Dylan Scholinski was sent to Michael Reese Hospital in Illinois at 15 to be treated for depression. After one 15-minute consultation, he was diagnosed with what was then called “Gender Identity Disorder” and would spend the next three years of his life in a treatment plan that depended on his ability to wear makeup and dresses. His memoir The Last Time I Wore a Dress, re-issued this October by Penguin, details coming of age in a system treating him only for being a queer adolescent.
Scholinski, now 58, is the embodiment of becoming “the person you needed when you were younger.” During our interview, his thoughtful views on trauma, forgiveness, and his family felt like the flowering of everything repressed by the psychiatric system. Today he runs an art studio that provides kids a space to exist without shame, becoming the genuine intervention they needed growing up. The re-issued memoir contains an epilogue about their transition to Dylan and becoming a father. The book is available from Penguin Books or wherever books are sold.
Do you feel like you’re reaching for something other than a butch lesbian narrative by the end of the memoir?
Yeah, I definitely think that. For years, I didn’t mind that it was selling under Daphne. I refer to Daphne as she, like, it’s her story … Because I didn’t have the language or the identity or the opportunity to think about it in any other way at the time.
I didn’t grow up in a world that allowed me to be trans. So instead, I grew up female. That’s how I was violated; that’s how I was mistreated; that’s how I was celebrated in some ways, like, being the first girl in Little League.
Sometimes people are like, “How come you didn’t really come out in the book?” But I thought if I went too far after, people weren’t going to sit with the story as it was.
When I wrote the book, I had this conversation with Leslie Feinberg, and I was trying to decide if I was going to do a book based on my life or an actual memoir of my life. And Leslie was like, “Do based on your life, because then you can be the superhero whenever you need to be, or you can give the reader a rest,” and it was that conversation that convinced me not to do that.
You’re kind of like “Fuck giving the reader a rest.”
I felt like if I was to say this was “based on my life,” that that would give the reader permission to dismiss whatever made them the most uncomfortable.
And this doesn’t really feel like as much of a coming-out story to me as it is, like, here I am cataloging this extreme form of violence that was going on for generations.
Well, and the reality is, is that I could have turned out to be anything. I still would have been treated that way. Because that’s who I was. I was just being me. That’s why the book is dedicated to everyone because (of) this intense desire to fix things that aren’t broken.
It doesn’t feel like Daphne is separated from the other patients in any way; it feels less about an exclusively queer story and more one about mental health. But there’s definitely loneliness in the book; one of the interns says to Daphne, like, “You’re so normal. What are you doing here?”
When I think about my third grade teacher, and I think about, I can’t remember what I named her in the book, but her name is Karen, the intern. If I had not had those interactions with specifically those two people I don’t even think I’d be alive.
Those interactions are sometimes relatively short. Does somebody have to stay in your life to still be family?
I think there are people that, you know, I’ve met in the last few years that I would consider to be family. My biological family, it’s changed so much … With my dad, I kind of severed that relationship for a really long time. I was like, “Don’t call me unless you’re dying,” you know. I was in this constant state of wanting; I would call and he’d be busy and say, “Oh, I’ll call you back this weekend,” and then six months would go by.
In order to like take control, I had to break up with him. Years later, I’m like, “Shit, I don’t want my dad to die thinking I don’t love him.” I had this realization that I was needing him to come at me like that 14-year-old needed or that 12-year-old needed. And, at the age of 40, I was like, “Well, that would be creepy.” And I reopened communication with a lowered expectation.
Which, some would say, “That sounds really awful.” But, no, I was reminded that I kept on asking him to accept me as I am, to acknowledge who I am and how I am in the world. And I wasn’t doing the same thing for him. I wasn’t letting him be an absent minded, not emotionally available, like that’s just part of who he is, you know?
Is this a book about family, you think?
Yeah! When I talk about, my father is a Vietnam vet, or my mother raising her siblings … how my mom turned out … My adult life with my mom is magical. She was my best friend, and the last five years of her life, I was her primary care person and moved her to Colorado and just did everything I could with her. But, I was being raised by a child.
You know, and that, even her leaving and, like, all the abandonment issues, the adult understanding of knowing that she had to leave, I would understand that when all else fails, you hold on to yourself. You survive in order to come back to your life. (It’s) one of the most important lessons that I ever had. People will ask, “How come you didn’t just put on a dress and act like a girl and get out?”
Have they ever tried that?
I would have become ungrounded, I would have lost myself, and they would have had someone to treat. So much of what happened to me happened because I was too masculine for a girl
How are the questions you got 25 years ago different from the ones now?
I don’t know that the questions change much, but the answers change. A big part of the conversation is about forgiveness. How do you forgive after trauma? And it’s complicated, but I think our biggest struggle in life is to stay open. You know, when I cry, I’m crying because I’m trying to stay open.
A lot of the questions have more to do with who’s asking the questions. When a story challenges your perceptions of how a system works, like, they’re trying to figure out how it fits. Sometimes I meet people, and they know my story, and they expect this really hard, kind of mean, like, I should be an asshole. I think people are really thrown sometimes by the gentleness that can come from trauma.
Do you feel like the hardness is something that you grew out of?
The hardness of when I was younger had a lot to do with self-preservation. This toughness and hardness I had to have as a kid. I guess I grew out of it; I just refocused the energy.
Do you still think queer kids are being sent to mental hospitals instead of being allowed to be themselves?
I think there’s definitely many more pockets of safety. But, I know of kids that are still, either they’re sent to some type of camp, or there’s definitely still places where this type of stuff still happens. The thing that I find so interesting is that you can have two kids having similar experiences at home, similar experiences at school so on and so forth, but they’re feeling completely different things. Here in Colorado having one of the highest youth suicide rates in the country, but the reaction to that so often is, “No way, it’s so sunny and beautiful.” But that has nothing to do with my depression, like at all, you know.
Yeah, it’s such a hidden problem here.
The other thing in working with kids is making it very clear to them that their identity can change over and over again, and that at no point are you a liar. People change for a multitude of reasons, but this pressure to become something that’s comfortable for other people, that’s too much.
Another thing that’s such a beautiful mirror to the book is stepping not only into kid’s lives, but also to parent’s lives in your work.
A lot of the parents that I’m working with, they’re like 21, 22 years old. And when you work with the parents, you’re working with the kids as well. And I love giving parents, you know, a fighting chance to try and get their kids back and try and to become better people.
And it does seem interesting sometimes because I work with a lot of fathers, you know, and to be giving them, like, parenting and fatherly advice, it’s certainly, not what I expected from myself, you know?
So I wanted to ask if it came naturally to read your story out loud for the audiobook or if it was kind of like strange and uncanny?
Yeah, some parts of it were hard. I’d have to pause, and I would be like, “That was really fucked up.” There’s the records and stuff like that, and I would get to the end of them, and I would just scream, “Fuck you!” Like, oh my god, your obsession with wanting me to be sexual, I find so alarming.
How did you end up reissuing the book? Why reprint it now?
There’s a different audience that’s ready for this story. And with the current climate where we are politically, (it’s) good to have some historical context as to why what’s happening right now is problematic.
With “Gender Identity Disorder,” you could be locked up based on other people’s feelings and thoughts about you. You know, based on their perceptions of you. That just became more and more dangerous. (Then) they turned it into a diagnosis that was necessary for access to care; it turned the focus from fighting with the psychiatric system to fighting amongst ourselves because now it was necessary while, at the same time, it was abusing children. Which I thought was, you know, just a really smart attack, you know, coming from the American Psychiatric Association.
I just don’t want to see, when I was first trying to tell this story in the late 80s, the hardest community of people for me to convince that there was even an issue was the queer community. So it took quite a long time to get a community of people to even care.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Photo courtesy of Dylan Scholinski
