Friday 28th July 2000

 

BEAUTY: April as she is today; she was a model in the Sixties

Forty years after my sex change I’m still treated as a joke, though I don’t get my face slapped any more

By Jane Warren

SHE is beautifully dressed in a yellow trouser suit, fuchsia pashmina and open-toed sandals.  Her Thatcherite bouffant hair is a distinguished grey and the voice is pure, cut-glass Thirties BBC.  April Ashley has the hauteur and bearing of a duchess, she is also unmistakably feminine, but she has only just received her state pension despite celebrating her 60th birthday five years ago.  And, unless legislation is changed, her death certificate will describe her gender as male.

“Legally, I might die as a man but my friends won’t let me be buried as anything less than a woman,” she says.

April was the most famous transsexual of the Sixties.  Born George Jamieson in a Liverpool slum, she went on to marry as a woman and become a top fashion model, showgirl and socialite.  She was queen of the catwalk, Vogue’s favourite underwear model photographed by Terence Donovan and David Bailey, and was in constant demand.  And then, 40 years ago, she “lost everything” when a friend sold her story to a downmarket newspaper for £5.

Her secret was out.  The model appearing in the glossies had been the ninth person in the world to have a sex change.  April was pilloried and became, as she harshly puts it, “a celebrity freak”.

“I was booked up for six months and it was all cancelled.  I couldn’t even get a job as a shop assistant.  It was unbelievably difficult.”

Her husband Arthur Corbett, later to become Lord Rowallan, who was well aware that April was a transsexual when he married her, divorced her when her story became public.  Their acrimonious case caused a sensation but April did not receive a penny when the marriage was declared nul and void because she was born a man.

Since then, she has had “normal, heterosexual relationships” including a brief affair with the late singer Michael Hutchence in the early Eighties after they met at a bar in Australia, but today she is alone.

“Michael was an absolutely beautiful man and I was flattered by his interest in me.  I was so sad to hear of his death.  He had everything to live for,” she says.

She lives in exile in San Diego where she works as a guide and saleswoman in art galleries.  She is known as a rather eccentric, perfectly mannered English gentlewoman and relishes her anonymity.  She remains convinced that “the breath of scandal” will always follow her in Britain and that finding a job that would fund a new life here would prove impossible, although she longs to return.

“I’m too famous, too well known.  People won’t employ me,” she says.  “But in the USA, I’m just April.  I don’t hide what I’ve been but I don’t volunteer it either and my bosses don’t know.  Being anonymous is awfully nice but it’s never going to happen to me.”

Yet last week she returned to Britain to launch a website, www.image100.com.  She will be a personal site navigation assistant on a web-based, royalty-free picture agency, Image 100.  ITV is also making a documentary about her.  Anonymity is going to be a while coming, but she feels she has little choice.  Because she left Britain so long ago, her pension is worth just £21 a week.

“What can you do with that?” she asks.  “If I’d stayed in the UK, lived on the dole and been a parasite, I would get a full pension, housing and benefits but I’m a penniless darling.  I have been condemned to work for the rest of my life.” Yet she is excited by her venture and hopes it may give her the finances to return to the country she loves.

It seems surprising that she does not live in constant fear of the kind of public disclosure that ruined her life in Britain.

“I was in blissful ignorance, rather naive, and I thought it was just marvellous to be working as a model in the body I’d always wanted,” she recalls.

She is aware that, today, she could have sued for sexual discrimination when her jobs were cancelled but the option was not open to her then.  She opened a restaurant, AD8, in Knightsbridge, becoming one of London’s most fashionable hostesses, before she fled to the US.

“Have you ever been slapped in the face just because you are you?” she says, deeply hurt at the memories of being bullied in the street.

Last week, she asked Tony Blair the same question in a letter.  “At the age of 65, I thought it was time I sorted out my life.  I wrote to Tony explaining that for 40 years I’ve held a passport in the name of Miss April Ashley and I would like a new birth certificate to go with it.  It seems like such a petty thing, but I’d like to get everything in order.”

Since her gender reassignment in Morocco in 1960, April remains in the catch 22 situation that dogs the life of all post-surgery British transsexuals.  Although the NHS recognises transsexualism as a medical disorder and offers hormone and surgical intervention to bring the body into line with the mind (attempts to do the opposite, using electro-convulsive therapy were abandoned but not before April was subjected to this treatment), there is no follow through.  Because a ghost birth certificate cannot be issued, transsexuals cannot marry, have countless problems with employment law and even go to the wrong prisons.  They have no rights in their new gender.

April’s letter is unlikely to be successful - several recent high-profile applications have failed, as did a Private Members bill brought by Alex Carlile, the former Lib Dem health spokesman - but it is only a matter of time before Britain, like Scandinavia and New Zealand, offers transsexuals the chance to enjoy lives of quiet consistency.

Transsexualism is not a “lifestyle choice”, as April puts it.  During foetal development, one foetus in 100,000 receives a dose of hormones that means its body develops the opposite gender to the brain.

April’s story provides a compelling insight into the psychological and social agonies this creates.  “Although I was bought up a strict Roman Catholic boy, I knew from age dot that I was a girl,” she says.

She claims that her parents “truly hated” her and never came to terms with the fact that their son felt like a girl.  “Being transsexual broke my heart.  When I was little, I used to kneel beside my bed praying, ’Please let me wake up as a girl’.  I had no one to confide in.  I didn’t tell anyone for years.  My entire childhood was spent trying to conform to the male body I was born into.”

As a teenager, April - then called George - watched Robert Mitchum films and tried to copy his swagger, but at the age of 15 after George had spent a week forcing his voice to break, there was a suicide attempt.

“I spent my whole life trying to win the love of my mother, but there was never any reconciliation.”

George even joined the Navy in a desperate and doomed attempt to kick start feelings of masculinity.  From then on, George stopped trying to become a man and started cross-dressing, taking on the name April Ashley.  For two years, she worked as a compere at Carousel, the famous female impersonator nightclub in Paris, but after her surgery in 1960 never again worked there, despite the apartment and generous wage she was offered if she stayed.

“I wanted to live as normally as possible and didn’t want to make a career out of that life.  I wanted to be a normal woman in a normal world with normal people,” she explains.

For while transvestites get a sexual kick from cross-dressing, transsexuals find only comfort in dressing their mismatched bodies in line with their minds.  Transsexualism is not about sexual kicks, but about gender identity.

April has fallen foul of every social support system going.  Upon her divorce, she didn’t receive a penny because - in a move that changed the law and “unmarried” all transsexuals - the judge declared her marriage null and void because she was born a man.  “Lord Ormerod’s summing up was rude, crude and judgmental.  It was vicious and nasty.  He was completely dismissive of the experts my legal team had assembled,” says April, adding that this decision still leaves her heartbroken.  “My doctor was going to explain that it happens because the womb gets all the wrong hormones at the wrong time…” April knew her claim was doomed from the start.  “I told my team on the third day, ’We’ve lost this case.  He will not even look at me.’” This seems surprising.  Although it is often difficult for male-to-female transsexuals to make a convincing change, April was not a burly six footer.  She has little feet for her slender 5ft 10ins frame, small shoulders and delicate hands.  Not only was she already naturally quite feminine in appearance but she also became an exceptionally beautiful woman after her transition.  “I had no problems,” she says.  “As a child, people would tell me I was beautiful and after surgery many people just wouldn’t believe I’d been born a boy.  I had to show my passport to prove it.

I always told men I was involved with about my background.

Many men have fallen for me but I’ve only been in love twice.  But you never know, life always surprises me.”

Just before our interview ends, April says something unbearably sad.  Sitting in a taxi, she looks wistfully out of the window.  “People say things have changed but they haven’t changed at all.  I’m treated as a joke and I can’t escape that.  I’m stuck with it for the rest of my life.”I suggest that scientific understanding and public acceptance of transsexuality have increased since she left Britain.  April smiles sagely.  “Happily, I don’t get slapped in the face any more but I think that has more to do with my age,” she says.

© Express Newspapers, 2000