Interview with Chloe Kelly

 

Some life changes arrive slowly. Chloe Kelly’s arrived through a phone filter. In October 2023, at 45, she tried a gender-swap FaceApp expecting something strange and unconvincing, much like the gender-swap program that had disappointed her at London’s Science Museum back in 2000. Instead, her heart raced, her breathing went shallow, and she kept going back to the images, in the bathroom at work, and again on the sofa at home. What she saw, she says, was something she had secretly hoped for all her life without realizing it. What followed was a transition lived at speed and in public. After weeks of sleepless nights and online research, she told her GP first, then her wife on an unplanned Friday morning, then her parents, and eventually everyone else through a Facebook post. She spent months choosing the name Chloe, searching through the most popular baby names of 1978 until she found one that felt right. For anyone wondering about “Lucy,” that was originally just a placeholder name she used online, but it began to stick on social media, hence her Instagram handle: @lucyseekelly. Faced with a long NHS waiting list, she turned to private care on Harley Street, and this November she travels to Thailand for surgery. Along the way she has written about identity, femininity and transformation on her Substack.

 

There has been joy and grief in equal measure. Chloe has spoken about the thrill of rediscovering fashion, from Debbie Harry to Stevie Nicks, and about learning makeup through trial, error and the occasional mascara wand to the eye. She has also spoken about mourning the girlhood she never had, the lingering question of whether she passes, and the moments of dysphoria that can still catch her off guard. Her relationship with her mother has grown into the closeness of mother and daughter, and she is clear that her journey is about being herself rather than meeting anyone else’s ideal. Today Chloe is separated from her wife, who she says is still her best friend (they both like boys), and she is dating, travelling and writing. Her solo travel journey through Europe and Asia from October 2025 to January 2026 is becoming a travel memoir, Girl:Avanting - Solo Travel Adventures of a 47-year-old Trans Woman, and she has already finished a novel, Trans-Atlantic. Her motto at the moment is “wander and wonder, live with kindness and joy, look up at the stars but look out for the lampposts.” It is with that spirit, and with a lot of honesty, that our conversation begins.

 

Monika: When you began your transition, did you feel that you had to learn how to be feminine, or did femininity feel like something that had always been part of you?

Chloe: I think I’ve always been feminine, but I suppressed it for all of my life until I came out. So it wasn’t learning femininity or discovering things about femininity. It was discovering my true nature and taking the handbrake off.

But to answer it another way: you don’t really know what part of you is learned behavior. I learned to be a boy. I learned to blend in and to do what is expected. So as you transition, you discover parts of you that you didn’t even know were there, things that come so easily. And, conversely, things you thought were really part of you turn out not to be, and things you thought might not be part of you really are. Hopefully that makes sense. It’s a really confusing answer.

 

“It was just: this is who I am, this is who I want to be,
this is who I have to be.”

 

Monika: You have described the FaceApp moment in October 2023 as unexpectedly profound. What was it about seeing that particular image of yourself that made you stop and really look?

Chloe: That’s a good question. In 2000 or 2001, the Science Museum in London had a gender swap computer program, which their marketing was briefly based on. I went there specifically to see what the gender swap would look like. I lied to a girlfriend at the time, saying I was really interested in science. It was super disappointing. It was 2000 technology and it just looked terrible.

So when I read about FaceApp, I thought, “I’ll put my photo in, and it won’t even look like me, it’ll just be weird.” I did it, and the moment I did, my body reacted. My heart started going, I started blushing, blood was rushing to my head, I almost panicked, and my breathing became shallow. The phrase “hit me like a ton of bricks” is probably right. And I felt really self-conscious. Then I went to the bathroom and did it again, and again. I was in there for ages.

I guess it was my deepest, darkest hope and desire: that could be me. I saw an image of what I’d secretly hoped for my whole life without even realizing that’s what I’d hoped for, and to see it come to life, that’s what spun me out. Not long after, I started cross-dressing again for the first time in decades, and that wasn’t enough. It was just: this is who I am, this is who I want to be, this is who I have to be.  

Monika: You have said that you spent almost an hour in the bathroom simply looking at the image. What was happening inside you during that hour?

Chloe: It wasn’t just that one image. I kept doing it. I would do another image, or play with the buttons that make the images more feminine. I could have spent all day in that bathroom. Then I drove home, because I was in the office that day. I was married at the time, so we were on the sofa and my wife was watching telly and I was doing it more and more. Is it a one-off? Oh, I’ve done another picture of me from somewhere else, and it’s still giving similar results. So it was just testing it, testing it, testing it.

Monika: Coming out to a wife of almost a decade must have carried an enormous emotional weight. How did you find the courage to begin that conversation?

Chloe: Oh, crikey. It was a Friday morning and I wasn’t intending to tell her. I intended to start female hormones and see how I reacted to them, not in terms of developing breasts overnight, more to check that they didn’t make me feel sick. It was really about double-checking before I told her. It was a secret I’d held so tightly that as soon as I shared it with someone other than my GP, the person I had tried to be all those years, the male version of me, would be forever changed. So I had to make sure I was sure.

I’d been acting a bit weird because I’d been preoccupied with this for weeks, and I think she even asked, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Before that I was thinking, she might kick me out, she might call me a freak, she might react really badly. It was playing on my mind so much I couldn’t sleep. So as soon as she said, “Look, what’s going on?” it just came out. I guess I needed to say it, and her prodding a little is what popped my reservations.

 

“I didn’t want anybody to think me anything
other than a heterosexual, normal man.”

 

Monika: Your wife’s response, according to your account, was remarkably supportive. What did her reaction mean to you at that vulnerable moment?

Chloe: It didn’t change my course, because I knew as soon as I told her that the person she thought she was married to no longer existed. She was more like: “I’m going to help you and make sure you’re OK, we’re still in this together.” Which was really, really lovely. She is an angel. She’s amazing. She’s still my best friend. I don’t think she appreciated just how much I would change, or how irrevocably our lives would alter. But she didn’t fight me on it. She was shocked more than anything, because I had tried so hard to give no clues. I didn’t want anybody to think me anything other than a heterosexual, normal man, so she had absolutely no idea. I guess it was a relief that I told her.

I’ve not said this before, but I told her, she said she’d help, and I think over that weekend I started wearing heels and it really bothered her. For me it was “Brilliant, I can just crack on,” because I’m that stupid, and those things really shocked her. So as soon as she said she was OK, I took that as a cue to move faster, whereas she would have liked to go a lot slower.  

Monika: When you came out, did your mother embrace you as her daughter? And do you feel any connection to her in the way you look, carry yourself, or even in your style and mannerisms?

Chloe: That’s quite a strange one to answer, because when I first came out I still presented male, so she treated me the same. A few months later my parents came to visit and we all went out for a meal. I was dressed, and they were OK, they didn’t act weird. But I didn’t look especially feminine, I looked more masculine than feminine, because it was still so early on. My mum was quite supportive about clothes and things like that, but as I became more and more myself, it became more and more mother and daughter. It feels like that now, but it didn’t happen overnight.

It’s the same with my name. For a long time they would misgender me or use my old name by mistake. There was never any malice in it, and now there’s never any mistake. So it takes time for the relationship to develop like that. My mum wears glasses, and when I wear glasses and look in the mirror I think, “Bloody hell, you look like your mum.” But we have quite different styles. If I do winged eyeliner, she says she wishes she could do that, she tried in the 70s but never could. So we’ve got a really good relationship. She’s loving.

 

“My mum was quite supportive about
clothes and things like that.”

  

Monika: You later shared your transition publicly through a Facebook post. What was it like to press publish on that post and know that your story was suddenly visible to the wider world?

Chloe: Before that I’d already been on Instagram for about six weeks, so complete strangers had already seen my transition. By the time I posted on Facebook, everybody I actually cared about already knew. I did it for a bit of gossip, really. I’m not really on Facebook anymore, and maybe 75% of people there are people I used to work with or go to school with and don’t really speak to. I think that’s the same for everybody, isn’t it? So the 25% I knew well already knew, and I wasn’t nervous or worried. I just thought, “Here you go, something for the gossips to feed on.” Sure enough I got quite a few messages. I checked how many friends I had before and a few days later, and I had exactly one less. I’ve got no way to check who that was. But everybody was all right with it. There were some nice moments too: some girls I went to school with reached out and said it was brilliant news.

Monika: Choosing a name is such a deeply personal decision, one that can hold layers of significance and meaning. How did you come to choose your name? Does it carry a special resonance for you, perhaps representing a part of your journey or embodying a particular feeling or aspiration?

Chloe: The name I picked to start with was Lucy, which is why all my social media is under Lucy, which is quite frustrating. That was more of a panic, because I wanted to get onto Reddit and see what the community was all about, so I just chose that name. It never quite fitted, and when it came to the deed poll I was never committed to it. So over a period of months I was trying to find my name, and I thought about it quite a lot.

I looked at baby names from the year I was born, 1978, Generation X, because I didn’t want a name that would be totally unusual, and I also didn’t want one that was totally common for when I was born. There were some other names I really liked, but one of my friends had that name, or one of my friends’ daughters did, and you can’t call yourself the name of a friend. Imagine: “Oh, hi, Debbie.” “I call myself Debbie.” You’d just look ridiculous, wouldn’t you? So I had to pick a name that I didn’t know anybody close to me having, that wasn’t uncommon for the year I was born, that fitted, and that I liked. That’s why it took me months. But Chloe, it is.

 

END OF PART 1

PART 2

 

All photos: courtesy of Chloe Kelly.

© 2026 - Monika Kowalska

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