Pride Month: April Ashley
April Ashley (1935-2021) was a celebrated English model, performer, and LGBTQ+ activist. In her early 20s she became a successful performer at the French drag cabaret Le Carrousel de Paris, where she was a colleague of Coccinelle, who we profiled earlier. Denied gender reassignment surgery in Great Britain, Ashley went to Morocco in 1960 for a difficult but successful surgery by pioneering surgeon Georges Burou, who had performed the same surgery for Coccinelle in 1958.
Returning to Britain, she began to model for British Vogue, but her career was cut short in 1961 after the Sunday People newspaper outed her as a trans woman. In 1963, Ashley married aristocrat Arthur Cameron Corbett, but the marriage soon deteriorated, eventually leading to the landmark 1970 court case Corbett v Corbett which ruled that the marriage could be annulled because Ashley was biologically, and therefore legally, male. This very public divorce set a legal precedent for all transsexuals that remained in effect until 2004 when the Gender Recognition Act was passed to legally allow people in the UK to change gender.
Ashley tried to recoup after this humiliation, but after a heart attack in 1975, she eventually retreated to the U.S., only returning to Britain in 2005 when she could be legally affirmed as a woman because of the Gender Recognition Act. Her life of determination was a source of strength for many in the trans and queer communities, for which she was recognized and honored by being appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2012.
The images shown here are from our copy of April Ashley's Odyssey, co-authored by Ashley and English writer Duncan Fallowell (b. 1948) and published in London by Jonathan Cape in 1982.
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