Douglas Thompson - Inside Out – The Extraordinary Legacy of April Ashley

April Ashley’s story, or at least the facts of her life, have been told so often now (not least on this site) that when I saw this in my local library I wondered who now needed to know about “the boy who became the most famous woman in the world”. Well, that’s one way of putting it. April had the distinction of accruing a richer and more full-fat fame later in life than she did in what for a long time was considered her heyday, the 1960’s when she was momentarily one of the world’s most sought-after models and socialites. The subtitle of the book begs a question, not least of someone whose womanhood was for decades the subject of legal disputation, - we might better bill her as “Britain’s most famous transexual”. And the word “became” downplays the great efforts of friends, supporters and allies to establish the status of “woman” for April Ashley. When she finally emerged around the turn of the 21st Century as an exemplar and pioneer and began to receive due honours and renewed celebrity there was not much “becoming” about it – it was a cause she and others had fought for over decades. By that time April had declared herself in public – interviews, a kind of autobiography, television, press – often enough, to establish some facts, but this is a kind of friendly memoir. In this it stands comparison with “Becoming Drusilla”, another friend’s account of a transition and its consequences. (That book is reviewed on this site) The differences are not insignificant – Dru does not achieve a comparable celebrity to April’s, and her story is an altogether more down-to-earth life-progress, but for me both books raise the question about who is best to tell the transition story, the trans or another? There are so many self-tellings now that we might assume that only the shy and the dead need to be biographized – every transbody else can bounce into print. But let me tell you – the best of this book is the sympathetic way it lays out the life-story. Douglas Thompson was a friend with a friend’s access to April in conversation and was a first-hand witness to her circumstances in the latter half of her life. He has an easy style without the painful exaggerations and literary formulas of the jobbing journalist, and knows when to leap ahead in the story to break up its texture. There is an air of supportive complicity in his telling of it all, as though he and April had plotted the whole thing in advance. In a way of course she had, but more of that in due course. Trans is not something we are but something that we do in relation to others. The best of trans lives help us to an outsider’s view of ourselves. The best of this is therefore in those periods, first and last, when Douglas is the main narrator. In the middle period when April is more or less living in the wilderness so far as public prominence goes and he has access to a lot of her through interviews which are quoted at length the substance is different. It is not then about a trans-life but a famous life and the revelations and gossip about, it seems, everybody from Paul McCartney to Richard Booth, Keith Moon to Michael Hutchence, Princess Margaret to Sammy Davis Jnr, have the feel of playing to the (media) gallery. When the story is concerned with origins and consequences it opens up the nature of trans, when it sails out into society it runs the risk of making transition feel like something you have to be famous to do. But fame and trans for most people do not run in the same riverbed and April’s story is profoundly untypical. It is most untypical in that she was outed as trans at a time when public understanding of such things was mainly primitive so that she had to live with the harsh consequences of that revelation. The trial which resulted in the adverse judgement forms the tipping point of this book, and the full transcript of the judge’s deliberations is printed as an appendix. It is a book in itself, the whole April story to 1970, as filtered through the English legal system’s structures and vocabulary, and it’s painful to read, and yet….. I was asked on radio when April Ashley died what had been her legacy. I said that by her suffering, bravely and resolutely, that public outing she had opened up the questions around gender identity which we are still answering today. Of course, given the choice, she wouldn’t have opted to be discovered in this way (or any way probably), but in a kind of grand disgrace she flew the flag long enough for it to be raised high and for the many who had followed in her footsteps to march in gratitude. Many of the early trans were conservatives and traditionalists – Jan Morris, Roberta Cowell, were like April in accepting the social structure and wanting their place in it. It can be something of a puzzle to we who live a trans life in the third decade of the 21st century, - when gender can be shaded and fluid and intermediate and when we see the establishment as the force readied up to deny us our freedoms, our dreams and our social existences, and ours a cause to be fought for publicly – that our brave precursors wished to merge back into their society, simply as another, to achieve a kind of equivalence or swap, me for another me. We, many of us, consider ourselves a force for change, a necessary “other” to help the world manage a transition to a better version of itself, or at least as publicly resisting the newly-surging forces of intolerance and dangerous selfishness. In her time April had worked for Greenpeace and consistently lent her support to individuals and organizations dedicated to reform and renewal, but I wonder if she was political by default. As someone who had suffered gender-injustice she was almost wedded to the cause. If there is an underlying theme to this book it is not “inside out” (the procedure by which her penis became a vagina) but artifice. Even with her fine features and with the confidence of an entirely successful surgical transition April is the queen of the created appearance. She acts her entrances well of course, and much of her life is high theatre but she rarely appears without make-up, treasures her Balmain gowns, and fronts all kinds of events with the hauteur of a grande dame. She is also intensely conscious of the story she is telling, a story which has been lovingly crafted. You sense from the book that one of the most wounding aspects of the judgement which declared in favour of her husband was that it broke the story, spoiled the completion of her self-narrative, messed up the look of it all. She wanted a modest perfection and it was denied her. Not even an MBE could fully compensate for the fallow middle years of unrecognition. And I, for one, had never quite comprehended until I read this account of her childhood and adolescence, quite why that perfection, that security, that respect, was so important to her. The abuse, God, the abuse – the brutality! The broken bones and bruised face and body, the sexual interference, the violence and indifference! – you don’t have to be an expert in psychology to understand why love, kindness, gentleness and a transcendingly beautiful appearance were her passports to an emancipated life, and worth enduring adversity to achieve and finally enjoy. Drugs, we understand, were not part of the picture, but drink was, as a social lubricant also a solvent for hurts received and any residual sadness from the brutalities of growing up. It was her genius to also bring resilience and dignity to the table, even a kind of modesty. She needed to be known and she needed to be respected. For all that she bears no relation to those fame-hungry queens of the Drag-Race. She wasn’t actually hungry for fame, but she craved celebrity (a more old-school thing) and her artifice was to meet society head-on with an immaculate poise. The life of a model suited her down to the ground. Exaggeration was bad form. To its credit this book does not portray a “legend”, which is something socially-constructed, something “we” need more than anybody really, actually is. April Ashley was her own creation and she comes across in this friend’s account as someone who knew the value of understatement.