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The Last Time I Wore a Dress
Daphne Scholinski with Jane Meredith Adams
Riverhead Books/Penguin Putnam, New York, NY 1997
ISBN 1-57322-077-9 Hardcover $23.95
Reviewed by Jamie Faye Fenton |
The ETVC hot line rang. The French boy’s fear was the strongest I had ever sensed. He was certain that
someone would trace the call, arrest him, commit him to a mental hospital and ruin his life. All the standard
reassurances fail. I barely extract a promise from him to call back sometime, when he feels safe.
I often think of him - he never called again. Surely we live in enlightened times and things like this don’t
happen! Nobody is really going to lock you up, feed you drugs, and bombard you with invasive
questions and humiliating therapies just for being a tomboy or a sissy?
Actually they do. I saw it happen at close range in my own family - but I was not awake at the time. The
full story is in a book entitled The Last Time I Wore A Dress, by Daphne Scholinksi with Jane Meredith
Adams.
Daphne’s Family
Daphne’s mother Deb was a service brat. Her father was in the USAF, drifting from
posting to posting in a drunken daze - a classic abusive alcoholic. At age 17, Deb meets David*, a sensitive
and intelligent lad who aspires to be a clergyman. A missed period leads to a marriage in Japan. On the way
home, David does a tour in Vietnam which wrecks his psyche. They had two daughters: Daphne,
then Jean.
A Troublesome Child
Daphne was not the daddy’s girl David wanted, rather she is a rebellious tomboy with an active mind and
body. Mother Deb sinks into depression. Others girls gang up on Daphne and force her to wear makeup.
As her parent's marriage deteriorates, Daphne’s behavior unravels, which her father tries to correct with blows with his belt. Daphne protects her
sister Jean, who strives to be good in every way. The marriage ends and Deb heads to Chicago to pursue
her interest in film making, leaving Daphne with her father and his new girlfriend.
Daphne is now stealing, making threats, drinking, and taking drugs. On visits to her mother, now living with a
mercurial Arab who eventually hijacks a plane, she is sexually exploited by a neighbor who fancies
himself a mob hit-man. Daphne is initiated into a local gang, skips school, and continues finding
trouble.
Michael Reese
Fed up with the escalating misbehavior, David threads through the social services bureaucracy and sends
Daphne to a locked ward at the Michael Reese Mental Hospital in Chicago. Here we meet a group of characters right
out of Cuckoo’s Nest: Jesus and Jimmi Hendrix resurrected, anorexics, depressives, compulsive
masturbaters, chronic psychotics sitting in their feces all day, head pounders, screamers, and a deaf-mute
cross-dresser named Sandra.
Every movement and remark is analyzed and recorded by staff. It becomes a game, patients try and set each
other off and compete to get unusual diagnosis added to their charts. Daphne’s initial labels are: Conduct
Disorder with Borderline Personality, Gender Identity Disorder (GID), and Mixed Substance Abuse. Playing
games, Daphne has them tack on Anorexia. Disconnected from her mother and father and feeling abandoned, Daphne latches onto sympathetic nurse Kay, longing to be
adopted by her.
Daphne has a knack for creative rebellion: trapping the nurses in their station plastered with
"Fuck You" signs facing inward; later covering herself with oil so the men in the white coats could not
grab onto her; another time giving her friend water so she could avoid shock therapy. Daphne tries out sex
with James but is caught.
Rebuffed by nurse Kay, Daphne sinks into depression and drinks facial astringent and lighter fluid. She
wakes up in the isolation unit tied to her bed. Some jerk comes in and feels her up. That doesn’t make her
into a woman either.
Soon the hospital announces that she must be transferred. Its been 6 months and the official explanation is
that her parents are not participating in her treatment. The cynical explanation: the insurance company
didn’t like the paperwork it was seeing and was threatening to close the tap.
Forest Hospital
Daphne’s dad desperately calls around and finds another hospital that will take her. Daphne winds up in Forest
Hospital in Des Plaines, Illinois. Eager to avoid a locked ward, she decided to present primarily as a substance abuser so she can
get into a drug and alcohol rehab program.
The 12 step religion washes right over. Daphne does not fit in with the other addicts and alcoholics. She
describes her alienation to her diary and adds a brief footnote: i like girls.
A big mistake. It turns out that the staff is reading everything. Found out: The Gender Identity Disorder
diagnosis moves to the top of the list. Daphne is transferred to the "Town House" unit and its "point
system" for rewarding good behavior. There are tiers of awards leading to the ultimate prize, a brief
unescorted walk outside. Wearing makeup, feminine dress, and female behaviors all counted. Daphne dives
in and starts accumulating. It was all a fake, endurable only by anticipation of transfer to a long term
facility in Minnesota.
Wilson Center
The Wilson Center is about an hour South of Minneapolis in the town of Faribault. It is where wealthy
families send their screwed-up teenagers. A campus-like setting with dormitory units and an on-site high
school. While there are still plenty of control games, this place is well-staffed and compassionate. They
lighten up on the forced-feminization, instead working on her depression and her feelings towards the
opposite sex. Daphne tones down the rebellion, but still organizes drinking parties and an escape. She
gradually improves.
Daphne grows attached to another female resident. The staff tries to suppress this, but because no sexual
behavior takes place, they relent, pleased with having a new lever at hand. While the glimmerings of the
lesbian orientation are there, Daphne feels compelled to push them to the back of the closet.
As her 18th birthday approaches, Daphne is permitted to live off-campus. The "gold mine" insurance policy
peters out that day. Plans for her further education are drawn up. For some ludicrous reason, they suggest
a career in law enforcement.
Daphne Comes Out
During Daphne’s time at the Wilson Center, I began living with her mother
and sister Jean. Deb retrieves Daphne, who is stable but not well. She moves in and enrolls in a local community college.
Several months later, Deb and
I break up and she and Daphne move out. Eventually Daphne begins her art education and comes out as a
lesbian.
I remember Daphne as a Prince fan who loved to crank it up. One day she brought home
a stray kitten we called Frazzle. When I split with her mother it brought back
Daphne's earlier feelings of abandonment and a minor relapse.
I eventually lose track of Daphne and her family. I move to California, marry, and years later, discover my
woman within. Meanwhile Daphne turns to her art to heal herself and make sense of the insults she endured.
She is now renowned in San Francisco. I meet her again at a Mission District cafe and she takes me through
a tour of her artwork. Her early stuff is intense, almost menacing, her later works mellower. She has
elaborate drawings of every place she has ever lived with annotations about the people and events involved.
She has made many appearances telling her story and crusades against the persecution of differently
gendered people.
Daphne turned out great.
Reactions
This book is better than Ken Kesey's classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Allocate a day for
reading it straight through and several more days of background time for thinking about it. Everyone reports this same reaction.
Jane Meredith Adams did a splendid job of helping Daphne weave her experience into a quilt of
anecdotes and internal reflections. As a sample, we have digitized Daphne reading the prologue using the
Real Audio and .au (1.5 Mb) audio formats. This
excerpt is from her appearance on a recent GenderTalk program available online.
Daphne’s ordeal is a lucid illustration of how the social inventions of the clinic, the prison, and sexual science combine to
regulate behavior. Foucault's Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality
all in one box. A recommended companion to Read My Lips and another grounding of Riki Anne
Wilchins' postmodern philosophy of gender oppression.
High-level summarizations of Daphne’s life tend to emphasize Gender Identity Disorder as the only
theme of her incarceration and treatment. In fact, the situation was more complex and this book
honestly relates why an intervention was necessary. Her parents did not send her away
to feminize her - GID was a diagnosis that the treatment system identified and locked on to.
GID clearly was a false target wasting enormous time and expense. Still, Daphne’s gender variation was a root factor in her family relations
and social functioning. From her point of view it is a situation, not a problem. Unfortunately others saw her
difference as a flaw, pathologized her, and allowed this to mobilize their own misguided forces. The result was
like the screech of feedback from a microphone.
The excesses of the psychiatric health-care system which burned through one million dollars trying to fix
Daphne have brought about a cruel counter-reformation. "Gold mine" insurance policies have been
replaced by managed care plans, stingy to non-existent benefits for mental disorders, and our streets have
become mental wards. What folly.
Survivors of torture are encouraged to write about what was done to them. This act of denunciation helps
them resolve their conflicts and come to terms with their experiences. Daphne draws, paints, and has now
written about her teenage hell and the process has been working. Still, I wonder what is next for her - can
she move past this and make art that celebrates a larger beauty?
Notes
The issues surrounding the Gender Identity Disorder diagnostic category continue to be debated. Joann Roberts and Riki Anne Wilchins present two sides in a Transgender Forum article. Recently
Shoshanna Gillich, a TG psychiatrist, described her perspectives on GID in an interview with Gianna Israel.
* Daphne protects her family’s privacy by using pseudonyms. She does not mention any name for her father,
so I made up the name David for him. Artwork is Copyrighted by Daphne Scholinski, used with permission. Photographs by Jamie Faye Fenton.
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