The boom in first-person
narrative has produced a frightening subgenre that
testifies to our cultural obsession with controlling
expressions of gender and sexuality. This
subgenre, which includes Leslie Feinberg's Stone
Butch Blues and Susanna Kaysen's Girl,
Interrupted as well as Daphne Scholinski's new
book The Last Time I Wore a Dress, details
the punishments -- including physical assault,
sexual abuse and institutionalization -- visited
upon young women who fail to live up to
prevailing definitions of femininity. Scholinski's
mordant memoir recounts the three years she
spent paying for this failure in facilities for the
psychiatric treatment of adolescents, where her
tomboyish appearance and history of minor
delinquency earned her the diagnosis of "Gender
Identity Disorder."
Scholinski was 15 when her parents committed
her. Her artistic mother left her marriage when
Scholinski was in sixth grade, aiming to "find
herself" in the '70s counterculture. Her father, a
Vietnam vet haunted by memories of a "killing
rage," took to punishing Scholinski's household
infractions with a belt. Scholinski's search for
comfort had her turning to gang members and
sexual predators. Her amusements included
shoplifting, petty theft and truancy. By the time
she found herself on the way to her first hospital
admission, she writes, "If I felt anything ... it was
a stab of hope."
Her memoir records the betrayal of this hope.
Rather than treating the psychic scars of neglect
and physical and sexual abuse, her doctors
increasingly focused on her lack of conventional
femininity. At her second hospital, Scholinski's
"treatment plan" included spending 15 minutes
every morning applying make-up with her
roommate. Wearing eye shadow and hugging
male staff members earned her institutional
privileges. At the third and final facility, her
therapists considered her close, quasi-romantic
friendship with another female patient evidence
of "regression," and banned eye contact between
the two. Scholinski left this last facility at the age
of 18 with a high-school diploma, a legacy of
night terrors and a mental storehouse of images
of tormented bodies that she now reworks in
paintings and drawings.
The Last Time I Wore a Dress demonstrates
both the strengths and the weaknesses of the
confessional memoir. Scholinski intersperses the
narrative of her institutional journey with scenes
of her childhood and excerpts from official
diagnoses and evaluations. Bleak humor and
jump-cut organization give readers breathing
room in the miasma of inattention and violence
surrounding her. We take comfort in the implied
presence of the current Daphne Scholinski, the
healthy consciousness selecting, arranging and
reflecting on her experience.
Yet this very selectivity and fragmentation
inevitably limit our understanding of the people
and events in the book. For example, Scholinski's
mother comes through as her most important,
and ambiguous, adult influence, but their
relationship is portrayed only glancingly. As a
person, of course, I understand that Scholinski's
relationships are my business only so far as she
chooses to share them. As a reader, however, I
regret that her story sometimes stretches thin
around gaps it might cost her too much to fill in.
Nevertheless, if it causes us to question the
rigidity of our cultural definitions of gender, it can
certainly be called a success story. -- Salon
This patient's-eye view of life in a psychiatric hospital in the 1980s draws on the techniques of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted but offers an original perspective on the dubious diagnosis Scholinski was given: Gender Identity Disorder.
With a depressed mother and a father traumatized by service in Vietnam, Scholinski had an adolescence marked by physical and emotional abuse at home, teasing by schoolmates about her tomboyish appearance, and sexual molestation by strangers and others in positions of authority. She was turned over to the care of a mental hospital by parents who could not handle her minor acts of juvenile delinquency. Faced with the challenge of diagnosing her problems, doctors at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago decided the short-haired, ripped-jeans-and-rock-T-shirt-attired Scholinski was not "feminine" enough. When she became close friends with a new girl on the ward, she was accused of lesbianism. Thus she spent her high-school years locked up and marooned among the delusional, the suicidal, and the schizophrenic, being given "girly lessons" in makeup, dress, flirting, and other feminine skills. Former Boston Globe reporter Adams helps create an intimate narrative wherein the complex, ironic voice of the misunderstood young woman takes center stage (speaking of the $1 million price tag of her three-year treatment and her roommate's makeup lesons, Scholinski writes, "For the price, I would have thought they'd bring in someone really good, maybe Vidal Sassoon"). The reprinting of institutional evaluative documents, à la Kaysen, provides effective context for the author's retellings of the hospital experience. Scholinski is now a San Francisco artist and activist who, though she continues to struggle with depression, is free to dress and wear her hair and choose her partners as she wishes.
A notable book. Scholinski is a pychiatric memoirist with a powerful voice and a mission: to debunk doctors who continue to diagnose gender identity disorders.
