By Daphne Scholinski
By: Pat Anderson, Winter 2000 (1-29-2000)
Workshop: Supporting Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual and Transgendered Youth. National-Louis University, Instructor: Melissa Maguire
Scholinski, Daphne., with Meredith Adams. (1997). The Last Time I Wore A Dress. Riverhead Books: NY.
Before …
Daphne Scholinski was a local girl who grew up in several different communities around Chicago: Schaumburg, Roselle, and Lombard. She might have lived next door to any of us, she may have played with our children, or she might have actually been any of us.
We are all aware of the basic gender rules that we so often take for granted. Most of us have internalized them so deeply that unless our consciousness’ are raised about just how strong they stringently limiting they are. Daphne’s experience demonstrates just how far some people will go to enforce gender dictates.
Only recently her mother told her that when she was an infant she was riding on a bus with her going over a bridge. Her mother looked over the rail and thought, “I could just throw her off the bridge.” Daphne responded with, “Oh, really,” as if she didn’t care. She remembers that everywhere she went she looked for people who might take her in. Learning this recently is a start in explaining why she might have spent years looking for a sense of home.
She was restlessness in school, she wanted to skip ahead in books, but was told to keep quiet and follow along with the other kids. As far back as first grade a teacher told her to sit still and not roam around the room. She’s not sure what happened, but around second grade she stopped feeling things. One time a teacher asked her to say something and asked whether or not she felt anything. In response she slid her finger tip beneath a stapler and pressed down hard. It didn’t really hurt, but the teacher looked at her as if she was whacked. She stopped raising her hand in class and when teachers called on her she acted as if she hadn’t heard them. It never occurred to her that they really wanted to hear what she had to say.
By the time she was in third grade her mother was considering suicide. Her mother never told her with words, but she was always aware of it because her face was always very sad. The sadness made her mind wander even while she looked you in the eye. She worried that she might come home from school and find her mother dead. Her third grade teacher, Miss Martin, liked her. She said she thought she was a sad child and sent her to a school counselor, Mrs. Stein. When they played a career game with the school counselor Daphne choose the policeman and construction worker. This was the first time the gender thing came up. Mrs. Stein told her she thought she wanted to be a boy. Daphne didn’t really know if she wanted to be a boy, but she did like to go shirtless in the summer and play rough. She hit harder than all the boys so why would she want to be one? She wasn’t inspired by compliments on how pretty she looked when her parents tried to get her into frilly clothes. She couldn’t wait to get back into the tee shirts and jeans that left her free to run.
She remembers going to the bathroom in a grocery store with her father. As she walked out a balding clerk grabbed her and with a look of hatred on his face hauled her over to her father saying, “We found your son in the women’s bathroom.” He father said, “that’s not my son,” and explained to the clerk that she was a girl. The clerk apologized to my father, but no one apologized to her. Everything felt bad inside at that moment and lumped together into the fact that she didn’t look right. This kind of event happened many more times. After the first episode her father would simply slap her hand and say, “Bad boy, I told you to stop doing that.” She didn’t know what to think of that.
As far back as she could remember she had a powerful sense of her badness and feeling powerless to redeem herself. When she was very young her parents made it clear they would just as soon she go off by herself and not bother them. Her mother told her after age eight a child should be on their own. She says her badness grew out of boredom. She cut school, stole gold chains and cans of Dinty Moore stew. She recalls girls at school pinning her to the ground and forcing red lipstick on her and then laughing. The school social worker told her she was wrecking her family and if her bad behavior kept getting all the attention, her parents might loose her little sister Jean. She knew she was bad, but she wasn’t crazy.
She was kicked out of Sullivan High School for threatening to blow up the math teacher’s car because he insulted her mother. She knows she would never have done it. A therapist then said she needed a more disciplined environment, so she was sent to live with her father and his girlfriend. A high school counselor gave her the MMPI and told her father that she was out of control and had a criminal mind. He believed it without doubt. Her mother’s initial concerns were escalating fights, stealing, deteriorating school work, truancy, and involvement with drugs and alcohol, all of which got worse after her parents separated. The final straw for her mother was when she felt provoked to hit her. On June twenty third nineteen eighty one, a therapist at the Northwest Mental Health Center recommended she be sent away for long term psychiatric treatment. Her mother’s response was, “What else can we do? I can’t handle Daphne.” Her father said, “ She’s out of control.”
Daphne went through extended evaluations at the Doyle Center in January of nineteen eighty one. The conclusion was that she was confused about her role in the family and in family structure, she was responding to unclear expectations, responsibilities and rules, and was struggling to set up a structure for herself. Much of her behavior was thought to be directed at attention seeking, and for appropriate feedback about limit setting. The behavior problems went into the classroom as well, and it was postulated that she was carrying much of her family’s anger; they speculated that patterns of violence from her parents families of origin were continuing through Daphne.
Michael Reese Hospital
Daphne recalls leaving Arlington Heights Illinois with her father on September 10, nineteen eighty one. They shared a silent ride along I-90 to Michael Reese hospital. She was fourteen and her father had been physically abusing her. She always knew he wanted a quiet, obedient daughter like her younger sister Jean. Her mother told her that her father was never the same after he came back from Viet Nam. He had experienced a bloody incident where his fellow soldiers were blown to bits, his back was broken, and filled with shrapnel. He had lost the ability to warm up to his wife and later her mother used this to explain why he was abusive to her.
Her father knew exactly where and why he was taking her to Michael Reese, but she had been told they were merely on an exploratory mission to the psyche ward. It had actually already been decided that she would be admitted. At age fourteen, she had no idea she was on her way in with no way out.
When her parents got divorced her mother moved to Rogers Park in Chicago. Her mother didn’t know her father was hitting her. Her mother became involved in parties, marijuana, and arguing over foreign films. Her mother never noticed her involvement with a man named Frank who carried a handgun under his arm and in an ankle holster. He said he was a hit man. At thirteen she didn’t know it was possible to say no to a man with a gun, especially one who was nice to her. She has a clear memory of being naked in his bathtub and his large thing in her hand. She thought about this as she rode up in the elevator at Michael Reese – with her background, perhaps Michael Reese was a stab of hope.
Once in Michael Reese she saw Dr. Browning, who she called Dr. Sigmund Fraud when she got bolder. She never liked doctors because of their condescending attitude. He made her feel like she was a specimen he could study. As she told him about her father beating her and her mother not wanting her around, he just scribbled away. She exaggerated her use of drugs and alcohol because she knew doctors liked to hear about youth and drugs. She asked what her diagnosis was, knowing it was a major deal. It was like being a Disciple or a Latin King, it was your identity in the hospital. When a doctor looked at you he saw your diagnosis, not you. He told her she had multiple diagnoses: Conduct Disorder, Mixed Drug Abuse, and Gender Identity Disorder, Grade 3. He explained that this meant she wasn’t an appropriate female.
She didn’t mind being called a delinquent, a truant, a hard kid who smoked, drank, and ran around with a knife in her sock, but she didn’t like being called something she wasn’t. The gender screw-up thing wasn’t cool. It meant the boys in Little League who called her tomboy, and the girls who pinned her down and forced lipstick on her were right, she was a freak, she was … not normal. Dr. Browning’s labeling her was worse because it made it official and meant that every mean thing that had ever happened to her was her fault, because of this gender thing. She knew she walked tough, sat with her legs apart, and didn’t defer to men or boys, but she was a girl in the only way she knew how to be. She was now aware that this matter was settled and that anything she said now would be put in her chart as defensive behavior. It was also noted that she was unhappy, frightened, with a great deal of secondary depressive affect, primitive rage, a permissive superego, and grandiose expectations.
The mental health professionals at Michael Reese also diagnosed her family. They said her parents weren’t able to establish limits, there were several psycho-social stressors with the parent’s separation, and they emotionally abandoned Daphne.
So … she spent endless days watching one soap opera after the next. Units 3 West and 3 East were scary because of the older people who were predictors of her future if she didn’t behave. There was a woman in a wheelchair who would defecated and urinated on herself, there were adults who just stared in to space, there were pacers and screamers, and patients who thought they were someone famous. She found it interesting that none of the crazy people knew they were insane. She’d sit around thinking, I’m so sane in comparison to these people, and then a flicker of thought would enter her brain, maybe she didn’t know she was insane? They don’t know they’re insane, so why should she know, maybe she wasn’t aware that she was walking around saying she’s Patsy Cline?
The nurses let the patients borrow the DSM-third edition (the bible of psychiatric diagnosis) when they got bored. Patients would laugh about the various diagnosis. She never told the other patients about the gender thing, she only mentioned the conduct disorder. They even placed bets on being able to get a new diagnosis added to their charts (which they also had easy access to). You did have to be careful though, not go too far. Having anorexia added or multiple personality was one thing, but you had to limit hallucinations or you’d end up with big time drugs. She doubts if they had looked up Gender Identity Disorder that anyone would have tried to fake that and get it on their chart. They knew the rules, pacing, screaming, hallucinating, and vomiting were ok, but a boy with a scarf in his hair, or a girl like her, who wore only jeans and a tee shirt and who felt uncomfortable in a dress, were not ok. The doctors came up with the idea of her being, “an inappropriate female” – that her mouthy ways were a sign of a deep unease with her female nature. If she learned about eyeliner and foundation she’d be better off.
Once she was locked up she lost interest in having a meaningful conversation with her parents. Her mother didn’t care at all whether she wore make up or girly clothes. Her father would have liked to see her hair tied back with a pink barrette, but it wasn’t his main concern – he wanted her out of the house before the violence between them exploded. Once a counselor asked her father if he had any questions about her treatment. This was at a time she had already experienced a suicide attempt, had a guard hold her down with his foot on her head and had another patient run his hands over her body when she was forced to sleep in restraints. (There was also her legacy from home which led to her flinching if anyone came too close.) The one question her father asked the counselor was, “Can you tell me, why she won’t wear a dress?”
Her psychiatrist labeled her problem as, “failure to identify as a sexual female.” Her treatment goals included: becoming more obsessive about boys, becoming skilled with makeup, dressing like a girl, curling and styling her hair, and learning “girl things” with other teenage or young adult patients. The hospital used a current in vogue label called, Gender Identity Disorder. This sentence meant that instead of living a normal high school student’s life, Daphne faced: frequent doses of sedating drugs, seclusion, physical restraint, and being locked away with people who really were crazy.
Daphne actually lost points if she came out of her room in the mental ward without makeup and feathered hair. She also got points for affirmations such as, “I like my blue eye shadow,” “I love looking pretty.” Without points she couldn’t go to the dining room, or walk from her classroom back to the unit without an escort; without points her teacher would hand her off to an attendant whose manner and tone of voice communicated to her that he thought it was pathetic that a girl didn’t have enough points to travel one hundred feet alone. The staff was consumed with evaluating how well she adopted femininity, including the way she walked, the way she combed her hair, and how she related to males. She hated either choice, but a half moon of eye shadow was her best choice so she did it. To this she said, “This was how I learned what it means to be a woman.” About this she asked, “Ever lied to save yourself? Ever been so false, your own skin is your enemy?”
Daphne says, “ … one might say, these are trivial matters, but they’re trivial matters in which the soul reveals itself.” She asked us to try changing these things. Try it: wear an outfit that is utterly foreign, a narrow skirt when what you prefer is a loose shift of a dress, or torn-up black jeans when what you like are pin-stripped wool trousers. See how far you can contradict your nature. Feel how your soul rebels.”
She couldn’t count on her parents to visit or even call when she was hospitalized. She told one nurse, Kay, of feeling depressed and abandoned after her mother didn’t show up for the third time, her father lied about trying to call her, and she was worried because couldn’t contact her little sister. She often told this nurse she needed mothering and tenderness and that she hoped she would adopt her.
When she told her therapist about her mother’s violent boyfriend from Iraq and how he was threatening to kill the family if her mother didn’t go to Iraq with him they, marked in her chart – paranoid thinking. Soon after that he did try to kill her mother, but she narrowly escaped. He was later in the front page for hijacking an airplane and threatening to kill the stewardess.
One roommate, Francine, got shock treatments. She tried to get her out of them and actually succeeded until they got wise and separated them. You did have to be careful because you knew they had the power to perform those shock treatments on you too.
She had been sent downstairs to 2 West where the hallways smelled of urine, vomit and, unwashed armpits when she got fresh with a counselor. The patients looked as if their bodies and minds had been separated so long that all communication had been broken down. Skewed clothes, wild hair, faces twisted with all the terror that wanted to spill out. The first time she experienced this unit she thought, “This is how the outside world sees me: insane.” 2 West meant plastic silverware, no shoelaces and seclusion. No one slept well there and if your own anxiety didn’t keep you awake someone else’s did. One time while she waited for the three big male guards to take her up to 2 West she ran in the bathroom and covered herself with baby oil. Eventually they caught her and a nurse shot her with Thorazine. Despite being aware of the inevitability of being caught, she like the free feeling of running away. She says it felt similar to when she ran from her father as he yielded his belt.
Her counselor and psychiatrist had continually tried to get her to wear a dress, but she kept refusing. On 2 West there was no choice, a dress was the seclusion garb – a hospital gown was all you were allowed to wear. The seclusion room was nine square feet of whiteness except for a yellow mattress on the floor. This was the last time she wore a dress. In seclusion she had to be escorted to the bathroom with a male guard. She can’t even describe how she felt when she had her period. She learned to hold her pee for very long times and as a result developed many urinary tract infections.
Escape was something patients talked about a lot. It was a sign of sanity; it was a statement, I am not one of these people, I am not a mental patient. She was restricted from art therapy once because she painted a ceramic dog plaid, with thin blue and red lines. They only allowed to let her back when she agreed to do art in an acceptable manner.
After six months, Michael Reese decided to discharge Daphne because of the unworkable situation with her parents, who lacked cooperation, and Daphne’s continued non-compliance with hospital rules and staff limits. Dr. Browning told her the only way she could stay was if her parents became involved and they refused. The struggle to develop a working alliance prevented actual treatment. Daphne became so depressed when she learned of the decision she had to be on suicide watch for a few days. She felt the hospital was kicking her out. She thought, “… who gets kicked out of a mental hospital?” Her parents said they were coming to family sessions at the hospital, but the hospital told her they weren’t cooperating. Her parents said the psychiatrist told them she was way out of control, disruptive to the unit, and that the hospital couldn’t help her because she was too far gone. There was also some question in her mind about whether the insurance money had run out. Even the craziest of patients wasn’t kicked out of a mental hospital. She thought she must be psycho and not even know it. The art therapist told her that her parents lacked the commitment to care for her – what she heard was worthless trash.
Forest Hospital
In April, nineteen eighty two, after seven months at Michael Reese, she was transferred to Forest Hospital In Des Plaines, Illinois. Her presenting problems there were: depression, substance abuse, childhood physical abuse by her father, doing poorly in school, stealing, lying, running away. Their notes said she presented herself in a tomboyish manner. Although she had highly exaggerated her substance abuse, she was placed in a substance abuse unit. The admissions counselor writing up the admission information ended by saying, “At this point it is difficult to see any assets that might be present.” She later realized that bragging to an admissions counselor about drug abuse in a hospital that had a nut house ward and a drug and alcohol rehabilitation unit that advertised, “we get results,” was like making a bomb joke at an airport.
Rehab had several things going for it. Drug users were chic, far more chic than the mental patients, and her non-drug problem was a distraction from what she anxiously wanted to avoid – the gender screw up thing. Another appeal of rehab was that she wanted to be a drug addict because it seemed like a blanket of forgiveness. It was a disease, it wasn’t her fault, and it would absolve her parents from blame. It was a lot more understandable and easier to explain to the world than, my daughter won’t wear a dress, my mother doesn’t want me around, my father beats me, and she’s plain out of control. She thought she could act the part of an addict. She could do this to deal with her feeling of being the biggest mental hospital drop out in history.
Eye contact was very important in rehab. The doctors and the counselors are not really interested in what you think, they want you to give them the right answers so they can walk away smiling and pleased with the progress they’ve instigated. She wasn’t about to give the right answers. The truth was she’d tried drugs with her gang friends in Rogers Park, but they just hadn’t done it for her. When she got to the AA meeting she wasn’t able to say, I’m Daphne and I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict. She could justify lying to the doctors, but not the other patients. As she heard all their sad stories she thought she didn’t have the drugs as an excuse for her behavior so it must be her badness that made her the way she was. When she finally admitted in one AA meeting that she wasn’t an alcoholic the counselor wrote on her chart, massive denial.
She was the youngest patient on rehab, she wasn’t really an addict, and the patients here weren’t having any fun. They needed a few good screamers. She missed the patients at Michael Reese, she missed nurse Kay’s smile, Danny’s deep voice singing a Luther Vandross ballad, Jesus with his lengthy plans for the apostle’s reunion, Heather writing notes to her – at least these patients had liked her. She got herself transferred out of the rehab unit by pretending to be anorexic.
During a family session a counselor asked her mother, “It seems to me Daphne is looking for a mother. Is there enough room in your life for a mother-daughter relationship?” Her mother said, “No.” She wouldn’t cry in front of her mother, she wouldn’t cry, even lying in her bed at night her eyes stayed dry.
Dr. Browning said she was not appropriate, she hated him for that. However, she did feel different. She remembered roller skating with a girl, no one in particular, a blend of all of them, their hair flying loose and the tingle in her stomach. She knew if anyone found out she liked to roller skate with a girl she’d be locked up in the psycho ward forever. She wrote in her journal that she was tired of trying to tell them the truth about not drinking because they didn’t believe her anyway. She decided to play the game the way they (staff) wanted her to. She added a p.s. – I think I like girls.
She knew the staff read her journal because she read it in her chart a few days later. She feared that this knowledge meant the staff would have something on her. She also tried suicide while she was there by taking Sea Breeze and lighter fluid. She wanted to simply disappear. She couldn’t find a place for any aloneness that she could escape to. There was no privacy.
She couldn’t stay at Forest Hospital because they specialized in short term treatment and the doctors said she needed long term. She was transferred to the Wilson Center in Minnesota. Her father was freaked out about trying to get her accepted into the Wilson Center. She’d have to go through four days of interviews to see if they would accept her. Her father told her, “This is really important. You’ve got to get into Wilson, do you understand?” He seemed like a deranged parent trying to get his kid into the best prep school. She’s have to wow them with her mental illness. Dr. Freeman said if she didn’t get into Wilson they might be able to keep her at here for three years. She thought she would be able to tolerate the makeup and hair routine because it was short term, but the thought of it for three years made her think she’d fall apart. That’s what had led her to decide she’d rather be a drug addict than run around with crap on her face.
The Wilson Center
On June 14th, 1982, she went to the Wilson Center in Minnesota. Wilson Center was a residential facility in the middle of a corn field and was specifically for teens. They had their own small rooms and lived more like other teens. It was not totally a hospital environment. They could drive around town and have beer parties as long as they were behaving reasonably well. She had her first best friend (female) relationship while she was there. The staff tried to separate them because they assumed it was sexual, but later relented and let them be friends.
She felt a lot of the staff liked her here, which especially shocked her parents. Staff even let her do new patient orientation. Because of her past experience with mental facilities she could honestly tell them that at least you could have some fun here. No one here tried to get her to be feminine and her best friend had even referred to her as normal which she said made her feel changed inside just to hear the words. After her best friend tried to commit suicide twice Dr. Madison told her, “We feel there is a pathological aspect to your pairing off with a female patient who has had two suicide attempts.” With nine adults surrounding her – what response was appropriate? All she could say was, “She’s my friend.” She knew what pathological meant. It meant sick. Like Frank, who had steered her hand to his zipper, creepy men, and like Gloria a childhood babysitter who made her feel icky when she lifted her tee shirt up. They were saying she was like them – a sicko. Once in trying to convince her best friend’s psychiatrist that they weren’t physical she said the thought of being physical with a woman turned her stomach. The psychiatrist responded, “When something turns my stomach, I find that exciting.”
The psychotic made life interesting. One boy Peter’s mind was full of facts, dates, state capitals, wars won, treaties signed. The psychotics were ok one on one, but in group therapy they were scary. She was raped by a fellow patient, but didn’t even tell her therapist because she knew she would have asked her why she didn’t want to have sex with a cute boy like him.
While at Wilson she and some other patients were allowed to attend regular high school classes at the local high school. They got a chance to mix with the normals. This was cool except that everyone knew you were a mental patient.
Her insurance ran out on August 5 (her eighteenth birthday), she was discharged August 10th nineteen eighty four. Dr. Madison told her everything was in remission, except for the gender thing. After she was out for awhile she wondered why they didn’t treat her depression, why no one noticed she’d been sexually abused, and why the doctors didn’t believe she came from a physically violent home? The only thing they focused on was her not being feminine enough. The shame is that the effects of depression, sexual abuse, and violence were all treatable – where she landed on the feminine/masculine continuum was not. When she was in college no one wanted to hear about her experience in mental hospitals. She doesn’t know how to explain that she’s an ex-mental patient who never had a mental illness. There’s no use insisting you’re not crazy. All ex-mental patients are lumped together schizophrenics, manic-depressives, whatever.
Eventually she got to tell her story to an audience who wanted to hear it. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission paid her way to go to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in China. After she spoke she got the only standing ovation of the day.
Daphne has now gone to graduate school to study art and has found it to be her life saver. In one of her first art classes the assignment was to create a life-size self portrait. She built a wooden box, one foot square. Then she put in sand and dumbbells that equaled her weight. All of her one hundred thirty pounds crammed into this box. Her professor was ecstatic and told her she had found her place and to keep creating. She’s created over three thousand paintings and actually earns a living at it today. Today she lives in San Francisco with her partner.
Her treatment, in girly lessons, in three mental hospitals over three years (1981-1984) cost one million dollars and resulted in a high school diploma from a psychiatric facility for adolescents (she never shows this to anyone). At this cost she ponders whether they might have called in Vidal Sassoon instead of using other teen mental patients as tutors.
Frightening, she was released in nineteen eighty four, only sixteen years ago. I had no idea this type of treatment was taking place in our country. Recent 20/20 episodes have portrayed Daphne’s and another teenage girl’s stories of being put away in mental hospitals for being different, not being feminine enough, or for being gay. Thank God, only sixteen years later, I’m actually able to take a workshop called, Supporting Gay, Lesbian, Bi-Sexual and Transgendered Youth. A brief look back can brilliantly illuminate the progress that has been made.
