Girl in the Dream is the life story of Stephanie (Sydney) Castle Heal, an advocate, activist and elder in the Canadian transgender community. The outcome of an almost four year collaboration of story-telling, recording, analysis and writing, Girl in the Dream is a first person narrative that depicts in intimate detail Stephanie's transgender journey. The title is not only an acknowledgement of a pivotal moment in Stephanie's young life when at the age of 41/2 years old, her gender dysphoria made itself manifest in a dream that stayed in her memory for almost 90 years. The dream serves as a metaphor for her entire transgender experience and a talisman for gender mutability that today is taken for granted to a significant degree but does not reflect the reality or experiences of gender variant individuals in the early to mid-20th Century. Stephanie remarks, "When I took on the identity of Stephanie, I like to think that the image that I had in my head merged into who Stephanie became; me in female form. I am a female named Stephanie but I am also a male named Sydney. I am content with that status." Details of Stephanie's life prior to her transition-including her early childhood, growing up in Britain prior to the Second World War, military service in the British Navy during WWII, two marriages, immigration to Canada and the birth of two children-contextualize her experiences and her ultimate decision to undergo gender reassignment surgery at the age of 62. Our understanding of Stephanie's many years of silence, secrecy and indecision is set against a background of familial rapprochement (or lack thereof) and the social and political times in which she grew up. An enthusiastic and accomplished raconteuse, Stephanie tells her story with the verve, passion and expressiveness of a veteran storyteller. In the end, Girl in the Dream provides a candid, revealing, nuanced and genuine rendition of Stephanie's transgender experience in the world.
About the Author: Margot Wilson is an anthropologist recently retired from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Over the past 30+ years, Margot has undertaken anthropological research in South Asia. She has lived in a bamboo hut with no running water or electricity in a rural village in northwest Bangladesh, learning to be a village woman by living as one. She has also undertaken research at a shelter for abandoned women and children in Dhaka (the capital city) and at the Danish-Bangladesh Leprosy Mission in rural northwest and central Bangladesh. She has published a number of research papers based on that research and two books based on women's narratives. These include: Daughter of the Spirit and Beyond Ideas of Wrong Doing that are available through Castle Carrington Publishing. More recently (since 2014), Margot's longstanding research interests in gender, personal narrative and life story telling have led her to undertake life history research in collaboration with elders in the Canadian and American transgender communities. Girl in the Dream is the first in what is expected to be a series of life histories of transgender elders; the life story of Stephanie (Sydney) Castle Heal, a Canadian transgender woman and early advocate for the rights of transgender people, especially those incarcerated in the Canadian prison system. Despite her training as an academic, Margot's writing style is clear, engaging and personable, unencumbered by jargon and readily accessible to both experts and those who are new to the subject matter.