Throughout her childhood, Scholinski had been tagged a tomboy. She “wore Toughskin jeans with double-thick knees so I could wrestle with Jean [her sister] and the neighborhood boys. My mother cut my hair short so my father wouldn’t brush my long-hair snarls with No More Tangles spray. I took off my shirt in the summer when the heat in Illinois smothered me in the yard and I got on my bike and glided down the hill no-handed. The wind on my chest felt like freedom until three boys from my neighborhood saw me and said, ‘Daphne, let me see your titties,’ which was ridiculous since my chest was as flat as theirs but they held me on the ground. My ride was ruined and I put on a shirt but not before I punched one of them hard in the stomach and they all backed off.” When she was in seventh grade three of her female friends held her down and painted her face with makeup. “Linda opened her purse which was a wreck inside, torn-up Kleenex and lint in the crack of her lipstick case. She handled Michelle a compact of turquoise eye shadow, which Michelle applied with a heavy hand to my eyelids. From another compact she rubbed on blush across my cheeks thick as dust. Red lipstick she dabbed on fiercely. ‘Look at Daphne in makeup.’ All of them ha-haing like crazy.” Staring at herself in a mirror after escaping from her torturers, “I kept waiting to feel a pull, there you are, glamorous, older, prettier. Nothing.”
Slightly older, Scholinski waits with “sick dread” at a roller-skating rink when the lights dim and the couples’ skate is announced. Girls, thinking that she is a boy, ask her to skate. Sometimes she says no and sometimes she says yes, and for abrief moment enjoys the fun of being young and carefree, skating with pretty girls “with their long hair flowing behind them.” In either case, she is found out and accused of trying to pass herself off as a boy. She shoves and taunts the boys who challenge her, and they back off. “They got to be afraid of me. All you have to do is look a little bit like a boy and they think you’re a crazy girl who’s going to rip their heads off and spit down their necks.”
Never does Scholinski say that she felt like a boy trapped in the body of a girl, or that she yearned for a boy’s body. She was just “being a girl in the only way I knew how.” But like many gender-variant children and adolescents, she was a target for abuse in both her home and her community. Her father beat her, but not her younger sister. Her mother at one point took her sister back to live with her, leaving Scholinski with her father. Both boys and girls mocked and humiliated her for being different. And a few adults took advantage of her youth and vulnerability to molest her.
“Genderqueer kids present an ideal profile for sexual predators,” writes activist Riki Wilchins, director of the lobby group Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (Gender PAC). “We are often emotionally transparent, hungry for adult attention and approval, out of touch with our own bodies, socially isolated, lacking in any sense of boundaries, confused about what is ‘normal’ and used to keeping secrets about our bodies. If there are sharks in the water, the social thrashing of genderqueer kids is bound to attract them.” Scholinksi’s “social thrashing” attracted numerous sharks. Even before entering psychiatric facilities, Scholinski was molested by an adolescent babysitter named Gloria; a burly neighbor of her mother’s named Frank, “who took me out for dinner and gave me money and Ziploc baggies of green marijuana;” and a married couple who invited her to hang out in their apartment to listen to music and drink beer. “The second time I was over, the man kept his hand on my shoulder a long time. His wife started rubbing my back and my mind emptied out and I was a shell being rubbed. The wife spoke in a quiet voice and said she and her husband liked my body because it was so boyish. Their hands went further and further and my mouth couldn’t speak any words.” While incarcerated, Scholinski was raped on two occasions by fellow patients, boys whom she knew and trusted, and groped by another while in restraints.
In an informal survey taken at Camp Trans, a protest held outside the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival after organizers of the festival decreed that only “women born women” could attend, the activist Riki Wilchins discovered that of twelve “mostly white, mostly middle and working class” transgendered participants at the protest, ioo percent of them (twelve of twelve) had been physically abused or beaten as children and 75 percent (nine of twelve) had been sexually abused, with 40 percent of those (five of twelve) victims of incest. Fifty percent (six of twelve) had been raped at some point in their lives. This is, as Wilchins admits, a very small and unscientific sample; however, on the basis of the stories I’ve heard since beginning research on this book, I don’t believe that a more formal testing instrument would find those numbers hugely inflated. Gender-variant kids are often brutally mistreated. Riki Wilchins says that such abuse “appears not as an anomaly but as a cultural norm: the means by which gender-queer kids are instructed in the limits and consequences of gender difference.”
One of my sources, a transman who requested a pseudonym (“Brad”) because his daughter and in-laws don’t know about his past, said that his father beat him regularly throughout his childhood. “I was being physically abused at home all the time…. Whether I was being sexually abused, I don’t know, because everything is blacked out. I have like a minute here, a minute there. Years and years of nothing. But I know that I was physically abused. My whole family knows, and it all came out finally when my dad died and they were all like, ‘We’re really sorry, we should have stepped in.’ But they didn’t.”
Brad’s father was “a military guy, Navy for twenty-three years,” and “a white-knuckle alcoholic, a non-drinking alcoholic,” enraged by his “daughter’s” masculinity. “I think that my dad’s biggest problem was that I looked like him and I acted like him. He didn’t perceive me as male, but he saw me doing male things all the time, and that went against the grain. He would stay stuff like, ‘If you’re gonna be a girl, you need to wear dresses and you need to wear this and that.’ I would refuse to wear dresses. I always wore jeans.” When Brad’s father became angry at his three children for various infractions, he would “line us up and scream at us and then beat the shit out of me. Or he’d start beating all of us, and I would say that I did it ‘cause I couldn’t deal with my sister and brother crying. And I was like, ‘Go ahead, beat the crap out of me. I can deal with your shit.’ Because I was so mad at him,” Brad says.
Daphne Scholinski describes a similar dynamic with her father. Touchy and violent, he would become angry at minor infractions, and he and Daphne would get into shoving matches. “I’d walk up to him close enough so that his angry face was all I could see of the world, and he’d push me away, so I’d push back, and we were off…. He poked me on the chest, thud, thud, until I cried. Go ahead, hit me. I know you want to, I taunted. This was thrilling. If he hit me, I’d won— I’d cracked him open and reached his center.” Beaten with a belt regularly, Scholinski intervenes on the one occasion when her father threatens to beat her usually compliant younger sister. Like Brad, she assumed the role of protector of her sibling and absorbed the impact of her father’s rage.
Scholinski notes that when the patients at the Michael Reese Hospital, her first psychiatric facility, were bored, they would ask the nurses for a copy of DSM-III and look up various diagnoses, including their own. “Someone would ask, ‘What are you in for?’ We looked up anorexic for Julie and Lisa. Manic depression? Borderline personality? Obsessive compulsive? I didn’t tell anyone about my gender thing. I said I was in for Conduct Disorder.” Even in a psychiatric facility, surrounded by profoundly troubled adolescents and adults, being “a gender screw-up” is a shameful thing, something to keep hidden. When she was admitted to Michael Reese, her psychiatrist told her that “due to the complexity of my situation” she had a multiple diagnosis— conduct disorder, mixed substance abuse, and gender identity disorder. The fourteen-year-old Scholinski was horrified. “I didn’t mind being called a delinquent, a truant, a hard kid who smoked and drank and ran around with a knife in her sock. But I didn’t want to be called something I wasn’t. Gender screw-up or whatever wasn’t cool,” Scholinski writes. “He [her psychiatrist] was calling me a freak, not normal. … He was saying that every mean thing that had happened to me was my fault because I had this gender thing.”