April Ashley: 50 happy years for sex-swap pioneer
Britain's first transsexual is, in a new exhibition, again challenging ideas about gender, identity and DNA.
By Peter Stanford
Published: 7
0AM GMT 24 Nov 2009
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'It always makes me laugh when people say I was born a man," says April Ashley, who in 1960 became the first Briton to undergo sex-change surgery. "I was born a baby, not a man. From the year dot, I knew I was female, so as soon as I could kneel down to say my prayers, it would be 'God bless Mummy, God bless Daddy, and please let me wake up and be a girl.' "
Next year, Ashley celebrates the 50th anniversary of her operation. Though today the NHS carries out about 150 ae_SNbSyear, then it was a revolutionary procedure, available only at a clinic in Morocco. As soon as she was fit enough, Ashley – born George Jamieson in Liverpool in 1935 – returned to London and became one of the leading models of the Sixties. Even exposure as a transsexual in the News of World in 1961 couldn't derail her. If anything, it added to her lustre
Now 74, she sits serene and regal on the sofa of her south-west London flat, talking about her starring role in a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection called "Eight Rooms, Nine Lives". As she talks, she throws out questions about gender identity – legal, emotional, and scientific – which is appropriate, since the show is part of a season of events designed to prompt a debate about the scientific and social aspects of human identity. "I've a room to myself," she confirms, in the languid, cut-glass English accent that is as much a part of her legend as her photo-shoots for Vogue with Lord Snowdon, David Bailey and Terence Donovan. "I don't share."
Has she taken a keen interest in the scientific understanding of transsexuals? "Not really," she says. "A nice young man invited me to lunch to talk about being involved in the exhibition and, after I'd listened, I said OK. To me it's old hat. It is so long since my operation, but I've never regretted it. I'm as happy today as the day I had it."
Yet science has certainly taken an interest in Ashley, most notably during the headline-grabbing 1970 court case when her aristocratic husband of seven years, the future Lord Rowallan, successfully petitioned to have their marriage annulled on the grounds that Ashley was a man, even though he knew about her sex change when they tied the knot.
"That was an ordeal," she recalls. "I lost three stone during the 16 days we were in court. The judge never even looked me in the eye. He had me sent off to be X-rayed from head to toe. They made an astonishing discovery that technically I'd never reached puberty, because none of my bones was fused. That should have told them there was something strange about me."
She says it deadpan, but her still arresting face makes it clear she is not playing this particular memory for laughs. Though she has featured in "An Evening With…" theatrical shows, wittily reliving her conquests, who, she claims, included Omar Sharif, Peter O'Toole and Michael Hutchence – Ashley's outrage at how she was treated by science and by the law all those years ago remains visceral. It took until 2004 – with the Gender Recognition Act – for her birth certificate to be amended to describe her as female.
There were, of course, some distinguished scientists who spoke up for Ashley, including Dr C N Armstrong, a consultant physician at the Newcastle Royal Infirmary. "He was the first one who came up with the theory that the reason you have all these peculiar things that go on in life, like transsexuality, is that when you are in the womb, just before you're born, the wrong hormones get to you, and that defines what you are going to be. That theory seems to be accepted now. It wasn't then," she says.
Accepted is perhaps overstating it. Professor Melissa Hines of Cambridge University, who has made a particular study of the prenatal influence of hormones, says that what Ashley describes is still just a hypothesis. "What we know is that in males at about week eight of gestation, the testes are already active and producing high levels of testosterone, but in females, this is not the case. The male production of testosterone causes the external genitalia to develop in the male pattern. We know that testosterone can also act on the fetal brain."
So it is possible that Ashley, could have experienced reduced brain exposure to testosterone before birth. Whether this applies generally to male-to-female transsexuals is much debated. Might they, in the womb, have lacked testosterone somewhere in the brain, affecting their psychological development as males and causing what many describe as a feeling of being a woman in a man's body? "It is," Hines says, "one theory under consideration."
Because Ashley has long been the best-known transsexual in Britain – alongside the writer Jan Morris, who had her operation at the same clinic – she has received distraught letters and emails from often very young children who feel, as she did, trapped in the wrong body.
"Fifty years ago, there was no one I could talk to," Ashley says. "My mother used to call me 'It' and beat me much more than she beat my brothers and sisters. After I tried to commit suicide as a teenager, they put me in a loony bin. That was the very first time – when I was strapped to a bed and having electric shock treatment – that I was able to talk about feeling I was a woman."
Does she recognise anything of herself in the youngsters who contact her? "I do, but I always write back and say, 'I am not a professional. I send you all my love.' I direct them to organisations that can help."
She thinks young children should be allowed to have surgery to change sex. An estimated 40 out of about 1,200 referrals to gender identity clinics in Britain are children and adolescents (the age limit for surgery is 18). "For the ones who are obviously sincere, as I was, I wouldn't hesitate to let them go ahead, but with others I would make them wait.
"For me it was clear-cut. When the doctors in the loony bin told me, 'Go away and be gay,' I said, 'I'm not a homosexual. I want to be a woman.' But some people do get confused. I have known quite a few who committed suicide after the operation because they realised they'd made a terrible mistake."
There have, says Professor Hines, been long-term studies to test this. "These show that very young children who want to change gender don't always continue to want that into adulthood. Among very young boys who want to become girls… the majority no longer want it when they grow up. Most grow up to be gay men."
The advance of scientific understanding could also, Hines suggests, signal an end to the negative labelling that April Ashley once faced – seen more recently in the case of the South African runner, Caster Semenya, whose gender was questioned after she won gold at the 2009 World Athletics Championships. "There are hormone abnormalities which occur in the womb as a result of genetic disorders, but we also know that with hormones there is what might be called 'normal variability' which is not the result of any disorder. So it comes down to what society defines as normal, and that can change over time. In years past, being left-handed was seen as a disorder or a defect, but now it is regarded as simply part of normal variability."
Ashley offers a wealth of other practical examples of that same variability. "Take these" – she gestures at her corduroy trousers – "I can't remember the last time I wore a skirt. I've always preferred wearing slacks. People must see some masculine traits in me, but I don't see them in myself. If I have learnt anything at all about this whole question of identity, it is that nothing is ever straightforward."
"Eight Rooms, Nine Lives" opens on Thursday at the Wellcome Collection in London (www.wellcomecollection.org)
