April Ashley grave (29th April 1935 to 27th December 2021)

At my all-boys school there were a couple of homosexual lads in my year. They preferred lads and that what is and nobody seemed to mention being born into the wrong body. Nowadays transgender issues drip though the newspapers and television news most weeks. Here I am at the grave of the trailblazer who changed from male to female decades before it became voguish. Despite being a pioneer who gained fame, fortune, modelling contracts and an MBE there's no headstone (only a simple crucifix.) After leaving Merseyside and living around the world she returned 'home' to be buried.

April's real name was George Jamieson. He was born in working-class Liverpool before World War Two started. He seemed effeminate from birth and his mother loathed him, bashing his head on the ground like a pneumatic drill while the city was being bombed. He suffered an appalling childhood and was bullied so violently at school that he was once crippled for four months. This anguish could not compare with the civil war raging in his mind as he felt he was a female trapped in a male body.

Aged 16 he left Liverpool to become a sailor for the Merchant Navy. Suppressing urges to change gender he took male hormones and underwent electric shock therapy but nothing worked. Trying to commit suicide he was discharged. A further attempt ended in failure too. He moved to Paris and worked in a cross-dressing nightclub. Here one of his co-workers showed him sex change was possible by showing the result of surgery. He went to Morocco where operations were carried out and was not put off upon seeing photos of blood-soaked, chopped-off dicks. The next morning he was booked in for a castration and over seven hours his sausage skin was inverted into the newly created space and the remaining tissue used to complete the new vagina. The post-op pain was excruciating but there was no question in April’s mind: she was reborn and fee from regrets. She’d done the right thing saying she was not 'transformed' but 'complete'. From then on she only spoke of George - the boy she’d been - in the third person.

Returning to London a new life began as April Ashley. She came a sought-after model and the toast of London. Aged 26 a former colleague who needed money ‘outed’ April’s sex change to the Sunday People newspaper. April's modelling career ended when every one of her bookings was cancelled (she'd modelled for Bournville chocolate but they said they could not have their name associated with a sex change.)

A rollercoaster life ensued as she rocketed to highs and plummeted to lows. She ran off to Spain to be near a married friend Arthur Corbett (who was also a Baron, part of nobility) who ran the Jacaranda Club in Marbella. While there April enjoyed an with Omar Sharif. She went onto marry Arthur after he divorced his wife. The marriage was a disaster and annulled seven years later. A public and embarrassing law case set the newspapers alight: Corbett versus Corbett (Ashley). Arthur declared the marriage null and void, and ‘fraudulent’. He was refusing to support her financially saying that on their wedding day she was a person of the male sex and the marriage was never consummated. April claimed that Arthur refused to - or couldn’t - consummate. The case rumbled for 17 embarrassing days in December 1969 where April endured being quizzed about endless private bodily details (nine medical experts subjected her to medical examinations to decide whether she was still a man.) April lost the case.

Cut adrift she escaped to the U.S where she married a gay man and did menial jobs in restaurants and working for Greenpeace (ended in divorce.) She continued modelling and writing articles, appeared in a film and got on the front of some glossy magazines. There were alleged affairs with Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif and Michael Hutchence.

The Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004 and a year later April received the document she’d longed for: her birth certificate from Her Majesties Government identifying her as a female. The rollercoaster life accelerated a little when in 2012 when she was awarded an MBE for her services to transgender equality. There were biographies written about her an exhibition "April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady" at the Museum of Liverpool (attended by over a million people.) She died at home in Fulham aged 86 and there was a memorial celebration in St George’s Hall in Liverpool.

Someone abroad asked me to look for this grave and thankfully I had a plot number. It's in a quiet cemetery in Litherland north of Liverpool city centre. It's in an old part of the cemetery and some of the graves had numbers engraved into them. I walked along the backs of graves and saw RD 1081 was patch of grass (also RD1081 next to it - could it be a relative?) I thought such an icon would herald visitors with flowers, trinkets and love heart-shaped pebbles. I did a salute and left.

April was called George Jamieson...