Color blindness?

[teenagerebelioushyperchild]

I am a female and I am 16 years old. Today, my biology teacher pulled out a book that had a bunch of different plates of colour blind tests. I had difficulty telling the shapes of some numbers, but I could tell that SOMETHING was there, I just didn't know what. And for a few I could see shapes but she said that wasn't the shape in the plate. For example, I saw a '3' once when there was really an '8' or I saw a '40' when there was a '79' It kind of made my eyes hurt, haha. But there was a final plate, and by this time, my math teacher( who IS red-green colour blind) had walked up. She asked me what I saw and I said a '2' and my math teacher said 'yeah, I see it too!' and then she's like 'you just proved my point, there is nothing there to the normal eye and you saw that right away; you might be a little colour blind.' My math teacher was like 'Yeah, you're probably colour blind.' and I was sorta in denial, so I went through the book again and got some of the same results as my math teacher (he's known that he was colour blind since he was five.) I came home and took more test online, more proof. But I thought that for me to be female and colour blind, my dad had to be colour blind as well to pass it onto me! (Or else that means he's not my dad, and he's gotta be because I look just like him!) But my biology teacher told me that it was possible. Then I told my parents that I think that I'm colour blind, they told me that I was 'putting on' and the I was a hypocondract! I couldn't believe it! The didn't believe me and called me a liar. They said 'I always have some kind of "elements." If I am in fact colour blind (which, I think I have SOME sort of deficiency when seeing colours) how could I go my whole life without knowing? It does make sense because when I was young, we used to bird watch and I always had trouble seeing 'that red bird over there' so I guess it DOES make sense. Anyone else here realize that they were colour blind later on in life?

[KerieK]

It is really rare for a girl to be color blind, but not impossible. My grandfather was red/green color blind, and I am not, but my son is experiencing what you described in your post. We were looking online at t-shirt web sites and came across a colorblind pattern on a t-shirt, he said he didn't see anything and I could hardly believe him. Then we went to the colorblind tests online and he has some sort of issue ... not completely colorblind, but he has trouble seeing some of the differences in the color patterns. I would not worry too much, because you have adapted this far and been able to identify colors as you were brought up. The thing is, you won't see the color exactly as another person sees it, but you can name it the same because you learned the names of the colors as you have seen them while growing up. it will be interesting to learn whether you will be able to pass the color blind genetics to your children or not. Typically, a female inherits the gene and passes the gene to her male offspring.

[BlondViolinist]

Well, I dunno if this counts, but when I'm looking far away,(not that far but ya know) I can't see orange or green. That has just happened recently.