Trans trailblazer who went from Liverpool lad to Vogue supermodel. Everyone from Elvis Presley to Peter O’Toole fell for April Ashley, who claimed… ‘I could have slept with all four Beatles!’

So, when would you like to transition from monsieur to mademoiselle?’ asked Dr. Georges Burou at his clinic in Casablanca.

“At once,” replied George Jamieson. It was 1960. At the age of 25, he was desperate. All his life he was sure he was a woman, trapped in a male body.

Born in working-class Liverpool in 1935, he had a horrible childhood, with a mother who detested his effeminacy and smashed his head into the ground like a pneumatic drill as the city was bombed to bits. He was bullied so violently on the playground that he was once crippled for four months.

But none of that was as bad as the inner conflict he suffered.

At 17, he escaped and went to work, first as a sailor (during which he was pumped with male hormones and underwent electric shock therapy to suppress his urge to change gender) and then at a transvestite nightclub in Paris called Le Carousel. One of his colleagues, Coccinelle, showed him that sex change was possible. She had it ready. She opened her legs to prove it.

George decided that he too needed to change gender and went to Morocco to meet the Gauloises chain-smoking surgeon who could help him.

During the consultation, Dr. Burou tested his resolve by showing him photos of blood-soaked, severed body parts to remind him what the sex change operation would entail: photos so graphic that, as he put it, “only a real transsexual’ would remain in place’.

George didn’t flinch.

“I’ll book you tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.,” Dr. Burou said.

This was twelve years before that same doctor would perform the operation that turned acclaimed travel writer James Morris into Jan Morris. When it came to gender reassignment, George Jamieson – soon to be ‘reborn’ as Miss April Ashley – was the real pioneer.

The operation continued the next morning. Look away now if you don’t want to know the full details: castration, after which the penis skin was inverted into the newly created space, and the remaining tissue was used to complete the new vagina. The official name of the operation: an ‘anterior pedicled penile skin flap inversion vaginoplasty’.

The pain after the operation was unbearable, but April was in no doubt: she was reborn. She had done the right thing.

From then on she spoke only about George, the boy she had been, in the third person. As Douglas Thompson writes in this lively, if rather fawning and gushing, book about her (they were friends and reminisced at her home in Provence), April always emphasized that the operation did not “transform” her, but “complete” her. her.

And then the fun began. The first thing she did was sleep with a muscular dancer at Le Carrousel named Skippy. He promised her he would be the first to have sex with her after the surgery – and it worked.

Tall, thin and beautiful, April became a supermodel. David Bailey and Terry O’Neill photographed her for Vogue modeling underwear.

Even when she was a transvestite at Le Carrousel, Salvador Dali and Elvis Presley were magnetically drawn to her. Now, as a woman in her own right, she was the toast of London.

“I could have slept with all the Beatles,” she boasted. She claimed to have rejected Paul McCartney at Club dell’Aretusa on King’s Road and escaped his advances in a taxi.

She befriended a married old Etonian transvestite named The Hon Arthur Corbett, who wanted to marry her. She told him about ‘Casablanca’, and he claimed it was no big deal.

The only problem, as she put it, was that there were four people in his life: himself, his other self (the annoying person he became when he dressed as a woman), April, and his wife Eleanor. Moreover, he was schizophrenic.

In November 1961, a former colleague in need of money announced April’s sex change in the Sunday People newspaper.

“The extraordinary case of top model April Ashley: ‘Her’ secret is out,” the headline read. That was the end of April’s modeling career and all her bookings were cancelled.

She modeled for Bournville chocolate, but Bournville said their name could not be associated with gender reassignment.

As we read her story, we accompany April on the roller coaster of her life, rising and falling from victory to catastrophe. She fled to Spain to be near Arthur, who ran the Jacaranda Club in Marbella. While there, she enjoyed some “fun dalliances” with Peter O’Toole and a “full-on affair” with Omar Sharif. She later married Arthur Corbett, after he was divorced, and became the Honorable Mrs. Arthur Corbett.

With that title, the doors socially opened again. But the marriage was a disaster, and before April knew it, she found herself embroiled in a terrible lawsuit: Corbett v. Corbett (Ashley).

Arthur declared the marriage null and void and ‘fraudulent’. He refused to support her financially, saying that on their wedding day she was male and the marriage was never consummated. April claimed that Arthur refused or could not complete.

The case dragged on and in December 1969 she had to spend seventeen days in court being questioned about endless personal body details such as the ‘size and activity of her penis’ prior to the operation. Nine medical experts were present and she was subjected to medical examinations to determine if she was still male.

April lost the case. Judge Ormrod ruled: ‘The defendant is not, and was not, a woman at the date of her marriage, but was at all times a man.’ Set adrift, she fell into poverty.

It’s sad to read what she went through. She fled to the US, married a gay man named Jeff West to get a Green Card, worked menial jobs in restaurants and worked for Greenpeace. As she put it, she was condemned as “a freak living in exile.”

It wasn’t until 2005 that she received the document she longed for: her birth certificate from the British government, identifying her as a woman. In 2004, the Gender Recognition Act was passed.

To crown the rollercoaster, she was awarded an MBE in 2012 for her services to transgender equality.

The following year, a million people attended the April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool. Her mother must have been turning in her grave.

April died in 2021 at the age of 86. At her memorial celebration at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, the place erupted with the singing of her favorite ‘anthem’: I Am Miss April Ashley.

Actor Simon Callow, one of her biggest fans and supporters, paid tribute, saying she had led the way for others.

Against all odds, she had managed to “correct what nature had done wrong” and live the life she knew she was born to live.