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boxing promoter Frank Maloney having sex change and living as a woman...
Fair play. Quite a supportive reaction from others within the sport, bar the odd numpty. Less so from boxing fans, a large number of whom seem ultra-offended. Quite an emotive piece in the Daily Mirror. Bit of a shame she could only reveal who she was after retirement, but looks like it's happened on her own terms. For those not really into your sport, longtime promoter and manager of Lennox Lewis and one-time UKIP candidate with some pretty choice views, as per. Quite an important development, eh, given the macho and often exclusive nature of the industry.
fair play, good post
what's her new name? keeping 'frank' would be p punk
Kellie
Fair play to her.
Can't have been an easy decision to go public about this, even after retiring. It would be nice if this helped to change attitudes around the subject for the better, but I guess we'll have to see.
It's actually a realy honest interview, and a genuinely angle-free write up from the Mirror
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/frank-maloney-sex-change-boxing-4030910#ixzz39zO3sVuv
Which is nice to see. You'll probably get a few of the other papers being snarky tomorrow, I guess.
It'll be interesting to see if she's asked about the things that were said during the 2004 London Mayoral elections. If I remember correctly, Maloney's campaign was totally sidetracked by claims of bigotry and homophobia.
it certainly makes the things she said in 2004 quite tragic now.
Stan Colleymore tweeted his best wishes
but rather cringingly gets his 'hims and hers' all mixed up.
in fairness to him
it struck me as a really sincere and honest message of support, other than what I'd personally see as a pretty forgiveable mistake given the circumstances.
absolutely
i agree his intentions were 100% genuine yep.
and if anything his faux pas might be a good thing he will learn how to think and treat people in this situation, and others might too.
A good lot of awareness can come from mistakes like these.
the today program this morning
Only used he, him and his when covering the news story, just sounded really jarring
the bbc really struggle with this kind of thing
they really fucked up the Chelsea Manning story when they broke that too.
Had a massive row about this on twitter last night when i was drunk
with some dickheads.
Some people I thought were alright were awful about it
Good for her,
I hope she's in a happier place.
it's a sign
of better times that this news has been mostly sensitively received.
Not sure I can get past the things she allegedly said about gay people when she was a UKIP candidate though. All a bit odd.
whilst I don't think homophobia is purely the preserve of cis gendered hetereosexuals
I do wonder if her comments weren't influenced by her situation. It would be interesting to see if now she's become more accepting of herself she can be more accepting of other people.
I guess the generally positive press coverage really was too good to be true...
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/aug/13/kellie-maloney-public-life-woman-newspaper-boxing-promoter
You can also tell
that Lewis is like totally FREAKED out by it and obviously his publicist is like, nah lennox man, you can't say that, you have to say 'i respect Kellie's decisions innnit'.
One would hope, given the rumours and smears that dogged Lewis throughout his career,
that this isn't the case. And I suspect that it's actually as he says.
I suspect it's not
Neither of us will ever know. I don't think he says much to anybody he doesn't trust (which is certainly not press) other than through his management, but let's be more generous than me here and assume it was his own words.
And when I say freaked out, I don't mean disgusted. I think it's ok to be completely thrown when you find out something is not as it has been portrayed to you for most of your life.
Im not sure the sexuality rumours re LL will have caused him to be any less of a tailspin at the news.
can you?
I'm not sure this is fair
of course he's going to be confused or even shocked, by Kellie's transition he'd known her as Frank for over a decade I'd expect it would take longer than a day or two for him to adjust.
Littlejohn is being a bit of a prick about it
using the "I worked with Frank for years" cop-out. But it is a lot better than when he essentially drove a trans teacher to suicide I suppose. Small steps.
It baffles me how he could work in such a 'macho' world for years
keeping that under wraps.
Might've been some seriously deep cover.
Had a lot to lose, really - a wife, kids, a career, fame, colleagues and friends, etc. There are other factors which may have proved a wake-up call after retirement. An Olympics boxer hanged himself and Maloney found the body, then she had quite a serious stroke or heart attack, retired last year, and and started some sort of procedures, so all of those things could have quite likely caused huge stress.
Yeah I suppose that's probably it.
In one of the articles I read she was expressing her concerns that both of his daughters are unmarried and there won't really be an opportunity to walk them up the aisle now.
Can't really put myself in that sort of situation really, must be loads of little things like that. Fair play.