Lennox Lewis Promoter Frank Maloney Announces Sex Change

Famed British boxing manager and promoter Frank Maloney has made the surprise announcement that he intends to undergo a sex change operation to fully embrace becoming a woman.

Maloney, 61, led Lennox Lewis to become Britain’s first undisputed World Heavyweight Champion boxer in nearly 25 years and was well known as a tough-talking, flamboyant boxing promoter.

But behind that flamboyance, Maloney says, hid a troubled man who struggled with his sexual identity.

In a wide ranging interview with the UK Mirror, Maloney announced that his struggle is about to come to an end and that he intends to undergo a sex change operation and make a full transformation into a woman named Kellie.

“I was born in the wrong body and I have always known I was a woman,” Kellie told the British newspaper.

“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.”

Maloney has spent the last year making the transition but has kept this effort a secret from the macho world of boxing where he made his mark as Frank. And now that transition is to become permanent.

“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 insisted.

The paper reports, that “in the past two years she has secretly undergone hormone therapy, hundreds of hours of hair removal electrolysis, voice coaching and specialist counseling.”

These efforts were undertaken to satisfy the British government’s National Health Service’s guidelines governing such a transition in order for government healthcare services to pick up some of the costs.

Maloney says that telling anyone in the boxing world was something that could not be done.

“But I have never been able to tell anyone in boxing. Can you imagine me walking into a boxing hall dressed as a woman and putting an event on?”

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com