Early Life
Born George Jamieson on 29 April 1935, in Smithdown Road Hospital, Liverpool, she was one of six surviving children of a Roman Catholic father and a Protestant mother.
Raised in Liverpool, she had suffered from calcium deficiency and required weekly calcium injections at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital. Because she wet the bed she was given her own box room aged two when the family moved house.
She joined the Merchant Navy at the age of 14. She had under-developed genitalia and by the age of 15 she had not developed secondary sexual characteristics. She attempted suicide after returning home from the Merchant Navy, and given a dishonourable discharge was sent to the mental institution in Ormskirk for electric shock treatment. In her book The First Lady, Ashley tells the story of the rape she endured while still living as a man. A roommate raped her, and she was severely injured as a result of the sexual assault.
Read more about this topic: April Ashley
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (1897–1973)
“No person can be considered as possessing a good education without religion. A good education is that which prepares us for our future sphere of action and makes us contented with that situation in life in which God, in his infinite mercy, has seen fit to place us, to be perfectly resigned to our lot in life, whatever it may be.”
—Ann Plato (1820–?)