Kellie Maloney interview: ‘I was swimming with sharks and I had to bite’

For as long as she can remember, Kellie Maloney has been female in her dreams. For a child called Frank in South London in the 1960s, such ideas would have been considered alarming. But for this child – short, scrappy, and besotted with boxing – they stuck all the same.

Decades later, while guiding Lennox Lewis to the undisputed world heavyweight championship while dressed in a union jack suit, Frank still dreamed of being a woman. Making incendiary homophobic remarks as Ukip’s candidate for London mayor, Frank dreamed of being a woman. And when threatening to batter a counsellor whose advice was infuriating, Frank dreamed of being a woman.

“I used to get so angry,” Kellie Maloney says now. “He’d tell me: ‘Look at how you’re behaving, look at the way you are. I’m not telling you what you are, but you have to decide for yourself.’ I went to another counsellor after that.” All in all, Maloney went through four counsellors before coming to the inevitable conclusion. “I had to come to terms with it,” she says. “I was the way I was” – loud, combative, quick-tempered – “because I wasn’t really myself.”

Today, Kellie Maloney could hardly be more different. We meet in a west London cafe, where she is accompanied by a PR and the eldest of her three daughters, Emma, to whom she occasionally glances for support. Her outfits tend towards a sentimental vision of femininity, and today she’s in a check dress with a chiffon scarf printed with hearts. Her eyes remain firmly fixed on her lap as she speaks; her gestures are small, diffident, birdlike. As Frank, she relished publicity; these days, she says, interviews make her nervous.

You can’t blame her. Between the seismic Sunday Mirror interview that revealed her to the country and her departure from the Big Brother house in early September, Maloney was everywhere, as often ridiculed as treated with respect. She immediately became Britain’s best-known transgender person, and a repository for other people’s arguments; because she had been such an unreconstructed figure in such a relentlessly macho world, the news seemed like a particularly acute test of the maturity of our understanding of what it means to be trans – and a revelation that would leave Maloney herself in the crucible.

Six weeks later, the dust has settled a bit, and it seems the right moment to take stock. So: does she feel accepted by the public, by her family, and by herself? And what’s been the effect of such intense scrutiny, an interest predicated not on the punches of her clients but on the contents of her soul? “It has changed the way I look at the world,” she says quietly, turning the ring on her left hand with a certain suppressed agitation. “It’s changed the way I deal with everything.”

It was, after all, very far from what she had planned. Painfully separated from her wife and already a year into the process that will soon culminate in gender-reassignment surgery, she had intended to sink into peaceful obscurity as Kellie – a hope brought crashing down by a knock on the door from a reporter from a paper she hasn’t named. Maloney, who had been betrayed by a member of the support group she was attending, bought herself time by threatening an injunction, and decided to wrest back some control by giving an interview to the Sunday Mirror instead. Still, she was forced into a radical change of direction.

She speaks so quietly that several times I have to ask her to repeat herself. “We were buying a coffee shop,” she says. The plan was to go in with her two grown-up daughters. “We were up to the point of exchanging contracts. But I felt I didn’t know how the public would react. I was frightened people would be coming and saying, that’s the boxing promoter who’s had his nuts cut off, if I can put it bluntly … we decided it was too much of a risk.” Maloney lost her deposit.

Instead of that quiet life, Maloney ultimately embraced exactly the opposite path, taking an offer of close to £200,000 (£20,000 of which she donated to the support group TG Pals) to appear on Celebrity Big Brother. That wasn’t an easy experience, either. The boxer Audley Harrison, who she’d known for years, voted her out on the insidious grounds that her presence made him “uncomfortable”; for her part, Maloney, plainly in a fragile state, called actor Leslie Jordan “a little queen” and issued the bracing threat: “You point at me, I’ll knock you sparko”.

It wasn’t an especially edifying moment for a woman hoping to win the sympathy of the nation, and Maloney professes to be acutely embarrassed, blaming a hiatus in her hormone treatment. She makes a striking distinction about her understandably sharp response to Harrison’s cruel remarks: “To be honest … this was, I think, Frank Maloney’s reaction.”

What’s the difference? “I think the hormones make you look at things a little bit differently,” she says. “As Frank, because of my environment, I was very aggressive in how I approached things – I knew I was swimming with sharks and I had to bite them or be their bait. As Kellie, I just see life in a different way.” To Maloney, you feel, there’s been something precarious about this sense of herself. Perhaps that explains why, when she started to live as a woman, she put away all her boxing memorabilia.

Maloney’s name was booed when she came out of the Big Brother house. Broadly, though, the public reaction to her appearance was positive. And, if she’s entertainingly sceptical about the good wishes of many of those in the boxing community – “I think a lot of that was PR … you’ve only got to look at the interviews and you can tell they’re biting their tongues” – she has, in general, been delighted by the response. This week, she moved house, and while walking her dogs bumped into a new neighbour who immediately recognised her and struck up a conversation. She’s used to this from the old days, of course, but, back then, “guys would stop me and say, ‘Hi, when’s so-and-so fighting’, something like that. Now people stop me and have conversations with me. It’s totally different … it’s mainly women. Instead of two or three minutes, I could be there five or 10.”

Kind though this is, it must get a bit exhausting. “Oh, no,” she replies, quickly, with a certain brittle brightness. “Because, do you know what? I’m never lonely. I think the one thing transgender people are very worried about is being rejected. And I’ve not experienced that.” That’s why, even if it was forced on her, she doesn’t totally regret her exposure. “I lived very quietly for two years,” she says. “The only people around me were my immediate family. So it has been like a breath of fresh air.”

Even with a need for wider approval, though, it’s her family’s reaction that matters the most. Maloney has cried in public quite a lot lately; in the course of our conversation, the only time she comes close is when she talks about her mother. “I can’t say enough about my mum,” she says. “I think it stems from her that the family has accepted it, because she made the point of telling them.” These days, they even go to bingo together. Only her brother Eugene, who she refuses to talk about, has publicly rejected her since the news emerged.

As a result of that support, she says, she’s getting better at going about her business. She’s done some public speaking – “I spoke at my first LGBT thing a few months ago,” she says, slowing down slightly over a set of initials that you suspect never crossed Frank’s lips. Interviews, even if they’re still complicated, are getting easier. “And I come out of my house, I walk about, I talk to people.”

Still, some significant hurdles remain. She’s been to the boxing in Germany, but not in Britain. She was invited to a boxing writers’ dinner, but skipped it. And as for her beloved Millwall – “they’re the fans I’m more worried about. But I am going to do it soon.” They sing a song about her there, she’s heard, and I brace myself for something horrible. “No, it’s quite nice, actually, it goes, ‘Kellie Maloney is one of our own.’” She smiles. “Or something like that.”

In the longer term, if the coffee shop’s not an immediate prospect, I wonder how Maloney plans to fill her time. One option is a return to boxing, and though it remains a distant prospect, she’s had talks about starting a new sports management company. She knows all too well what sort of a world it is: back when she was managing fighters, she dropped in the occasional reference to trans people – “Thai ladyboys or something” – into a conversation to gauge the reaction. It was, she says dryly, not exactly liberal. “They’re so set in their ways,” she goes on. “It’s like an old boys’ club, and the mischievous side of me – yeah, I would like to do that.”

Then there’s politics. Maloney’s previous brush with public life was an undistinguished run for London mayor as Ukip’s candidate in 2004. If she did get the call from Ukip again – not, you feel, enormously likely – she says she’d think about it, but any sense that it’s a serious goal diminishes when she says that she’d also consider Tory, Labour and Lib Dem propositions.

If her mortification about the homophobia that decorated that campaign doesn’t square entirely with the “old queen” line, it still feels heartfelt. We’re back to blaming bad old Frank. “Frank just said things to draw attention to himself, probably said a lot of things he didn’t really mean … but they’re the kind of remarks that are hard for people to forget.” There’s something raw about her admission of error. “Because of the world I came from, I was blinkered. But now I’ve lived in a bigger world. I’m not seeing it as black and white any more.”

If anyone had told you that the person who laid into gay people with such abandon would be comfortable with such complexity, you wouldn’t have credited it. Perhaps that’s part of what the last couple of months have done for Kellie Maloney. Having tried to escape him altogether, she’s come to accept that there will always be a little bit of Frank in her. “Do I want to lose him completely?” she asks herself. “Not really.” And so, when she moved to the new place this week, she put some of her boxing memorabilia up again.

So, is she happy now? I ask her versions of this question throughout our hour together. Each time, the answer is a little different. “Look,” she says first. “If you could give me a pill now and said I could stop this transition, I would stop it. And I think 99% of transsexuals would as well.” But then she explains this isn’t because she wants anything else, but because of her nagging worry about the rejection it entails. “When you start to live that life, the fear factor hits you. And you would do anything to get rid of that.”

By the end of our conversation, she’s not staring at her knees quite as much, and I ask how she feels about her surgery. The first bit, to reduce the size of her nose, is on 4 November; her final operation is due in January. “I’m very impatient,” she replies. “I’d like to do it tomorrow.”

No regrets, then. “In five years’ time, the one thing I won’t be doing is sitting here saying I regret what I’m doing now. That I know. I think I’ll be a happier person.” And, even now, she insists, “I’m as happy as winning the lottery. I seriously am.”

I hope she is. And I hope she gets to disappear a bit and one day open the tea shop on the coast that she says is her ambition. “I just feel – I was going to say a weight, but I feel a country lifted off my shoulders,” she says. “I really do. And I sleep so much easier.” In her dreams, Kellie Maloney is still a woman. But these days, she says, she doesn’t dream so much.