Me As A Man

This morning, I dreamt that I pretended to die and came back as a man.

Except that I wasn’t a man – I was still me, still female – but was trying to pass as one to friends and family.

At first, it was no problem. I was actually quite impressed with how I was doing. In my real life, I have cross-dressed several times and ended up hating my own performance. My masculine side, Carl, feels he needs to constantly prove his masculinity and does so in ways that I don’t like. He is, naturally, the cumulative creation of my own views of masculinity, which is neither nuanced nor realistic; it seems to arise from the most heartless, macho concept of masculinity that one can imagine. He is the product not of my view of men but of my view of the stew of social influences that we call masculinity; I do not consider “men” and “masculinity” to be interchangeable.

But in the dream, I wasn’t performing the caricature that Carl is. I acted male, not masculine, which I would consider a much more subtle notion. I talked to people – both men and women – as though they were human beings. I recognized in my own act the men that I have seen around me in life, who are decidedly male in their behavior but human beings about it.

And then it started to fall apart. I thought someone had realized I was really a woman, and the thought snowballed. My confidence was shaken. I found myself hitting on a girl, but analyzing every sentence I spoke and finding the female faults in them. She didn’t seem to notice. That didn’t reassure me. Why did I ask a question rather than make a statement? Isn’t that something a woman would do, not a man? I remember thinking. Is my voice getting higher?

And I began to worry what violence might befall me if any of the men nearby discovered I was actually female.

My alarm went off then, but I drifted in and out of sleep, trying to recapture the dream and find the meaning in it.