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April Ashley and the pursuit of a lovely life

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case that gripped 1970s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation.

As Britain emerged from post-war austerity and headed towards the Swinging Sixties, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the heights of London society via Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris, she was also one of the first Britons to undergo gender-affirming surgery.

Ashley was appointed MBE for services to transgender equality in 2012, but her journey towards acceptance was hard-won and bitterly contested. In 1961, a friend sold her story to a tabloid and she feared that she would never work in the UK again. Her brief marriage to Arthur Corbett, the son of a baron, set off a high-profile divorce battle, resulting in a landmark 1970 decision denying transgender women legal status as women — and denying Ashley her husband’s inheritance. Instead, she blazed her own trail, rubbing shoulders along the way with the bohemians and jetsetters who had risen to prominence in the Swinging Sixties.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, award-winning biographers Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts tell the full story of April Ashley’s extraordinary life at the vanguard of the sexual revolution and the movement for trans equality.

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