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As a boxing promoter, Frank Maloney didn’t shy away from public gaze: you don’t survive in that macho world as a shrinking violet.

As Kellie Maloney, currently undergoing gender reassignment and living as a woman, she must have longed this week for the kind of anonymity she never sought in her former life.

There she mixed the rough and tumble of a high stakes sporting industry with political campaigning which inevitably made enemies as well as admirers.

Working to become London mayor ten years ago, she insisted that she wasn’t homophobic, but thought gay people didn’t do a lot for society, and had a problem with them ‘openly flaunting their sexuality,’ as she put it - remarks she later described as ‘a little bit stupid….I’ve grown up since then.’

Thankfully we’re all permitted to change our minds, but she was 50 at the time, and these and other comments are still out there.

Does that make her fair game for the exposure she’s just had? Because she’s a member of some kind of celebrity class which thrives on publicity, and because she’s expressed views which some find offensive, does that make the most intimate details of her personal life public property to be dissected over morning coffee? That, for me, is the serious moral issue in this story.

Kellie Maloney has described how one newspaper threatened to expose her, and journalists from another doorstepped members of her family at their homes. She became terrified of going outside, when she’d wanted another 18 months to complete her transition, and allow her family to adjust to the change.

As it happens, the outcome has been happier than she could have hoped for. She seized the initiative, spurned the papers which had pursued her, and took her story to a sympathetic Sunday Mirror. She’s received huge support, feels immense relief, and other transgendered persons are reporting wholly positive reactions. Full marks to the paper which made that possible.

But she still had little real choice about going public, and it could have ended very differently.

The Christian scriptures are replete with warnings about the perils of damaging people through the words we use. We can be particularly vulnerable when we pass judgment while failing to see the weaknesses we ourselves carry. Jesus spoke about trying to take a splinter out of a person’s eye when there’s a plank sticking out of our own.

I can’t see that this story is anyone else’s business, but I’m glad that Kellie Maloney feels well served by the paper she chose. Others might have been less generous, working on the principle that so long as it boosts sales, they have a right to say what they like, whoever it hurts. They don’t. Whatever we think of them, human beings are always more than fair game.

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