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By Root 2051 0

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