April Ashley April Ashley April Ashley, MBE (born 29 April 1935) is an English model and restaurant hostess. She was outed as a transgender woman by the "Sunday People" newspaper in 1961 and is one of the earliest British people known to have had sex reassignment surgery. Born George Jamieson in Sefton General Hospital, Liverpool, she was one of six surviving children of a Roman Catholic father, Frederick Jamieson, and a Protestant mother, Ada Brown Jamieson. In her childhood in Liverpool, Ashley suffered from both calcium deficiency, requiring weekly calcium injections at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital, and bed-wetting, resulting in her
National Center for Transgender Equality to the U.S. Congress and yielded the first-ever Congressional hearing on transgender rights issues. Under the Obama administration, NCTE successfully lobbied for at least 150 federal policy changes on issues including health care access and non-discrimination in health services; federal employment protections; homeless and emergency shelter access; non-discrimination in federally-subsidized housing; and open military service for transgender service members. Also among these policy victories was the modification of State Department regulations, allowing transgender citizens to change the gender marker on their passport without necessarily having undergone genital reconstruction surgery. NCTE's mission statement reads: Mara Keisling is the founding executive director