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 LGBT liaison in 2016, making her the first openly transgender person in the role. On April 3, 2017, Freedman-Gurspan rejoined NCTE as director of external relations. NCTE works to educate policy makers and the American public about the transgender community and the issues facing it, as well as to lobby Congress and other policy makers to adopt policies that support the rights and human dignity of transgender Americans. In service of this mission, NCTE runs several programs spanning a variety of policy issue areas. NCTE works on a variety of policy issues of significance to the transgender community. These include: