April Ashley

“Forty-five years and four months after I became the woman I wanted to be, I had a piece of paper to prove I really am April Ashley. I feel free at last.” April Ashley (b. 1935, Liverpool, UK), seen here at a restaurant opening in Chelsea, London, was a successful British fashion model, whose image appeared in Vogue. In 1961 a friend sold her story to the media, and the newspaper the Sunday People outed her as a trans woman. In 1963, her short-lived marriage to the British aristocrat Arthur Corbett was annulled, with the British courts ruling that she was not entitled to maintenance payments because she could not legally wed "another" man, despite Corbett’s full knowledge of Ashley’s story. Today she is known as one of the earliest British people to undergo gender affirming surgeries, two books have been published about her life, and in 2012 Ashley was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth II for services to transgender equality.