April Ashley
English model, actress, author, and activist (1935–2021)
April Ashley (29 April 1935 – 27 December 2021), styled as The Honourable Mrs Corbett from 1963 to 1980, was an English model, author, and LGBT rights activist. In the 1950s, upon being discharged from the Merchant Navy, she performed under the stage name Toni April at Le Carrousel de Paris in Paris. Ashley was outed as a transgender woman by The Sunday People newspaper in 1961 and was one of the earliest British people known to have had gender confirmation surgery. Her first marriage, to the future 3rd Baron Rowallan, was annulled in the High Court of Justice case of Corbett v Corbett. Ashley was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to transgender equality.
Early life
Born at 126 Smithdown Road (then Sefton General Hospital) in Liverpool, Ashley was one of six surviving children of a Roman Catholic father, Frederick Jamieson, and Protestant mother, Ada Brown, who had married two years before. During her childhood in Pitt Street, Ashley suffered from both calcium deficiency, requiring weekly calcium injections at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital, and bed-wetting, resulting in her being punished so severely by her mother that the police were almost called and subsequently being given her own box room, at the age of two, when the family moved to a different house. Ashley started to experience gender incongruence during her childhood. It has been suggested that she may have had "some abnormality in androgenisation at puberty" whereby her body did not masculinise as expected.
1950s to 1970s
Navy
Ashley joined the Merchant Navy in 1951 at the age of 16.
“April Ashley” enters the record as english model, actress, author, and activist (1935–2021). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what April, Ashley and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“April Ashley” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, April, Ashley and English provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q774137. VIAF identifies the subject as 94838166. The Library of Congress control number is n83211414. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 2021, 1963 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “April Ashley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.