painted a shade of green to accent my eyes, and the toenails painted to match. I pirouette, craning my head over my shoulder so I can see my reflection from behind. The maneuver is only partly successful, but sufficient to reveal a narrowing lower back, compact buttocks, and calves contoured as if accustomed to high heels.
Through the undiminished astonishment and the “Holy shit,” repeated like a profane mantra, I become aware of a tingling sensation originating from around my loins. Am I getting an erection? I turn and re-examine my genitals in the mirror. No, I have a vagina, not a penis. But still, I think I’m becoming aroused. I wonder if I should be disturbed or disgusted over the fact that I am being aroused by my own image, but I think, “It’s a dream. Who cares?”
Then I am being pulled away from the mirror, pulled toward wakefulness, and I resist. “No, not yet, not yet....” But the harder I resist, the more forcefully I am hurled toward wakefulness. Suddenly I am awake, frustrated, the feelings of astonishment and tingling in my abdomen remain. I am indeed aroused, the erection tent-like under the sheets. The dream is clear and does not fade; it never fades. As I write, more than twenty years later, it is as clear as the morning I woke from it.
I rise from the bed and examine myself in the mirror, just to make sure. I am impressed by my total lack of revulsion as I contemplate the dream. Doesn’t the male ego mandate horror at the idea of being identified with a woman? But my only psychological response seems to be an intense, consuming fascination. And there was something else, something I was on the verge of understanding. Another few moments.... What was it? That tingling in my abdomen? Drowsy erotic arousal, the morning’s diurnal urination, or was there something else? Whatever it may have been, it had retreated forever to the place where dreams go.

I was married the first time in 1976. It lasted for eight years. We were childless. My ex-wife suffered from something called Stein-Leventhal syndrome which means that she had cysts in her ovaries. It was very difficult for her to conceive, and she miscarried twice. We were toying with the idea of fertility drugs (which we really couldn’t afford, and we definitely couldn’t afford a multiple birth) when she became pregnant the third time, in 1984. She was in the 16th week of gestation when she was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. The drunk had numerous DUI convictions, and his driver’s licence had been revoked. But nevertheless, there he was, speeding and weaving along the highway where my wife was returning from the convenience mart. I had not yet come home, and she had run out to purchase butter for our dinner, leaving two potatoes baking in the oven. Had I left work a few minutes earlier, I would have been home in time to run that errand; a few minutes later, and I would have been at work to receive her phone call asking me to stop at the grocery en route. The highway patrol officer told me that death was instantaneous, as if I should take some consolation from this knowledge.
I was single for eleven years after that, almost half of them bereft, melancholy, struggling with anger and despair. But one day I noticed that the loneliness hurt more than the grief, and I took it as a sign that it was time to move on. I had been out of the dating scene for a long time, and had no especially fond memories of it. My friends were quick with advice and suggested what was, at the time, a newfangled invention: the on-line personals (there were as yet, to my knowledge, no on-line dating services). I’m not sure what I expected but, in retrospect, I think the only difference between e-personals newspaper personals was that the e-prospects had to be sufficiently intelligent to run DOS. Some of my experiences were memorable, if not exactly successful.
One woman I remember in particular. It was our second date, and I was already a bit wary. Our first time together I had taken her to a fairly expensive restaurant where I had eaten a regular meal, but she had only a glass of iced tea because she’d had “a rather large salad” for lunch. I was concerned about the possibility of anorexia or bulimia, and pleased to see her eating normally on this second occasion. Just as I was contemplating dessert and beginning to relax, she dropped the bomb.
“There is one other thing that you should know about me.” Her demeanor revealed that this wasn’t coming easily. I steeled myself, but not enough.
“Yes?”
“Until about ten years ago, I.... I was a man.”
I wonder what the expression on my face must’ve been. I measured my response, waiting long enough to finish chewing and swallow. “Really?”
“Yes. I’m a transsexual.”
“I – uh – see. That’s very interesting.” And suddenly it was very interesting. “Can I ask you kind of an odd question?”
“I guess.”
“What does it feel like to be a woman? I mean, you’ve been a man and a woman, right? So you have something to compare it to – being a woman, I mean. You must have a unique understanding of the difference.”
“No, it’s not like that.”
“It’s not?”
“Transsexuals are not men who one day decide they want to be women – or vice versa. I can’t imagine anyone making that decision, or actually following through with it. The transition is difficult physically and psychologically, the procedure is expensive and most insurance won’t cover it. The social stigma is, as you’ve probably noticed, almost insurmountable. No, real transsexuals are women trapped in a male body, or men trapped in a female body. The suffering is.... I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to live in a time when sex-change operations were not possible.”
“In other words, even though you spent the first half, two-thirds of your life in a man’s body, you still don’t know what it feels like to be a man?”
“That’s right. I know what it feels like to be trapped in a body of the wrong gender, but I don’t think that’s at all what it feels like to be a man.”
“I see.”
“May I ask you an odd question?”
“Fair is fair.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh, it’s just something I’ve wondered about, off and on, for a long time. I have this theory that no one knows what it’s like to be a member of the opposite sex, which, I suppose, is obvious enough. But I also suspect that no one really knows what it feels like to be a member of their own sex.”
“Feels like? I’m not sure I know what that means.”
“I’m not either. But I’m sure it means something. Women have more nerve endings, less muscle density, process information differently, and the behavioral differences are obvious. There has to be something, physical sensations, emotional tone, psychological background noise, something. But what? And what is it like?”

Until the early 1980s, prior to my first wife’s death, I would not have believed in recurrent dreams, particularly not in recurrent dreams with a semi-continuous narrative thread. My mind was changed when I had one, or rather a series of them. The dreams were not stories per se, and perhaps I err in referring to “narrative” continuity; perhaps the correct term would be continuity-of-character, because the continuous element was the fact that I always appeared in these dreams as the attractive, red-haired, ultra-Irish woman. When I say that the dreams were not stories, I mean that they were scenes in which I was doing ordinary, banal things like taking care of personal hygiene, dealing with the pain and malaise of catamenia, dressing, cleaning house, cooking, doing laundry, driving, shopping, going to work, conversing with friends, flirting. And, interestingly, being objectified in the unremarkable ways to which we have become so accustomed that they go unnoticed by perpetrator and victim alike. I am referring to the posterior appraisal, the subtle glance down the blouse, the gaze which never rises above the hemline, the lascivious double entendre, the dirty joke, the hidden agenda behind the compliment ostensibly directed toward hair or clothing or shoes.
The dreams came intermittently, separated by weeks or even months, and they persisted for a period of more than two years. I actually came to look forward to the REM-cycle fantasy. When I would awaken, I would describe the dream to my wife and, on those occasions when time permitted, we would speculate (sometimes heatedly) at great Freudian or Jungian length about the individual dream, or the entire series. But then the dreams took a turn for the strange.
I began to appear in the dreams as myself, my male self. I was present as two characters, “Samuel” and “Samantha” as it were, though it seems in recollection that the first person perspective was always, or mostly, through Samantha’s eyes. I do not recall the circumstances of our initial dream-encounter very clearly. I think we may have been co-workers at the same job, but I suspect the heavy hand of secondary revision in this interpretation. I know that I found her attractive, as I did even when looking through her eyes. I remember flirting, awkwardness, contact and the ultimate narcissistic clonus; coitus with myself. This image, though erotic and highly charged, was indeed disturbing, and I did not discuss it with my wife.
The final dream of the series, not long after my wife’s death and perhaps partly attributable to that trauma, was a bona fide nightmare.
I awaken in bed. The room is in an apartment I had inhabited many years earlier. The antique paper on the walls appears dingy in the yellow lamplight. The air is humid and smells of something familiar, but I can’t name it. I am wet and sticky and uncomfortable and I want to move, roll over, resituate myself into a more comfortable position. But I cannot move. It is frightening to discover that I cannot move. Then I notice the smears on the walls and the splotches on the ceiling. Disgusting. Filthy. Who made this mess? What is that stuff anyway? Suddenly I understand that it is blood. The room is covered in it, it’s everywhere, walls, ceiling, floor. I recognize the odor and realize that I am wet and sticky because I am drenched in it. The bed is pooled with it. Feelings of sickness and stark terror settle over me.
Somehow I understand that this is the scene of a murder. More than that, it is the scene of a dismemberment. Someone has been murdered and dismembered right here, in this bed. The blood is still warm, fresh, the murder has just happened. Body parts must be nearby, maybe on the floor, maybe here in the bed with me. Dear God, there’s a head here somewhere, a torso.... Who did this? Who.... The murderer could still be here, in this room, right now, with me. But no one is here. Just me. I’m alone. Suddenly I am panicked by the thought that I am the victim, I have been murdered and dismembered. But no, that doesn’t make sense. If I was the victim I wouldn’t be frightened, I’d be dead.
Am I the murderer then? Did I do this? I have no memory. For God’s sake, what have I done? Who have I killed? The terror mounts, along with the urge to scream, till it becomes too disruptive for sleep.

I awaken in bed. Wet and sticky and uncomfortable, heart pounding in my chest, I fear that the dream was no dream, or that I have reawakened into a horrifying reprise. But no, this room is mine. My curtains, my comforter. I turn on the lamp next to the bed. There is no blood, I am damp from the night-sweats. There is stirring in the bed next to me.
“Sam... what time is it?”
“Almost 3:00 A.M.” The water softener is running in the basement.
“Are you O.K.?”
“Yea, I guess. I had a scary dream.”
“C’mere, I’ll hold you.”
“I have to change. My nightgown is damp. Night-sweats again.”
I get up to change, silently and groggily rehearsing the debate over the pluses and minuses of hormone therapy. I go into the bathroom and look into the mirror. For some reason my reflection is strangely reassuring. Calico, our cat, appears from somewhere and begins to weave in and out between my legs, brushing herself against my ankles. I feel compelled to look in on the boys and stand for several minutes in each doorway, listening to their measured breathing. Charlie will be leaving soon for his fourth year at Cal Tech. He studies computer engineering and is helping to develop something called a “High Speed Parallel Processing Unit,” whatever that is. Ben, though only a sophomore, was starting quarterback for his high school football team last season; they finished second in their division. He thinks he’s going to play for UCLA or USC. They couldn’t possibly be any more different from each other, nor any more different from me.
For one fleeting moment my agitated unconsciousness percolates a long forgotten regret the about daughter I never had, the relationship I’ll never know. But the feeling is accompanied by guilt, as if the boys aren’t good enough, and I immediately banish it whence it came.
In bed, my husband cuddles me, front to back, like spoons. “Mark.”
“What Sam?” He is annoyed with the renewed disturbance, but I ask anyway.
“What does it feel like to be a man?”
“Sam, go to sleep.”

S. Dan Warhorse