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April Ashley

April Ashley (born 25 April 1935) is a British-born model and singer. She was famously outed as transsexual by the British press in 1961.

After an unhappy childhood in Liverpool, as one of six children of a Roman Catholic father and a Protestant mother, she moved to Paris in the 1950s and joined the cast of the cabaret show at the Carousel theater. She had an early sex reassignment procedure in 1960 in Casablanca, Morocco.

After moving back to England, she became a successful model, but was outed by the UK’s People newspaper in 1961, causing a great scandal.

She married Arthur Corbett in 1963, but the marriage did not last, and in 1970 Corbett successfully sought to have the marriage annulled on the grounds that Ashley had been born male, which set the precedent for the legal status of transsexuals in the United Kingdom until the Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force.

She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the European Diversity Awards on 02 October 2014.

She currently lives in San Diego, California.

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Adapted for T-VOX from Wikipedia by Jennifer Kirk