Sweetgrass: The Girl in the Dream

By Sarah Coffey

Sarah Coffey was bought into the world in 1961 and was assigned male at birth.

As a young child, she experienced feelings of being different - in her soul and her mind she was female.

It was only after navigating adolescence, early adulthood and the births of her four children that Sarah finally decided to listen to the feelings with

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sarah Coffey
• Release date: Oct 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922890498

Book preview

PART ONE

Of Hop Fields, Family and Dissonance.

CHAPTER ONE

Where do I start? I have been asking myself this very question for years now. Or rather, do I start? I mean, who would be interested in my story? It’s not so different from so many others; it’s just me, and I’m not the most exciting person in the world. I have described myself in many ways, but the two that spring to mind are ‘an ordinary woman with an extraordinary past’ or ‘an extraordinary life made ordinary’. I don’t see myself as anything special now, but I was. It was so ‘special’ that I sought to change and succeeded in changing. When I decided… or perhaps it was a realisation, a gradual dawning that I could not continue as I always had. This is my story and how I survived.

I sit here alone in my house in the suburbs of Townsville in Queensland’s tropical north. I’m typing into my old home computer listening to Landslide by Fleetwood Mac, reflecting on what has been a roller coaster life and considering the point at which I will start this narrative. It occurs that it all began at my birth, so I will give you an overview of my life up until 2008 when all the fun started.

I came kicking and screaming into this world at approximately twelve-fifteen on the early morning of April 7, 1961. The doctor hung me by my feet, took a look at my genitals and announced, A boy, definitely a boy. With that short statement, in the maternity ward of Maidstone’s old West Kent Hospital he committed me to a life of dissonance and heartache, confusion and self-hatred. The hospital was a pre-war building with long corridors and wooden floors where nurses wore proper nurse uniforms and a stern matron headed every ward, and doctors wore white coats and had stethoscopes around their necks like badges of authority. The hospital sat on the banks of the River Medway, a relatively small river that meandered through the centre of town within its stone-built embankments. My mother, Marion, was alone as my father was drinking at the Cricketers Arms, his favourite place in the whole world.

I have a few memories of those first few years as I grew up with my brother, Mike, and eldest sister. My first conscious memory was lying in an old blue and white pram which was used by all five of us in our early days; I must have been about eighteen months old. My mother used to train hops in the gardens of Kent on the outskirts of Maidstone. I remember the white fluffy clouds shooting across the deep blue sky between the hop trellises and the green leaves rustling in the breeze; this was be the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the land and farming.

We lived in a three-bedroom semi-detached council house in the suburbs of Maidstone. I have snippets of memory from those first few years. For instance, the brown and cream trolley buses that ran along the main road, and the park with its swings and tall slide and roundabout, all made of heavy steel on concrete bases. I remember the’ top shops’ with the fish and chip shop and Co-Op store; and the ‘bottom shops’ where my mother would take us for our regimental ‘short back and sides’ haircuts. I remember my aunts’ house on the far side of the park, where my mother’s sister lived. She had married my father’s brother and produced a large family of cousins. I have many fond memories of adventures with two of these cousins. I have not spoken to either of those two in over fifty years, and I wonder how they are doing. I remember, with some fondness, the old single-screen cinema in the town centre where we would regularly attend Saturday morning pictures, as we would call them. We saw Flash Gordon and Children’s Film Foundation serials, a new episode each week and the Japanese Godzilla and King Kong films. It was where I saw my very first big films -The Wizard of Oz, which scared me senseless and The Jungle Book, which I loved and still do.

My first memory of being ‘different’ came when I was four or five. We were staying over at Nan’s house (my father’s mother) in an old Victorian terrace that was very dark and dingy. My granddad was ever so scary, or so I thought; he used to chase me up and down the hall with his Punch and Judy puppets and scared me half to death. After a bath in three inches of water -they were very economical with everything -it was off to bed. I always got to sleep alone because I was prone to bed wetting, whereas my brother and sisters had to share a bed. I had a dream during one of these sleepovers, parts of which have remained in my memory ever since. I remember being on a roller coaster at a funfair with other children I didn’t know. As the roller coaster went up and down on its short journey, I laughed. I was so happy, waving my arms in the air and squealing along with the others. There I was with long golden curly hair and a pretty pink summer dress with a lovely ribbon in my hair. I awoke confused and distressed, and no one knew why and I couldn’t explain. I went to the bathroom and looked at my body, and I knew, I knew it was wrong; I had the wrong bits. I was the girl in my dream, not a boy. I never forgot that dream or how it made me feel about myself.

Soon after this, I started school at the Derby Road Infants School, not far from home. It was a complex of old wooden huts placed around a central playground. It is gone now, like so many things. It was a time of half-pint milk bottles at break time, and horrible school dinners, and playing Spitfires with arms outstretched, running around the playground shooting each other down. I had already learned that I was a boy and could never be the girl in the dream. Even then, as a small child, I was already behaving as prescribed, like all those around me prescribed and playing war, throwing stones, climbing trees and generally doing ‘boy things’. No deviation from the correct path was or would be allowed. Birthday parties were the worst for me at that age. Mother would always put on a lavish spread, and all the cousins and neighbourhood friends would attend. All the girls were wearing their pretty party dresses. All I could do was look on with envy and increasing despair. I had to wear cute tiny shorts or trousers with a little man tie. God, I hated those ties. I would soon see the ties as a ‘man’ badge and avoided wearing them whenever I could, even into adulthood.

My relationship with my father was never easy. He was a long-distance truck driver, hauling newspaper print from one of the paper mills in Maidstone to Scotland and the North of England, before the advent of motorways. I remember that he would arrive home on Friday evening after a session in the Cricketers Arms long after we had all gone to bed. He would go back to the Cricketers Arms at lunchtime the next day before returning for his weekly bath, which my brother and I were made to share. Saturday evening would see him back at the pub. I do not remember if he repeated it on a Sunday. I grew to hate Sunday evenings as my father usually beat me in anticipation of me being naughty while he was away during the week. I do not have any fond memories of my father.

In 1967, my parents went through a bitter separation and divorce. My father had started a relationship with another woman. My mother and this woman were attending the same antenatal clinic together, both carrying my father’s children. When my mother found out, all hell broke loose. What followed was at times violent. I remember my mother lashing out at my father verbally and physically in our dining room. My father never retaliated physically, to my knowledge, but the verbal abuse was horrendous. That was in the autumn. The last time I ever saw my father was the following year.

The Christmas of 1967 would be a first and a last for me. It would be the first and last white Christmas of my life and the last Christmas in Maidstone. Strangely, I remember the gifts I received that Christmas; a complete set of toy Thunderbirds. I loved that show and had many happy hours in my own world with them. We moved to Leeds, the village with the castle about 15 kilometres out of town the following spring. I loved it there. In those days, it was still a proper village. There are places I remember with great fondness; Bluebell and Primrose Woods, Mr Brown’s farm, my primary school, the church with its ten bells, Buttercup Meadow, the old ‘haunted’ ruins of a monastery, the ruins of Vergers Hall, the village store, the single pub, and the castle and its grounds still owned and lived in by its original family at that time. I have memories of long walks alone, through the lanes and orchards, watching Mr Brown working the fields, village cricket on the castle’s grounds, knocking chestnuts from its trees, and sledging in the snow on the slopes leading down to the mote. I also have memories of getting caught scrumping apples from Mr Brown’s little orchard and watching it get bulldozed in the final year we were there along with thousands of acres of English fruit orchards. It was so sad to see the end of an era.

In the spring of 1968, I had my second girly moment. My sisters and their friends were playing dress-ups in the lounge room of our council house in Wycombe Grove. They allowed me to play too, and it was not long before they had me dressed up in a long satin dress, it was silver I think. There I was, a girl. It scared me half to death, not because it was wrong but because it felt so right. I was delighted but ran away as fast as I could to the sound of almost hysterical laughter from my sisters and their friends. I was a terrified bundle of tears. I sat behind the garden shed sobbing, knowing I had to take off this skin and return to being a boy. That is when I first realised I should have been a girl. I still had no words to explain how I felt. I was confused, and had so many questions with no answers and no one to talk to.

During 1968, I saw my father for the last time. My mother had found caring for five children alone too difficult and ultimately broke down. In desperation, my mother took us to my father’s house, where he lived happily with his new family and asked if he could take us in for a short while as she recovered and sorted herself out. He refused point-blank. As I stood there looking up at my father, he looked down at me, shouting, I don’t want the fucking kids! and slammed the door. I remember pretty vividly my mother screaming, the tears falling down her face. She destroyed the front garden and broke every window in the front of his house. My eldest sister ushered us away and took us to one of my aunts who lived nearby. Our aunts found temporary lodgings for us while our mother got the help she needed.

The next few years would be both happy and traumatic. I lived as a typical happy boy on the outside whilst tearing myself apart on the inside. I was so bewildered, there had been some mistake. Every part of me said I was a girl. Why could I not wear the pretty party dress and grow my hair long? The doctor at my birth had decided I was a boy. Mum said I was a boy, the world screamed at me that I was a boy. But, but, said the quiet little voice inside, I’m a girl! I would have to learn to hide a part of me that could never be allowed into the light; no one would understand something I could not explain.

By 1970, my mother had remarried and we had left the village and moved to the old railway town of Swindon in England’s midwest. Her marriage collapsed after only a few months. I attended the local junior school, located in the centre of a huge council estate. The town had been designated an overspill town to accommodate the many families that had to leave London after the wartime bombing. I soon learnt that the town was divided by income. The working class inhabited the council estates and worked either for the steel pressing factory, a part of the nationally owned car maker or the rail works. The ‘other half’ lived in the privately-owned estates and worked for the insurance and banking companies located in the newly established tech parks on the outskirts of town or in the new office buildings springing up in the centre of town.

Town life did not suit me at all and it was not long before I had found the countryside only three or four kilometres from our new house. I would wander further each time, through the villages and lanes and back home via the vast building site which was then on the outskirts of town, it was one of my favourite routes. It eventually became two massive housing estates primarily owned by the local council. I would be off on these long walks amongst the farms and wheat fields of the Marlborough Downs or sometimes in other directions amongst the dairy farms. I would set off early in the morning and not return until the streetlights began to flicker on every weekend. I felt alone in the country, but I was surrounded by things I was interested in and found joy in, such as farms, tractors, animals, and sweet smells. In the town, I was just alone. I had very few friends whom I only saw at school.

I had decided to wander off in a completely different direction one day when I came across a small farm that I had not seen before. A father and two sons, were busy haymaking as I wandered into the farmyard. They were stacking hay into one of their Dutch barns as I noticed a boy about my age and got talking. I asked if I could help and they said yes. It was not long before I was on the farm every day, either after school or on the weekends. Later that summer when we were fetching the cows in, one of the brothers cornered me, pulled my trousers down and sexually abused me. I was only 10 years old. I vividly remember every abuse in the cowshed, grain store, and calf shed, the old van he kept full of pornographic magazines and even a few times in the open fields. This abuse continued for three years. He would say the things that predators say to their victims, No one will believe you, or If you tell your mum, I will hurt her, or It’s natural, all boys do it. He terrified me, but I believed him. One day, I plucked up the courage to ask his father to tell him to stop. Instead, he fired me and told me never to return or tell anyone about it. This period of my life would torment me for many years; it still does in some ways. It is not something I have ever or will ever forget; it had a significant impact on me as a developing person. I was not penetrated but have always felt raped. Why did I not put a stop to it? I was a child; I thought it was a normal part of life, and I was afraid. Of course, this period of my life did nothing to relieve my gender questions; in fact, it exacerbated the problem enormously when I was just beginning puberty.

It was 1974 when I had left the farm for good. That year, I finally drew up the courage to ask my mother about my feelings. I had been sneaking into my sister’s wardrobe for a few months, and puberty was in full swing. I was a mess of raging hormones and my body was developing in the wrong direction. I was sprouting hair in all directions, and my voice began to drop, it all felt so alien and unfair and I was struggling to present a well-rounded 13-year-old boy to the world (if there ever was such a thing). I was learning to show what society required of me. Most of the time, I was doing ‘boy things’, dressing and behaving like a boy, and fighting a rising desire to be