Former British boxing promoter Frank Maloney, who helped Lennox Lewis become world heavyweight champion, is set to undergo gender reassignment and is living as a woman called Kellie.
The 61-year-old Maloney made the revelation in the Sunday Mirror, saying: “I was born in the wrong body and I have always known I was a woman. I can’t keep living in the shadows, that is why I am doing what I am today. Living with the burden any longer would have killed me.
“What was wrong at birth is now being medically corrected. I have a female brain. I knew I was different from the minute I could compare myself to other children. I wasn’t in the right body. I was jealous of girls.
Maloney has reportedly been living as a woman for the past year and has undergone counselling and hormone therapy, hair removal electrolysis, voice coaching and plans to have corrective surgery.
Maloney, who suffered a heart attack in 2009 and has experienced crippling bouts of depression, spoke of the anguish he felt in telling his wife Tracey in 2012 that he couldn’t live as a man any longer.
“One morning it all came out of me,” she told the Mirror. “I just said to her, ‘The problem with this marriage is not you. The problem with this marriage is me’.
“We were standing in the kitchen and I said ‘I have to tell you that I have lived with this all my life. I’ve lived a lie and I really am a female in my head.’
“As the words started to come out I wanted to catch them and pull them back in. I looked at her face and I knew my marriage was over. She was the first person I had told outside counsellors. I could see what it was doing to her and I had to release her.”
Maloney managed Lewis between 1989 and 2001 — including in 1992 when the boxer became Britain’s first heavyweight world champ in nearly a century — and helped make the careers of multiple British, Commonwealth and European boxing champions before retiring last October.
Maloney also stood in the London mayoral election in 2004, coming fourth with just under 7 per cent of the vote.
She also stood unsuccessfully for the east London seat of Barking at the 2010 General Election while representing the United Kingdom Independence Party.
Maloney has been married twice and has three adult children.
