"How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student/Mackenzie Fierceton was championed as a former foster youth who had overcome an abusive childhood and won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. Then the University of Pennsylvania accused her of lying."

A very strong piece by Rachel Aviv in The New Yorker. 

The facts here are very complicated, so I can't summarize it or excerpt enough to enlighten you about this particular case. So let me quote one part near the end that says something more general: 

One of Mackenzie’s professors, Anne Norton, who teaches political science... told me, “I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough. She was a foster child, but not for long enough. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. She was abused, but there is not enough blood.” Penn had once celebrated her story, but, when it proved more complex than institutional categories for disadvantage could capture, it seemed to quickly disown her. Norton wrote a letter to [Amy] Gutmann, Penn’s president, warning that the university had been “made complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse.” Norton says that Gutmann did not respond.

"[I]n the nineteen-eighties, several thousand people claimed that, having been abused as children, they had developed multiple selves. The public responded to these stories much as it had..."

"... to the surge of dissociative cases at the turn of the century: this sort of mental experience was considered too eerie and counterintuitive to believe. Whatever truth there was to the condition was lost as hyperbolic stories circulated in the media: tales of feuding selves and elaborate acts of sexual abuse, such as torture by satanic cults. The legacy of that time is that people with similarly radical alterations of self are viewed with distrust."

From an article by Rachel Aviv in the new issue of the New Yorker — "How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity/Hannah Upp disappears for weeks at a time, forgetting her sense of self. Can she still be found?" That passage seemed to compel me to think about what is happening today with transgenderism. The necessity of thinking about transgenderism felt so strong that I was surprised The New Yorker published that passage in that form. Didn't the editors notice? Maybe they did, and the idea is that Hannah Upp has a condition that needs to be taken seriously, and the problem is that the multiple personalities craze of the 1980s has left us, unfortunately, skeptical about real psychological conditions. But we should have been more skeptical of those multiple-personality cases that were so titillating and attention-getting at the time.

Hey, remember when Roseanne Barr said she had multiple personalities? Fortunately, one of her therapy sessions is preserved (from 1994):

(Here's the video in case that embed won't work for you, and here's the transcript in case you can't or won't watch video.)