Kellie Maloney: ‘I achieved a lot as Frank. I could never totally lose him’

It’s unlikely that 2014 will ever merge in Kellie Maloney’s memory into the general blur of passing years. When it began, she was known to the world as the pugnacious boxing promoter Frank Maloney, ex-manager of the former undisputed heavyweight champion of the world Lennox Lewis.

As the months went by she was subject to a tabloid exposé as transsexual, which she fought off with an injunction, came clean to another newspaper about the process of gender reassignment she was undergoing, appeared in Celebrity Big Brother as Kellie, and almost died last month during cosmetic surgery in Belgium that left her bleeding from the eyes and with a massively swollen head. She finishes the year in preparation for a final double operation of genital reassignment and breast implants.

There are no signs of the botched operation when we meet in her apartment in Bromley. She is in reflective mood, having done several TV interviews, and she sits talking quietly and stroking a strand of hair from her wig.

“It’s been an unusual year,” she says. “But I’ve never felt I couldn’t deal with it. There were times when I was depressed and upset, and there were times when I had suicidal thoughts, but I’m a person who sort of believes I’ll get there in the end.”

Suddenly announcing that you are no longer a man and henceforth wish to be known as a woman is almost certainly never an easy thing to do. But coming from the intensely macho background of boxing, it must have been that much more of a daunting experience.

She says that she had already quit that world and adopted a very quiet, almost anonymous life in preparation for coming out. She closed down her boxing business, separated from her wife Tracey and moved out of the family home. But for a while she lived as “split personality”, being Frank in public and when she visited her three daughters, and Kellie indoors and at her transgender support group.

All that really mattered to her, she says, was the acceptance of her family. And she gained that. She first told Tracey, then her eldest daughter, then her 81-year-old mother, and finally her other two daughters. All of them proved to be understanding and supportive.

How do your daughters refer to you?

“They call me ‘Dad’. We’ve made that decision. Even in public if they call me Dad I don’t have a problem. I am their dad. I can’t stop being their dad.”

Her own father, who is dead, never learned of his son’s secret identity. “While my father was alive I don’t think I could ever have come out and told him. He put me on a pedestal because of what I’d achieved. Probably my biggest regret is that I never told my dad, and I couldn’t tell him.”

She says that even as a boy she knew she wanted to be a woman, but fought against the knowledge because she was brought up “never to let anyone down”. As a boy, she says, she would go to bed at night and cry in frustration. The young Frank’s only liberation was in dreams, where he always appeared as a woman. His dreams, she says, were his saviour.

But back in the waking world Frank got married twice and lived an active, outspoken life as a very laddish sort of bloke. It got him into trouble when, in 2004, he ran as the Ukip candidate in the London mayoral election. He made several disparaging remarks about gay people, telling a BBC reporter that he had a problem with them “openly flaunting their sexuality”.

Maloney has subsequently apologised for those statements and says now that it didn’t represent her true feelings. This was “Frank” the boxing promoter, shooting off his mouth to gain publicity.

Like many famous people, she often refers to herself in the third person but in this case it’s two people – “Frank” and “Kellie”. She speaks of Frank as a kind of incorrigible alter ego who intervenes at the wrong moment to say the wrong thing.

When she lost her temper on Celebrity Big Brother, Kellie attributed it to Frank, who often gets the blame for misbehaviour.

“Well I have lost a lot of Frank,” she says, “but I could never totally lose Frank. Frank achieved, well I achieved a lot as Frank.”

As a transgender woman, she’s asked a lot about her sexuality. “My answer is that it’s not about sexuality. It’s about my gender identity. Am I heterosexual, am I gay, am I going to be a lesbian? I don’t know. I can’t answer that question. I’m still in transition.”

Physically at least that transition is due to come to an end with the double operation in February. Given the problems ensuing from the previous surgery, was she anxious about the operation?

“No, I’m absolutely looking forward to it because then I feel my journey will be completed. I can then move on to the next chapter of my life, whatever that is.”