Documentary about April Ashley

Channel 4 ran a documentary on socialite April Ashley who fell from grace after a so-called friend sold her story to the People for a fiver, then she had just become one of the leading models in the country. She recovered from the shock and married Lord Rowallan's son who a few years later threw her to the lions and through a bigotted legal system which protected the rich (it still does) declared her a man but this after the judge in effect ordered the doctors who examined her to find in the negative, having previously said she was a normal woman. Ormerod who was nothing but a bigot declared the marriage void. To his disgrace, the leading psychiatrist at the Gender Clinic at Charing Cross Hospital, Dr John Randall, whom I saw when I first realised I was transsexual, also denounced her as a male. Finallly, she found respite at Hay on Wye on the Borders of England and Wales. During this quieter period she received an MBE for services to gender, of which she was extremely proud.

The documentary was a bit superficial but then there was enough in her life to have run a series of programmes about the woman who was friends with the likes of Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif and who claimed to have bedded the latter, and whose friends in later years included Simon Cowell and Boy George and others who all claimed she was a woman despite Omerod's wrong conclusion all those years before, my own conclusions were that we have to accept she was a woman but because she was never seen with a hair out of place she was, I feel, something of a stereotyped woman who just exuded too much femininity to be normal.

The programme is still available on All Four.