Separate transgender people from the LGBT+ acronym, says Kellie Maloney
Kellie Maloney has called for the removal of transgender people from the LGBT+ acronym because it is “confusing.”
As trans people are also included in the term for lesbian, gay and bisexual people, Maloney believes that the label causes “confusion” to members of the public who do not understand the concept of being trans.
“The LGB is about your sexuality and the T’s about your gender and I think it’s very confusing to the general public out there to understand it,” Maloney told Robert Peston on ITV.
In the interview, Maloney also challenged the complex process trans people go through to legally change gender.
The former boxing manager voiced her support for an update of the Gender Recognition Act – which allow trans people to legally change their gender without medical checks.
On Monday, a host of pro-LGBT organisations signed an open letter to Equalities Minister Penny Mordaunt asking for clarification about when a review of the law will take place.
Maloney added that being trans is not something you can “wake up in the morning” and decide.
Kellie Maloney spoke about the new trans review (Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
“I don’t think you can wake up in the morning and just say ‘I want to be a female or I want to be a male,” she said.
“But I think that the system at the moment is very intrusive.”
After a life in the public eye, including as Lennox Lewis’s manager, Maloney came out as trans in 2014.
(Kellie Maloney/Instagram)
In the past, Maloney has run as a UKIP candidate and said that she didn’t want to enter an election in north London because “I don’t want to campaign around gays.”
On ITV, she said: “Them comments are going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
“I was protecting myself – I was in the very macho world of the boxing world. I tried to become this ultra-male and I do regret that.”
Since coming out, Maloney has been under the spotlight.
(Kellie Maloney/Instagram)
She said that her “life was taken away” when she came out as trans in 2017.
“[I didn’t receive] much negative attention but I sort of felt my life was taken away from me,” she told OK! Magazine.
“I wasn’t in control of my own life.
“There was so much attention around it, I felt like I was being rushed from pillar to post and I was at the centre of curiosity.”
