TRANSGENDER HERITAGE
April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady
The Museum of Liverpool, 27 September 2013 to 21 September
2014
A new exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool demonstrates,
through the story of one life, how much our society has really changed in the
last 60 years. In 1950, when 15 year old George Jamieson ran away from the
poverty of a Liverpool Council House estate to sea, the city, like the rest of
the UK, was place in which boys grew up
to be real men, and girls grew up to be housewives.
George, was born into the most abject poverty in Pitt street
in Liverpool, with an absent Navy father whom he idolised. The local bobby* warned
his abusive mother that if he saw George with any more injuries - she had
punched a hole the size of her fist in his back - she would find herself going to
prison. As a young boy in the war, George,
shouted helplessly to two friends from where he had climbed on the cricket pavilion
roof, and watched as the incendiary bomb they were playing with, blew off their
arms. He helped the same local bobby pick up the pieces, literally, before being
told not to say anything to his mother when he got home.
Despite being was an endlessly bullied sissy boy at school, George’s
formative life, and a market job with a family who recognised his difference,
gave George the courage and guts to escape. Ultimately signing up for the
Merchant Navy, he spent 2 years seeking the cure to become a real man. Finding
it did not work, another suicide attempt led to incarceration in Liverpool’s secure
Walton hospital where a second attempt at a cure; ECT, failed. So George ran
away along a road which would lead to becoming a dancer at the famous Parisian
club; La Carousel, and then on to a surgeon in Casablanca, by whom he would
become she; April Ashley, bon-vivant, raconteur, and high-society model for
famous fashion photographers including David Bailey and Terence Donovan, and
for Vogue wearing the clothes from the fashion houses of Chanel, Givenchy, and
Cardin.
Successful in every way, April’s future in the swinging
London of the 1960s looked set to be as far away from the poverty of Liverpool's Pitt Street as it
could possibly be. Except, that in 1971, after being ‘outed’ in the
Sunday People – a friend who must have
been desperate took a fiver in exchange for her story – April’s marriage to the
minor English Aristocrat, Arthur Corbett, was ended in the English Appeal Court.
Lord Justice Ormrod, a man who was qualified as both a doctor and a lawyer, and
so was doubly certain that he knew what he was talking about, held that a
person’s sex could be determined entirely through their chromosomes, gonads and
genitals. He ignored the major clinical and scientific experts of the day,
instead favouring the narrow view of his friend, the psychiatrist Dr. John Randell,
who was to build up his then very small patient group at Charing Cross Hospital
into what has now become the largest Gender Identity clinic in the country. Faced with Ashley, Ormrod ran
out of words, and being unable to describe the gorgeous woman in front of him
as a man, he managed simply to say that she was “not a woman for the purposes
of marriage.”
At the time, nobody quite realised the consequences of this
decision, but a series of cases in the English courts held that confidence in
the law could only be achieved through consistency. Gradually over the next 20
years, transsexual people lost one right after another. They found that whilst
the NHS was far more prepared to accept their need for Gender reassignment
treatment, becoming the people they really were became more and more difficult,
as increasingly they were required to disclose their past just to be able to
function in daily life. Whether obtaining car insurance, passing medicals for
jobs, or claiming benefits, it seemed everyone had the right to know their
former gender, and once they knew then to indiscriminately cause them to be disadvantaged.
Whilst Ashley herself tried to make the best of what had
happened, in 1992, other transsexual people decided the only way out of this
mess was to use the law to fight the law, and on the advice of Lord Alex
Carlile, set up the pressure group Press For Change. Since then, Press For
Change has been incredibly successful at obtaining those legal rights,
especially through their use of the European Court of Justice and the Court of
Human Rights. The group has obtained protection from discrimination in the
workplace and when accessing services, a right to privacy about their medical
history and, most importantly, a right to recognition of their new gender for
all legal purposes, allowing them to marry or become civil partners, adopt
children, or simply to get on in peace and quiet with their otherwise pretty
ordinary lives. The reach of Press For Change has been wide, with their work
influencing similar legislation in South Africa, Spain, Argentina Japan, Sweden
and many other countries.
The exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool focuses on how one
boy, born into the poverty of depression hit Liverpool in 1935, fought the
system. How she became an extraordinary woman; part of the back drop to that
battle for rights, and how she has survived to become one of England’s Grande Dames.
It is right that Liverpool has honoured this woman in this way, like so many of
her fellow city’zens, she is another of Liverpool’s children who have carried
the Liverpudlian fight for social justice out into the wider world. She has become part of a movement for change
that has created a better life for those who experience their gender
differently. April Ashley’s life, albeit unintentionally at the time, helped
create a social and political movement [led by legal and transsexual activists
from that other great city of the North West, Manchester]. It is a movement
which has led to real change to the lives of millions of real people throughout
the world. She is another point of pride in the history of the city of
Liverpool.
original version first published at
http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/april-ashley-trans-hero-who-changed-world260913
