Rob Newbiggin is an English boxer with a 20 year career behind him. Rob Newbiggin has also been creating something of a stir and a story as he's just announced that after his next fight he's going to have a sex change operation. This led The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, to dub Rob Newbiggin as "Frocky".
Yes, yes, we know, tabloids are indeed at the heart and soul of wit, aren't they? Combine Sly Stallone's "Rocky" with Newbiggin who wants a sex change and get "Frocky". Ho bleedin' ho as they would say in Newbiggin's native Southport (actually, he was born in Pennsylvania but adopted while young and grew up in England)
The story of the sex change intentions first popped up in his local newspaper: then a week or so later it ran in the national tabloid. The reactions to the national story have not been good:
SOUTHPORT boxer Rob Newbiggin says he has been driven out of the town he loves after admitting he will undergo a sex change operation.
The father-of-three has forged a 20-year career as a boxer in America and has even sparred with Ricky Hatton, but will soon begin a new life as a woman, known as Mercedes, after the operation.
Rob, 44, said that as soon as the news broke in a daily tabloid newspaper, he lost all his friends.
Newbiggin has known that he wanted to be a woman since he was three he says, and he's always known that he had high oestrogen levels. He has been and is married and has fathered three children so he's clearly, as he's fertile, of the XY haplotype (or possibly the very rare indeed XYY) but still defines himself as intersexual. In these modern times of course, gender is something assumed by the individual, not determined by simple genes or chromosomes.
Perhaps the most bizarre part of Rob Newbiggin's story though is what he intends to do after his sex change. Have a look at this video first to get a taste of the man:
Seems like a nice man, what would be in the local language described as a "cheeky chappie".
But here's the bizarre part: Rob Newbiggin's next intended career is as a glamour model (to translate from the English, a "glamour" model is one that poses nude or semi-nude, cheesecake shots, not porn). This reporter's not entirely sure about that career move but wishes Mercedes all the luck in the world in pursuing it.
