Opinion: Thank you, Kellie Palace Maloney for accepting who you are

I see

I just read that Frank Maloney, the boxing promoter is now undergoing gender reassignment having apparently been living as a woman for a while.

Now, Frank Maloney would in all terms be regarded a tough man with regards to his career as a boxing promoter, that business environment is at best brutal, if not quite difficult too.

However, she is now to be known as Kellie Palace Maloney which is both brave and interesting.

The conflicts of before

The Wikipedia entry for Kellie Maloney which has been revised to accommodate the feminine gender of the person, reads as an interesting struggle with inner turmoil between what was presented as publicly hard-faced whilst privately conflicted.

Besides having been a boxing trainer, manager and promoter, she made uncomplimentary comments about the lesbian and gay communities and when she dabbled in politics, she stood for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) whose right-wing populism is fearful and worrisome.

It would be curmudgeonly to suggest that publicly, Kellie had been a vocally strident opponent of the things she was as a person, in what is a bizarre form of aversion therapy bordering on rank hypocrisy, yet, people do have a long and difficult journey to realising who they really are and are ready to be.

Coming to terms

Coming to a point of self-acceptance where one does not care for accusation, abuse, stigma or shame is a personal victory of sorts over the wider influences of society that persuades people to conform and toe the line.

Surprised as I may be at this development, I can only congratulate Kellie Maloney for taking this decision in the pursuit of her happiness and the fulfilment of who she really believes she is.

However, like many us on the journey to openly accepting who we really are, there are some well-rehearsed lines of why we conform and how we get to the point where we are ready to live.

Offloading burdens

“I was born in the wrong body and 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.”

We could find different paraphrases of these lines spoken by Kellie Maloney to address many choices we have made under pressure to conform, for careers, for relationships, for coming-out, for gender reassignment and the much wider spectrum of human endeavour and expression.

Whether society is open-minded and accepting of it is the different topic, but too many of us have sacrificed ourselves to living with a burden of who we are not and it has left us unhappy, depressed, despairing, ashamed, guilt-ridden and sometimes suicidal.

The amazing thing is how easy it is to breathe when we release ourselves into living the truth of who we are and just get on with enjoying our lives.

Kelli Maloney, thank you for accepting and becoming who you are.