“I didn’t really know if I wanted to be a boy,” Scholinski writes, “but I wanted to go shirtless outside in summer and play rough. The painting is reproduced as the cover of Scholinski’s new memoir, “The Last Time I Wore a Dress” (Riverhead Books, written with Jane Meredith Adams), an affecting chronicle of an adolescence spent in mental hospitals, where doctors attributed her rebellious behavior and tomboy look and preferences to gender identity disorder-her failure to act like a girl. “I’m not crazy,” Scholinski has scrawled underneath. In the corner stands an image of an agonized figure straight out of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, large, meaty hands gripping his head, his feet bleeding into antiseptic tiles.
A large canvas hangs in the hallway outside her small studio in a collective art space in a warehouse in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. In the daytime, Daphne Scholinski tries to paint away her nightmares. She wakes, startled and exhausted, and runs to the bathroom, where she throws up. She whimpers, her girlfriend tells her later, then stops breathing altogether. She is being chased by something or someone unidentifiable, swallowed bodily by this great force, her personality dissolving like salt thrown into boiling water.
OCLC 36961015.Even now, 13 years later, the dreams come almost every week. This book is both a powerful indictment of Gender Identity Disorder treatment and an inspiring testament of one person's survival. This sounds awful enough, but when you realize that the confinement and treatment took place from 1981 to 1984, it's absolutely chilling. Because she was a tomboy who wore jeans and T-shirts and didn't act enough like a girl, her treatment, in addition to talk therapy, isolation, and drugs, required her to wear makeup, walk with a swing in her hips, and pretend to be obsessed with boys. Her family, not knowing how to handle her, agreed. When Daphne started acting up at school, her shrinks decided to put her away. Daphne came from a busted home: Mom left to go to college and become a feminist and an artist Dad stayed home with two daughters, the elder of whom, Daphne, he often beat. This terrifying memoir recounts author Daphne Scholinski's three years spent in mental institutions for, among other things, Gender Identity Disorder. The Last Time I Wore a Dress is a book by Daphne Scholinski.
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