So when would you like to go from monsieur to mademoiselle? asked Dr. Georges Burou at his Casablanca clinic.
“Immediately,” replied George Jamieson. It was 1960. He was 25 years old and desperate. All his life he had known for certain that she was a woman trapped inside a male body.
Born in working-class Liverpool in 1935, he had suffered a dreadful childhood, with a mother who hated his effeminacy and slammed his head into the ground like a pneumatic drill while the city was bombed to pieces. 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 internal conflict he was suffering.
At 17, he ran away and went to work, first as a sailor (during which he was pumped with male hormones and underwent electric shock therapy to try to suppress his urge to change gender) and then in a nightclub. of transvestites in Paris called Le Carrusel. One of his coworkers, Coccinelle, showed him that sex change was possible. She had done it to him. She spread her legs to demonstrate it.
April Ashley, born into working class Liverpool in 1935, underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1960.
Tall, thin and beautiful, April became a supermodel. Pictured is her performing a singing and dancing act at the Astor Club in London’s West End in 1962.
April with her mother Ada Jamieson at London Airport on the way to Gibraltar
George decided he too would have to change his sex and went to Morocco to meet the chain-smoking surgeon Gauloises who could help him.
During the consultation, Dr. Burou tested her resolve by showing her photographs of severed and blood-soaked body parts, reminding her of what gender reassignment surgery would entail: photos so graphic that, as he put it, “only a true transsexual would stay still.’
George didn’t flinch.
“I will book you an appointment for tomorrow morning at 7 a.m.,” Dr. Burou said.
This was 12 years before that same doctor performed 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 next morning, the operation continued. Look away now if you don’t want to know all the details: castration, after which the skin of the penis was inverted into the newly created space and the remaining tissue was used to complete the new vagina. The official name of the operation: “inversion vaginoplasty with anteriorly pedicled penile skin flap.”
The postoperative pain was unbearable, but April had no doubt: she had been reborn. She had done the right thing.
From then on, he only spoke of George, the boy he had been, in the third person. As Douglas Thompson writes in this lively, if rather fawning and effusive, book about her (they were friends and reminisced about her past at her home in Provence), April would always emphasize that the operation did not “transform” her, but rather “completed” it. hers.
And then the fun began. The first thing she did was sleep with a muscular dancer at Le Carrousel named Skippy. He had promised her that he would be the first to have sex with her after the operation, and it worked.
Tall, slim and beautiful, April became a supermodel. David Bailey and Terry O’Neill photographed her for Vogue, modeling underwear.
April signs the marriage register with her husband Arthur Corbett on their wedding day in Gibraltar in September 1963. The marriage subsequently failed and was annulled in 1970.
In 2012, April was awarded an MBE for her services to transgender equality.
April died in 2021, aged 86. She was one of Britain’s first transsexuals and her lovers included Omar Sharif, Peter O-Toole and Michael Hutchence.
Even when she was a transvestite in Le Carrousel, Salvador Dali and Elvis Presley had been magnetically attracted to her. Now, as a full-fledged woman, she was the star of London.
“I could have slept with all the Beatles,” he boasted. He claimed to have turned down Paul McCartney at the Club dell’Aretusa on the King’s Road, escaping his advances in a taxi.
She became friends with a married Old Etonian transvestite called The Hon Arthur Corbett, who wanted to marry her. She told him about ‘Casablanca’ and he claimed he didn’t care about her.
The only problem, as she said, was that there were four people in his life: himself, his other self (the unpleasant person he became when he dressed as a woman), April, and his wife Eleanor. Furthermore, he was schizophrenic.
In November 1961, a former colleague in need of money “highlighted” April’s sex change to the Sunday People newspaper.
“The extraordinary case of top model April Ashley: ‘Her’ secret has come to light,” read the headline. That was the end of April’s modeling career and all her bookings were cancelled.
She had been a model for Bournville chocolate, but Bournville said they could not associate her name with a sex change.
As we read her story, we accompany April on the roller coaster of her life, rising and plummeting from victory to catastrophe. She went to Spain to be close to Arthur, who ran the Jacaranda Club in Marbella. While she was there, she enjoyed some “pleasant games” with Peter O’Toole and an “all-out affair” with Omar Sharif. She married Arthur Corbett, after he divorced, and became the Hon. Mrs. Arthur Corbett.
With that title, the doors were opened again, socially. But the marriage was a disaster, and the next thing April knew, she was caught in a horrible legal case: Corbett against Corbett (Ashley).
Arthur declared the marriage null and void and “fraudulent.” He refused to support her financially, saying that on her wedding day she was a male and that the marriage was never consummated. April claimed that Arthur refused or was unable to consummate.
The case moved forward and, in December 1969, she endured 17 days in court, being questioned about countless private bodily details, such as the “size and activity of his penis” before the operation. Nine medical experts were present and subjected her to medical examinations to decide if she was still a man.
April lost the case. Judge Ormrod ruled: “The defendant is not and was not a woman at the date of her marriage, but he was, at all times, a man.” Adrift, she fell into misery.
It is unfortunate to read what happened. She escaped to the United States, married a gay man named Jeff West to get a green card, and worked menial jobs in restaurants and worked for Greenpeace. As she put it, she was doomed to be “a weirdo living in exile.”
It was not until 2005 that she received the document she longed for: her birth certificate from Her Majesty’s Government, which identified her as a woman. In 2004, the Gender Recognition Law was approved.
Then, to top off the rollercoaster, in 2012 she was awarded an MBE for her services to transgender equality.
The following year, a million people came to see the April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool. Her mother, surely, was turning in her grave.
April died in 2021, aged 86. At her memorial celebration at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, the place erupted with the singing of her favorite ‘hymn’: I’m Miss April Ashley.
Actor Simon Callow, one of his biggest fans and supporters, paid tribute and said he had paved the way for others.
Against all possible odds, he had managed to “correct what nature had gone wrong” and lead the life he knew he was born for.
