April Ashley MBE: Model and Pioneer

   April Ashley was born George Jamieson, in the Liverpool slums, in 1935. From the age of three George knew that he was really a girl. There were six siblings. It was a squalid, violent existence. His mother took a violent dislike to her effeminate son and regularly whipped him; she would also hold him by the feet and knock his head on the ground. Little George was bullied relentlessly for his feminine good looks. Boys would tie him up and bash him. When shopping with is mother people would refer to him as ‘it’. This instilled in him the dreadful knowledge that some people were considered to be freaks. At eleven he was raped by a friend of the family and severely injured.

    When he was fourteen he joined the merchant navy. At the same time he noticed that he was developing breasts. This proved traumatic and in a trough of depression he attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Mersey River. For this, he was dishonourably discharged.

    Confinement in a high-security mental hospital followed, when he was sixteen, where George was tied to a bed and given a range of treatments to ‘cure’ him of his femininity, including electric shock treatment and injections of male hormones. He was raped by a roommate. He was totally alone and had no one sympathetic to talk to. Released after a year, George moved to London, where he found a variety of jobs. Once, in the Soho restaurant Quo Vadis, Albert Einstein asked to be introduced to the stunning young man and complimented him on his long eyelashes.

    Several years later, in the early 1950s, George relocated to Paris, where he found some success as a compere at Le Carrousel, a famous drag club. Elvis Presley, on leave from his stint in the army in Germany, tried to seduce the ravishing young man. Even after he was told that George was actually male, Elvis continued to send flowers regularly. Artists, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí were also smitten.

    It was while he worked at Le Carrousel that George’s attention was drawn to Dr Burou. Based in Casablanca, Burou had conducted seven sex-change operations. George saved his francs and eventually scraped together the required £3,000 and flew to Casablanca. Still in its infancy, the nine-hour operation was grueling and carried a 50/50 chance of death, and there was a prolonged, pain-filled recovery period. Arriving back in Paris, on Bastille Day, Ashley was taken home by a young dancer from Le Carrousel for a test-run of her new female genitalia. Afterwards, the dancer opened the window and gestured over the roofs of the city, with all the Bastille Day bunting and people cheering, and told her that the whole of Paris was celebrating the loss of her virginity.

In the early 1960s, truly happy for the first time in her life, she found great success as a model in London, becoming Vogue’s favourite lingerie model, and photographed by David Bailey. However, one of her friends sold her story to the Sunday People for £5 and they ran a humiliating exposé which ended her modelling career. She had also recently made a small appearance in the film ‘The Road to Hong Kong’, with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, but when her transgender status was discovered, her name was removed from the credits and only scenes where her back was shown were allowed to remain. 

    In 1961, Ashley married Arthur Corbett, the son of Lord Rowallen. They opened a nightclub in Spain, where Ashley had sexual liaisons with Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. In 1970 her husband had the marriage annulled on the grounds of her being born a man, despite his knowledge of her gender-reassignment. In court, the judge ruled that she was “not a woman for the purposes of marriage”. Ashley was left penniless, and the tabloid newspapers went to town on the story, meaning that she was unable to secure any work whatsoever for several years. She existed on the generosity of friends during this period. Complete strangers would abuse her in the street - one woman even slapped her face. Eventually, she was taken on as a hostess at a restaurant in Knightsbridge.

     In subsequent years she has been a tireless campaigner for the rights of transgender people and has lobbied the government on their behalf. In 2004 the Gender Recognition Act became law. This allows transsexual people to officially change their legal gender and to acquire a new, gender-appropriate, birth certificate.

In 2012, April Ashley was awarded an MBE for services to transgender equality. She died in 2021, aged 86.