Stories like this matter. I may know a ton of random pop culture tidbits, and actors names that could cause me to win every possible version of Six degrees there is, but I’m not really into sports. i look like i should be. I could easily sit in any stadium, for any sport, and no one would think I had little clue who was on the field at the time, and had very little interest in which team won. I know major names, because I know pop culture, but in the boxing world, I’m limited to a handful of obvious names like Ali, fraser, Foreman, and Tyson. So, Kellie Maloney was not on my radar, but she should be. this documentary explores how Kellie came to be, starting from her journey born as Frank Maloney, to making a bold choice at the age of 60 to finally live her truth. All of this, after a sustainable career as a coach and trainer for heavy hitters, including Lennox Lewis.

Putting a focus or a face on the concept of transgenderism in 2025 feels like it has never been more incendiary nor more important. Add to that the focus on sports, and you have a subject matter like a powder keg ready to explode. Somewhere, JK Rowling is very angry, and she doesn’t know why. Her transphobic spidey senses are tingling, and she’s looking for a social media outlet to rage on. the sad fact is that this incredibly important and personal journey, which already has a high rate of suicide compared to basically any other identity other than clinical depression, is constantly being shoved into the spotlight out of lingering fears of men in women’s clothes, and the fervent fear of things we do not understand and choose not to try and learn about. it drives the xenophobic need to systematically remove brown people from America, under the guise that we are under an invasion of people who traveled here largely to apparently take over by working menial jobs that not many people want, and also through an unsubstantiated fear that transgender women are somehow dangerous simply for being transgender, and no other multiplier on top.

Sitting and listening to Kellie tell her story of how she spent all these years as frank, growing up in a restrictive and conservative Irish family, and being driven to the world of boxing, which is almost a breeding ground for toxic masculinity, and all the while knowing that she didn’t feel like she was herself, but felt trapped in a lie, is powerful. to see that society has forced ideology on someone for so long, that rather than feeling like they could be accepted and live their truth early on, and not lead to a marriage that breaks hearts and collapses in divorce, is part of why the stigma around the LGBTQ culture has to stop. People can only fake being happy for just so long, and then they either reach a point of dying, or losing everything to transition. Kellie chose the latter, and the world is better for it. She may have rocked some concepts around who she was all those years, but she was never not the same inside, it was about making the external match the internal.

this film has no known audio description, so I can’t strongly recommend it broadly to more blind and low vision users, but I kind of stil want to. Honestly, it is framed like a talking head documentary where Kellie does most of the speaking, all from her perspective. there aren’t too many gaps where you could add verbose audio description. it could almost just as easily be a podcast, or a book. But, being able to hear Kellie in her own words, expressing her own emotions as she reflects, is powerful. And in a world where blind people often have our choices curated through denial of accessibility, it limits our opportunity to hear challenging opinions, and learn from people whose lives are not ours, and empathize anyway.

Knock Out blonde is a documentary to be floored by. Kellie Maloney is an inspiration worthy of some golden gloves (or whatever color she prefers).

fresh: Final Grade: 9/10, Audio description: N/A