MBE Is Awarded to April Ashley

As every America knows the MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) is award by the Queen of England…

British Honours are awarded on merit, for exceptional achievement or service. The Queen chooses the recipients of Honours on the advice of the Prime Minister and other relevant ministers, to whom recommendations are made by their departments or members of the public. Private nominations - those made by individuals or by representatives of organisations to the Prime Minister's Office - account for about a quarter of all recommendations. Honorary awards to foreigners are recommended by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and certain of the orders of chivalry are conferred on the sole personal decision of the Sovereign (the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Thistle, the Order of Merit and the Royal Victorian Order).
British Embassy – Washington DC

This year MBE was awarded to April Ashley,

April MBE: transsexual crusader is honoured

She made headlines for her love life, but April Ashley has never stopped fighting to win equality for others like herself

The Independent
Matthew Bell
June 17, 2012

She was born George Jamieson in the Liverpool docks, but later modelled for Vogue and seduced Omar Sharif. Now, in the latest chapter of an extraordinary life, April Ashley, the first Briton to have a sex change, has been awarded the MBE for services to transgender equality.

The recognition in the Queen's Birthday Honours has thrilled the 77-year-old. "It's unbelievable and wonderful and especially fantastic to receive it in the year of Her Majesty's Jubilee," she said yesterday, at home in Fulham, south-west London. She declined to speak until she had finished watching the Trooping of the Colour.
[…]
The status of transsexuals was left in this awkward limbo until as recently as 2004, with the introduction of the Gender Recognition Act, which allows a person legally to be recognised as the gender they are reassigned to. The MBE recognises Ashley's work campaigning for the law to change. In the last decade, she wrote to Tony Blair and Lord Falconer, then Lord Chancellor, asking for her birth certificate to identify her as a woman. "They said: 'Be patient', and eventually the law did change. I got my new birth certificate finally in 2005."

We should always remember those who blazed the trail before us. People like April Ashley, Christine Jorgenson, Caroline Cossey, Virginia Prince and Lou Sullivan who made life a little easier for us who followed.