The Last Time I Wore a Dress

by Dylan Scholinski

Overview

UPDATED WITH A NEW EPILOGUE

At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder. For three years and more than a million dollars of insurance, the problem was “treated”—with makeup lessons and instructions in how to walk like a girl.
 
With a new epilogue by Scholinski, whose name is now Dylan and who identifies as nonbinary, this revised paperback edition of The Last Time I Wore a Dress looks back at those experiences and their life since. It chronicles the journey of coming into oneself and gaining a nuanced, freeing understanding of being born transgender. This memoir tells Dylan Scholinski’s remarkable story in an honest, unforgettable voice that’s both heartbreaking and hopeful.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781573226967
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/01/1998
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	9.04(w) x 5.46(h) x 0.62(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dylan Scholinski is an award-winning artist, author and public speaker. They are the founder/witness of Sent(a)Mental Studios and the Haven Youth Project, which offer programs for at-risk youth. They live with their wife and children in Denver, Colorado.
 
Jane Meredith Adams is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Slate, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and other publications. She lives with her wife and children in Berkeley, California.

Editorial Reviews

Any...gal who reads The Last Time I Wore a Dress is bound to see at least one of Daphne's symptoms in herself.

BUST Magazine

The boom in first-person narrative has produced a frightening subgenre that testifies to our cultural obsession with controlling expressions of gender and sexuality. This subgenre, which includes Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted as well as Daphne Scholinski's new book The Last Time I Wore a Dress, details the punishments -- including physical assault, sexual abuse and institutionalization -- visited upon young women who fail to live up to prevailing definitions of femininity. Scholinski's mordant memoir recounts the three years she spent paying for this failure in facilities for the psychiatric treatment of adolescents, where her tomboyish appearance and history of minor delinquency earned her the diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder."

Scholinski was 15 when her parents committed her. Her artistic mother left her marriage when Scholinski was in sixth grade, aiming to "find herself" in the '70s counterculture. Her father, a Vietnam vet haunted by memories of a "killing rage," took to punishing Scholinski's household infractions with a belt. Scholinski's search for comfort had her turning to gang members and sexual predators. Her amusements included shoplifting, petty theft and truancy. By the time she found herself on the way to her first hospital admission, she writes, "If I felt anything ... it was a stab of hope."

Her memoir records the betrayal of this hope. Rather than treating the psychic scars of neglect and physical and sexual abuse, her doctors increasingly focused on her lack of conventional femininity. At her second hospital, Scholinski's "treatment plan" included spending 15 minutes every morning applying make-up with her roommate. Wearing eye shadow and hugging male staff members earned her institutional privileges. At the third and final facility, her therapists considered her close, quasi-romantic friendship with another female patient evidence of "regression," and banned eye contact between the two. Scholinski left this last facility at the age of 18 with a high-school diploma, a legacy of night terrors and a mental storehouse of images of tormented bodies that she now reworks in paintings and drawings.

The Last Time I Wore a Dress demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the confessional memoir. Scholinski intersperses the narrative of her institutional journey with scenes of her childhood and excerpts from official diagnoses and evaluations. Bleak humor and jump-cut organization give readers breathing room in the miasma of inattention and violence surrounding her. We take comfort in the implied presence of the current Daphne Scholinski, the healthy consciousness selecting, arranging and reflecting on her experience.

Yet this very selectivity and fragmentation inevitably limit our understanding of the people and events in the book. For example, Scholinski's mother comes through as her most important, and ambiguous, adult influence, but their relationship is portrayed only glancingly. As a person, of course, I understand that Scholinski's relationships are my business only so far as she chooses to share them. As a reader, however, I regret that her story sometimes stretches thin around gaps it might cost her too much to fill in. Nevertheless, if it causes us to question the rigidity of our cultural definitions of gender, it can certainly be called a success story. -- Salon

Laura Green

This patient's-eye view of life in a psychiatric hospital in the 1980s draws on the techniques of Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted but offers an original perspective on the dubious diagnosis Scholinski was given: Gender Identity Disorder.

With a depressed mother and a father traumatized by service in Vietnam, Scholinski had an adolescence marked by physical and emotional abuse at home, teasing by schoolmates about her tomboyish appearance, and sexual molestation by strangers and others in positions of authority. She was turned over to the care of a mental hospital by parents who could not handle her minor acts of juvenile delinquency. Faced with the challenge of diagnosing her problems, doctors at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago decided the short-haired, ripped-jeans-and-rock-T-shirt-attired Scholinski was not "feminine" enough. When she became close friends with a new girl on the ward, she was accused of lesbianism. Thus she spent her high-school years locked up and marooned among the delusional, the suicidal, and the schizophrenic, being given "girly lessons" in makeup, dress, flirting, and other feminine skills. Former Boston Globe reporter Adams helps create an intimate narrative wherein the complex, ironic voice of the misunderstood young woman takes center stage (speaking of the $1 million price tag of her three-year treatment and her roommate's makeup lesons, Scholinski writes, "For the price, I would have thought they'd bring in someone really good, maybe Vidal Sassoon"). The reprinting of institutional evaluative documents, à la Kaysen, provides effective context for the author's retellings of the hospital experience. Scholinski is now a San Francisco artist and activist who, though she continues to struggle with depression, is free to dress and wear her hair and choose her partners as she wishes.

A notable book. Scholinski is a pychiatric memoirist with a powerful voice and a mission: to debunk doctors who continue to diagnose gender identity disorders.

Kirkus Reviews