The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [117]
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