The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  A survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization that works to end harassment of LGBT kids in schools, found that 69 percent of LGBT youth (ages twelve to nineteen) reported having been victims of harassment or violence in their schools. Half of them said that they were subject to some form of harassment every day. Constant harassment and rejection put transgendered kids, like gay and lesbian youth, at high risk for depression, substance abuse, and other self-destructive activities. “Because isolation and ostracism are key components of transgender youth experience, it would be irresponsible to overlook the associated mental health concerns of substance abuse, self-abuse, depression, and suicide or suicidal ideation,” say Israel and Tarver. They note that “the difficulty these individuals face is evident when we consider that approximately 50 percent to 88 percent have seriously considered or attempted suicide.”

  One of the most devastating accounts of the brutal challenges of a transgender adolescence was published by Daphne (now Dylan) Scholinksi in 1997. In The Last Time I Wore a Dress, Scholinski describes a lonely, fearful childhood that spiraled into an angry, rebellious adolescence. She skipped school, stole, hung out with gang members, and experimented with drugs and alcohol. Scholinski was fourteen years old when she was incarcerated in the first of the three psychiatric facilities where she would spend her adolescence. When, at her second psychiatric facility, she was given a list of feelings and asked to circle the ones that applied to her, she “skipped over hope, joy, love and anything else positive. The ones I circled were: lonely, angry, unloved, pulled, disgusted, defeated, rejected—I wrote in hopeless since it wasn’t on the list.”

  Throughout her childhood, Scholinski had been tagged a tomboy. She “wore Toughskin jeans with double-thick knees so I could wrestle with Jean [her sister] and the neighborhood boys. My mother cut my hair short so my father wouldn’t brush my long-hair snarls with No More Tangles spray. I took off my shirt in the summer when the heat in Illinois smothered me in the yard and I got on my bike and glided down the hill no-handed. The wind on my chest felt like freedom until three boys from my neighborhood saw me and said, ‘Daphne, let me see your titties,’ which was ridiculous since my chest was as flat as theirs but they held me on the ground. My ride was ruined and I put on a shirt but not before I punched one of them hard in the stomach and they all backed off.” When she was in seventh grade three of her female friends held her down and painted her face with makeup. “Linda opened her purse which was a wreck inside, torn-up Kleenex and lint in the crack of her lipstick case. She handled Michelle a compact of turquoise eye shadow, which Michelle applied with a heavy hand to my eyelids. From another compact she rubbed on blush across my cheeks thick as dust. Red lipstick she dabbed on fiercely. ‘Look at Daphne in makeup.’ All of them ha-haing like crazy.” Staring at herself in a mirror after escaping from her torturers, “I kept waiting to feel a pull, there you are, glamorous, older, prettier. Nothing.”

  Slightly older, Scholinski waits with “sick dread” at a roller-skating rink when the lights dim and the couples’ skate is announced. Girls, thinking that she is a boy, ask her to skate. Sometimes she says no and sometimes she says yes, and for abrief moment enjoys the fun of being young and carefree, skating with pretty girls “with their long hair flowing behind them.” In either case, she is found out and accused of trying to pass herself off as a boy. She shoves and taunts the boys who challenge her, and they back off. “They got to be afraid of me. All you have to do is look a little bit like a boy and they think you’re a crazy girl who’s going to rip their heads off and spit down their necks.”

  Never does Scholinski say that she felt like a boy trapped in the body of a girl, or that she yearned for a boy’s body. She was just “being a girl in the only way I knew how.” But like many gender-variant children and adolescents, she was a target for abuse in both her home and her community. Her father beat her, but not her younger sister. Her mother at one point took her sister back to live with her, leaving Scholinski with her father. Both boys and girls mocked and humiliated her for being different. And a few adults took advantage of her youth and vulnerability to molest her.

  “Genderqueer kids present an ideal profile for sexual predators,” writes activist Riki Wilchins, director of the lobby group Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (Gender PAC). “We are often emotionally transparent, hungry for adult attention and approval, out of touch with our own bodies, socially isolated, lacking in any sense of boundaries, confused about what is ‘normal’ and used to keeping secrets about our bodies. If there are sharks in the water, the social thrashing of genderqueer kids is bound to attract them.” Scholinksi’s “social thrashing” attracted numerous sharks. Even before entering psychiatric facilities, Scholinski was molested by an adolescent babysitter named Gloria; a burly neighbor of her mother’s named Frank, “who took me out for dinner and gave me money and Ziploc baggies of green marijuana;” and a married couple who invited her to hang out in their apartment to listen to music and drink beer. “The second time I was over, the man kept his hand on my shoulder a long time. His wife started rubbing my back and my mind emptied out and I was a shell being rubbed. The wife spoke in a quiet voice and said she and her husband liked my body because it was so boyish. Their hands went further and further and my mouth couldn’t speak any words.” While incarcerated, Scholinski was raped on two occasions by fellow patients, boys whom she knew and trusted, and groped by another while in restraints.

  In an informal survey taken at Camp Trans, a protest held outside the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival after organizers of the festival decreed that only “women born women” could attend, the activist Riki Wilchins discovered that of twelve “mostly white, mostly middle and working class” transgendered participants at the protest, ioo percent of them (twelve of twelve) had been physically abused or beaten as children and 75 percent (nine of twelve) had been sexually abused, with 40 percent of those (five of twelve) victims of incest. Fifty percent (six of twelve) had been raped at some point in their lives. This is, as Wilchins admits, a very small and unscientific sample; however, on the basis of the stories I’ve heard since beginning research on this book, I don’t believe that a more formal testing instrument would find those numbers hugely inflated. Gender-variant kids are often brutally mistreated. Riki Wilchins says that such abuse “appears not as an anomaly but as a cultural norm: the means by which gender-queer kids are instructed in the limits and consequences of gender difference.”

  One of my sources, a transman who requested a pseudonym (“Brad”) because his daughter and in-laws don’t know about his past, said that his father beat him regularly throughout his childhood. “I was being physically abused at home all the time…. Whether I was being sexually abused, I don’t know, because everything is blacked out. I have like a minute here, a minute there. Years and years of nothing. But I know that I was physically abused. My whole family knows, and it all came out finally when my dad died and they were all like, ‘We’re really sorry, we should have stepped in.’ But they didn’t.”

  Brad’s father was “a military guy, Navy for twenty-three years,” and “a white-knuckle alcoholic, a non-drinking alcoholic,” enraged by his “daughter’s” masculinity. “I think that my dad’s biggest problem was that I looked like him and I acted like him. He didn’t perceive me as male, but he saw me doing male things all the time, and that went against the grain. He would stay stuff like, ‘If you’re gonna be a girl, you need to wear dresses and you need to wear this and that.’ I would refuse to wear dresses. I always wore jeans.” When Brad’s father became angry at his three children for various infractions, he would “line us up and scream at us and then beat the shit out of me. Or he’d start beating all of us, and I would say that I did it ‘cause I couldn’t deal with my sister and brother crying. And I was like, ‘Go ahead, beat the crap out of me. I can deal with your shit.’ Because I was so mad at him,” Brad says.

  Daphne Scholinski describes a similar
dynamic with her father. Touchy and violent, he would become angry at minor infractions, and he and Daphne would get into shoving matches. “I’d walk up to him close enough so that his angry face was all I could see of the world, and he’d push me away, so I’d push back, and we were off…. He poked me on the chest, thud, thud, until I cried. Go ahead, hit me. I know you want to, I taunted. This was thrilling. If he hit me, I’d won— I’d cracked him open and reached his center.” Beaten with a belt regularly, Scholinski intervenes on the one occasion when her father threatens to beat her usually compliant younger sister. Like Brad, she assumed the role of protector of her sibling and absorbed the impact of her father’s rage.

  Scholinski notes that when the patients at the Michael Reese Hospital, her first psychiatric facility, were bored, they would ask the nurses for a copy of DSM-III and look up various diagnoses, including their own. “Someone would ask, ‘What are you in for?’ We looked up anorexic for Julie and Lisa. Manic depression? Borderline personality? Obsessive compulsive? I didn’t tell anyone about my gender thing. I said I was in for Conduct Disorder.” Even in a psychiatric facility, surrounded by profoundly troubled adolescents and adults, being “a gender screw-up” is a shameful thing, something to keep hidden. When she was admitted to Michael Reese, her psychiatrist told her that “due to the complexity of my situation” she had a multiple diagnosis— conduct disorder, mixed substance abuse, and gender identity disorder. The fourteen-year-old Scholinski was horrified. “I didn’t mind being called a delinquent, a truant, a hard kid who smoked and drank and ran around with a knife in her sock. But I didn’t want to be called something I wasn’t. Gender screw-up or whatever wasn’t cool,” Scholinski writes. “He [her psychiatrist] was calling me a freak, not normal. … He was saying that every mean thing that had happened to me was my fault because I had this gender thing.”

  At Michael Reese, Scholinski learned that she was first diagnosed with gender identity disorder in third grade, when she was sent to a school counselor by a teacher who had noticed her depression. “We played games together,” says Scholinski, and one of the games was “The Career Game.” “She held up cards with a picture of a policeman, a farmer, a construction worker, a secretary and a nurse, and I said which ones I’d like to be: police officer and construction worker. She looked at me with a curious face like a mother robin. She was the first one who said I had a problem with my gender. I didn’t know what that meant, but later I found out that she thought I wanted to be a boy.”

  At each of the three psychiatric facilities where she was incarcerated, the staff took careful note of Scholinski’s appearance and mannerisms. “Daphne presents a tomboyish appearance with jeans, T-shirt and a manner of relating which is not entirely feminine,” wrote the staff at Michael Reese in Chicago, where her psychiatrist asked, “Why don’t you put on a dress instead of those crummy jeans?” At Forest Hospital in Des Piaines, Illinois, she at first pretended to be a drug addict because it provided some sort of explanation for her family’s difficulties. “Drug addiction offered itself to me like a blanket of forgiveness. It’s a disease. It’s not my fault. My parents too would be absolved of blame. We’d have something to tell ourselves and the world that seemed a lot more understandable than my daughter won’t wear a dress, my mother doesn’t want me around, my father beats me, she’s plain out of control, I don’t know why I stole the money. “But one day she confided a secret to her journal (“p.s. I think I like girls”), which was read by the staff and led to her being transferred out of rehab and subject to a new treatment plan focused on “identity issues and sexual confusion.” This included spending time with a female peer each day, combing and curling her hair, experimenting with makeup, and “working on hygiene and appearance.” After being made up by her roommate, she looked in the mirror. “I sneaked a glance, and it was a jolt. My beige face gave me a creepy dead look. The blue eye shadow, the blush—I looked like a stranger.” With a staff member eavesdropping outside the door, “I told myself that I didn’t care if I looked like a dead stranger.” To pacify the staff and gain “points” that could be traded for a few precious moments outside alone, she said out loud, “I love my eyeliner. I like my blue eye shadow.”

  Persevering in order to gain more points, Scholinski strove to become a more pleasing “girly-girl dead stranger.” She let her roommate, Donna, make her up each morning, curl her hair, and paint her fingernails. She wore Donna’s blouses instead of T-shirts and a pair of new jeans, and hugged male staff members. Donna, trying to be helpful, pointed out that Scholinski’s walk, an athlete’s walk, “a strong walk with my weight in my feet,” was not very feminine. “Donna wanted me to walk skittery, like a bird. Like the pigeons in the park near my mother’s apartment, strutting, with their chests sticking out, their tail feathers wagging. She said, Try this. She came up behind me and placed her hands on my hips. She knew I was in deep about the femininity stuff, she was trying to help, so I tried too. I took a step with my right foot. She moved my hips to the right. Left foot, left swing of my hips. Step, swing, step. I thought, Forget this.”

  Fed up with the “femininity discussions,” she told her psychiatrist that she really was a drug addict. “I’d rather be a drug addict than walk around with this crap on my face.” But before the staff could alter her treatment plan again, she was transferred to the Wilson Center in Minnesota. At Wilson, the goal of treatment was “for Daphne to come to terms with herself as a sexual female human being.” By the time she was released from Wilson, a few weeks after her eighteenth birthday, Daphne Scholinski had spent three years in psychiatric facilities, from September 1981 to August 1984. Just before her discharge, her final psychiatrist said that all of her problems were “in remission except for my gender thing.” Looking back on those three years a decade later, she says, “I still wonder why I wasn’t treated for my depression, why no one noticed I’d been sexually abused, why the doctors didn’t seem to believe that I came from a home with physical violence. Why the thing they cared about most was whether I acted the part of a feminine young lady. The shame is that the effects of depression, sexual abuse, violence: all treatable. But where I stood on the feminine/masculine scale: unchangeable. It’s who I am.”

  In their critical analysis of the DSM and the way it is used to create psychiatric diagnoses for “everyday behaviors,” Kutchins and Kirk point out how difficult it can sometimes be to distinguish an internal mental disorder from a patient’s reaction to external environmental Stressors. DSM’s role as a coding tool for insurance companies generally resolves this difficulty, they say. “The limited evidence suggests that individuals are given DSM diagnoses when family, marital and social relationships are clearly the problem; that treatments are shaped to adhere to what is reimbursable, rather than what may be needed; and that troubled individuals are getting more severe and serious diagnoses than may be warranted.” These diagnostic distortions are not the fault of the DSM, Kirk and Kutchins say, but a symptom of the way in which we try to craft medical solutions to social problems. Critics of the DSM diagnosis of gender identity disorder make the same argument. “No specific definition of distress or impairment is given in the GID diagnosis,” says Katharine Wilson. “The supporting text in the DSM-IV Text Revision (TR) lists relationship difficulties and impaired function at work or school as examples of distress or disability, with no reference to the role of societal prejudice as the cause. Prostitution, HIV risk, suicide attempts, and substance abuse are described as associated features of GID, when they are in truth consequences of discrimination and undeserved shame.”

  Dylan Scholinski spoke eloquently about the lifelong effects of shame when I spoke to him in 2004. “The stigma attached [to the GID diagnosis] is devastating” for a child or adolescent, he said, as we sat in an outdoor cafe below the Washington, D.C., row house where he keeps a second-floor art studio. The most emotionally devastating aspect of being institutionalized for gender identity disorder was the message that “there was something so wrong with
me that I couldn’t be out in the world,” he said, “that all these different types of people are out there walking around the streets, but I couldn’t do that, I was so dangerous. I felt lethal,” he says now, looking back on Daphne’s adolescence. “Like I was the bomb always waiting to go off in people’s lives.”

  Scholinski points out that though his primary diagnosis in the various institutions where he spent his adolescence was gender identity disorder, the psychiatrists and therapists who met with his parents told them “they were working on my depression. Well, I was depressed because the world was treating me poorly, but their plan was to get me to act more feminine so that the world wouldn’t treat me so badly— instead of realizing that if you try to make me be something I’m not, I’m going to be even more depressed. I never felt worse than on the days when I forced myself to wear makeup and had people telling me, ‘Wow, you look really pretty today’ “ he says with feeling.

  In its Standards of Care for the Treatment of Gender Identity Disorder (SOC) in both adults and children, the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association notes that “the designation of Gender Identity Disorders as mental disorders is not a license for stigmatization or for the deprivation of gender patients’ civil rights. The use of a formal diagnosis is an important step in offering relief, providing health insurance coverage, and generating research to provide more effective future treatments.” However, it must be asked whether the present classification of gender identity disorder as a psychopathology meets these goals.

  First, the designation of GID as a mental health problem does provide, and has provided, a license for stigmatization, and has undoubtedly contributed to the difficulty that gender-variant people have encountered in passing legislation protecting their civil rights. It is disingenuous to pretend that the deletion of the entry on homosexuality from the DSM has not greatly improved the status of gays and lesbians, or that the continued inclusion of gender-variant people in the DSM has not retarded their efforts to be recognized as healthy, functional members of society. Indeed, Dylan Scholinski says that since writing The Last Time I Wore a Dress and becoming an activist, he finds that “some of the toughest people to convince” that kids are still being institutionalized for gender identity disorder are gays and lesbians. “It’s like it brings up people’s worst fears,” he says. “People don’t want to believe that these kinds of things can happen now, they think that we’re beyond that. I tell them, ‘Well, maybe it didn’t happen to you, but it did happen to me.’”