Dee Mould – “ I was born in 1966 in a very small old school village in Kent, England. It was very different era and I was Trans in a very different era, not openly Trans but I grew up questioning my identity from a very early age which brought me a lot of confusion. My family wasn’t supportive when I tried to discuss it so that was one of the things that encouraged me to keep it buried.
I went to school in a very rough town and I’d rather gloss over that part of my life because it was pretty yucky. I went off the rails a bit in my early teens. I was born Trans but I wasn’t being honest about who I was. I was trying to be a man I guess and when I tried to discuss it with my Mum she said I couldn’t do that because it would break my Dad’s heart and encouraged me very strongly to dismiss those feelings.
I thought I was crazy for a while and did my best to hide it which resulted in a lot of alcohol and drug abuse and a lot of toxic male behaviour…a lot of fighting.
I was in England at a time where Punk rock was just starting as a reply to Margaret Thatcher and the Miner’s strikes were happening, so it was at a time where the biggest civil unrest in modern history was occurring. The Government at the time was very conservative so they built this huge Police response to deal with the Miners strike.
I got involved with the protests around access to Stonehenge so there was already this violent response in place to the Miners strike so they turned that onto what became the Hippie Convoy. The 1st June 1985 when I was 18 we had the Battle of the Beanfield which ended up with the largest number of arrests in one day. The convoy at that time was getting bigger and turning into a community of alternate people living in buses and caravans and the Police decided to smash it. There was a young journalist in the convoy who managed to get some footage out of the extreme Police brutality. There was a thousand Police and about 600 protestors, including footage of a pregnant woman being bashed. These vans were basically people’s homes being smashed up. As a result of that they brought a law in to respect people’s homes regardless if they were bricks and mortar.
I had a serious motor bike accident and snapped my arm pretty much off. I managed to rip the nerves out of my spine which left it completely paralysed and that made work much harder. That was a hard time stuck between employers who didn’t want someone with a disability and a social security system saying I had to find employment. I ended up surviving by doing farm work, labouring for builders and that was quite challenging. I didn’t live in a house until I was 40 when my kids came along. My dad threw me out when I was 17 for arguing with my brother. I was homeless for a long period of time with just a backpack, alcohol problem and sleeping rough. If I had a car I considered myself not homeless. I ended up living in the West country where I met my now ex-wife.
We came to Dubbo in Australia and she got pregnant. We went back to England where my eldest daughter Mollyanne was born and my wife struggled and wanted to come home so we moved to Dubbo. It was quite conservative and I was there for 13 years and we had our second daughter Lucy. I stayed and raised my girls, even though we divorced. In that time I made only 2 friends. It wasn’t an inclusive place for me to live.
I ended up going to the Pilliga Forest at the start of what became a very big campaign. I was arrested there under a truck and my bail conditions stated I wasn’t allowed to go within 100kms of the forest. I then moved to the area where we were trying to protect the Leard Forest from Whitehaven Coal and I stayed for 2 1/2 years. There were over 450 arrests over 4 years. People fought so hard for that forest but there is a coal mine there now. The community I became involved with gave me strength and self confidence and made me realise that I have skills and uses and it’s probably the first time that I’ve been put to work and valued. I was able to become myself and I’m so proud of who I am now.
I applied for jobs in the Northern Rivers and I landed a job in Lismore. I arrived on a Sunday and started work on the Monday doing youth work and disability support. I picked up some other jobs but one of those was working with a young person who attacked me almost every day and I ended up in A&E.
I moved into a house in Lismore with my partner at the time Naomi and this is where we faced the flood. We are no longer together. I lived in a flood area in England but this was different. We were settling down for the night and the plan was to get up at 4am when they said it was going to peak but we waded out over Browns Creek at 11pm that night through waist deep water. We stayed with friends just out of the flood area. In the morning a guy was going to investigate so I went with him.
There was people getting out of boats who had been rescued through the night. I jumped in a boat with a guy called John and grabbed a life jacket. I can’t swim. We rescued people from Saffron’s house which felt very life threatening. We ended up rescuing about 15 people dragging them out of houses. It was so gnarly. I ended up completely under water twice, once when I fell out of the boat and was sinking. I can’t remember a lot because I was in trauma. I know we were mooring on the second story awnings of the shops. What was scary was the speed of the water. We cruised my street and I saw our house which is also a 2 storey house and it was to the roof (photo in comments). I was relieved to see Naomi because we had lost touch throughout that period. A couple of days later the water was at the top step and a guy called Tom kayaked us to the house. We kicked the door in and it was rough. Naomi and I split up after the flood. It’s not easy to maintain a relationship through something like that.
I ended up stripping the walls to a shell. I had help with friends for the clean up but all the walls have been built by a crazy woman with one arm.(laughs) There was a company offering 10 free sheets of gyprock to flood affected people so I got those sheets and we put those in someone else’s house and that’s when we started ‘Insulate Lismore’. We did a press release and put up a Gofund Me. We used that money as it came in to buy building materials to line 2 rooms in as many people’s houses as we could. We did about 15 houses, a couple of sheds and 2 complete houses. We started going down to Coraki, Wardell and Woodburn. A woman gave birth in emergency housing and she brought the baby to the site where we were building 2 rooms so we saw the 6 day old baby and decided to line the whole house. Everything we did was covered by our crowd funding and our business model was ‘No drama’. My phone was ringing constantly by people needing help. I was walking into people living in tents in the houses with little children because they have no option and there’s snakes. People had brown snakes in their houses. After the flood people were overrun with rats. We raised funds for an old fellow who had lost his mobility scooter in the flood and he was living in the debris of the flood. Koori Mail helped him out with food and help. Sometimes all people needed for a moment was putting a group of smiling people in their home and listening to their flood story with no drama.
Growing up at the time of Thatcher’s reign and all that political unrest gave me a healthy disrespect for unjust law and bad policing. I see good police but that whole power trip with extreme right wing shit and now there’s all these organisations whipping up hatred of Trans people. You have Scomo supporting highly Transphobic politicians, you have Mark Latham spreading hate with his religious freedom act. Why the f#@k do they care what I wear on the street or how I present? Why do we have to stir up the misconception that the medical profession are harming young trans people. Why can’t we let the families and the medical professions of those young people that understand what’s going. Why can’t we leave the treatment to them?
Why is it being so heavily politicised? It’s because those extreme right wing organisations need the masses to hate somebody to strengthen their position. There’s a huge campaign going on against Trans people and I really don’t see why it matters. I’ve been violently attacked on the streets at least 4 times, here as well. I’m just walking down the street and I don’t get why people would attack me because they don’t like my outfit and the other thing I don’t get is why people would openly ridicule another human being in public. We don’t do it to people with disabilities, we don’t do it to Gay people, why is it ok to ridicule me? I thought it was getting better but since the stuff that’s in the media I sense that hatred on the street sometimes. I live in Lismore which is a bubble but sadly, we still get an occasional person like that.”
