The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [119]
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