The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Daphne Scholinski

Like Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, interestingly also published by Riverhead), she externalizes most of the responsibility for her actions while fiercely contesting any threat to her autonomy. She lies and then is contemptuous that her lies are believed, yet if she is challenged or disbelieved, she is also angry.

She appears to fight treatment and express a great deal of disdain for it, while also berating her treatment teams for not adequately treating her. I do doubt that she would be kept in treatment for so long as a youth in her era simply in order to force her to wear makeup and dresses. The picture that emerges from her self-portrait is that she was a mean, impulsive, conduct disordered child and adolescent who also was lesbian or trans. I don't think that Scholinski is particularly truthful with either the reader or herself. Being queer and oppressed does not mean that a person is not also cruel and difficult to be with. I don't think that this is because they were entirely dismissive and oppressive, but because Scholinski does not seem to recognize her own antisocial behavior. I don't have the impression that the people around her would tell the story in a similar way. I should qualify that by saying that so far as it goes, I imagine that it is a reasonably accurate representation of what she thought and felt. Yet of the many books and articles I've read and conversations I've had with people about the abuse of power in psychiatric settings, Scholinki's is one that does not ring entirely true. I don't doubt that her presentation of self along gender lines evoked a negative response from at least some professionals. Indeed, like Scholinski, I was on the receiving end of well-intentioned but pathologizing interventions. I know that the depathologizing of homosexuality (and its removal from the DSM) took far longer than the 1973 declaration by the American Medical Association. I'm well aware that psychiatry, psychology, and social work can be used oppressively, especially to people who are seen as socially deviant. I don't want to doubt Scholinski's narrative, but I found myself doing so repeatedly. That tag said that there was contention between staff members because some of them apparently knew the author and believed that she was representing her experiences in a way that differed from how they remembered events unfolding.įinally reading it around 10 years later, I find myself with many questions as well. When it first came out, I remember deciding not to buy it after reading a shelf tag at a feminist bookstore. It's hard to know how to review this memoir.

The Last Time I Wore a Dress by Daphne Scholinski