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The Last Time I Wore a Dress. By Daphne Scholinski with Jane Meredith Adams. Riverhead Books, New York, 1997, 211 pp., $23.95.
Reviewed by Heino F.L. Meyer-Bahlburg, Dr. rer. nat.18
This autobiographical report of a young woman focusing on her 3 years of psychiatric hospitalization is remarkable in two ways. It is a disquieting account of the experiences of a seriously disturbed adolescent who is placed in psychiatric institutions. It is also an example of an unfortunate personal history made into a cause celebre for a political movement, in this case the transgender movement. The latter is the reason why this book is reviewed in this journal.
Daphne was the product of a love relationship between a then 17-year-old high-school girl from a U.S. Air Force family and a young American army soldier in Japan (pp. 10- 11). Daphne's mother used having a baby to get out of her strict and apparently sometimes physically abusive family, and her boyfriend was pressured by his superiors to marry her. Still before Daphne's birth, her father had a brief tour of duty through Vietnam, where he was severely wounded and underwent a personality change for the worse (pp. 26-27). Already during Daphne's infancy, mother "grew glum and fed-up with taking care of" her so that the father "took charge of the bottle feeding." Mother had a second daughter but felt being "in a trap, which seemed to be us," i.e., Daphne and her younger sister. Already during the preschool years, "everywhere we went, I [Daphne] looked for a family to take me in" (p. 28). During the subsequent years in school, Daphne experienced growing restlessness, attention problems, and self-harming behavior. Her thirdgrade teacher wondered about maternal neglect--mother was depressed at that time--and suspected Daphne had a problem with her gender.
Later the parents separated and custody was split. Over time, Daphne's behavior problems increased: sexual involvement with a female teenage babysitter (p. 45) and then with adults beginning in early adolescence (pp. 72-73, 132; apparently at least in part out of hunger for affection and attention), gang membership (pp. 70-72), chronic involvement in stealing (pp. 69, 72, 109, 133; repeatedly to give things to needy people, presumably so that people might...