The last Cinderella
ROGER LEWIS
Bonjour, Mademoiselle! April Ashley and the Pursuit of a Lovely Life By Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts
Scribe £22
Sympathetic as we all must be towards the trans mob, how often is actual thought given to what’s involved surgically? The authors of this book describe the ‘brutal incisions along the scrotum’ and the ‘massive cut across the urethra’. The testicles are removed, the spermatic cord severed and the penis chopped off. A space is scooped out between the rectum and the prostate to create a vagina – a vagina which, in the words of a doctor friend of mine, cannot fail but to resemble ‘an elderly arsehole with third-degree piles’. Well, perhaps they’ve got better at performing the operation in recent years, but April Ashley, who went under the knife in 1960, had no qualms. ‘I wanted proper fulfilment,’ she insisted, even though when she came round after the seven-hour ordeal, ‘her body was bruised and swollen and foul-smelling with clogged blood’. Yet April was nothing if not tough...
I’m afraid this isn’t one of our four free articles available in full, which are set out in the first two rows of the ‘Magazine’ page.
Please click here to find them.
To buy a digital version of this issue for just £2.99, click here
