As a child Dorothy Riddle travelled all around the world with her missionary parents. As a young woman she experienced plenty of sexism and homophobia: first as a gifted student, then as a female university student, and later when she came out. Dorothy used her knowledge as a clinical psychologist to invent the Riddle Scale of Homophobia, which helped people begin to see that homophobia, not homosexuality, was the problem in need of fixing.