Sam Bailey has revealed she pretended to be a boy for two years while growing up, and even considered changing gender completely.
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The ‘X Factor’ winner admitted she cut off all her hair while she was at school to join the boys’ football team, and kept the fact that she was a girl a secret from her teammates.
Sam Bailey on 'Loose Women'
Sam made the revelation as she served as a guest panellist on Monday’s (22 June) ‘Loose Women’, as the ladies discussed nine-year-old transgender schoolboy Joseph Hughes, who is set to return to school as a girl, Ellie-Jo, in September.
"This happened to me when I was younger,” Sam told co-hosts Ruth Langsford, Nadia Sawalha and Jane Moore.
“I wanted to play football when I was young, I had long hair, and there was a boys' football team and they said, 'You can’t play because you’re a girl.'
"They said, 'the only way you can play for us is if you cut all your hair off,' so I went home and got a pair of scissors and cut my hair off.
"I had curtains and I went out as a boy. I used to climb trees and I didn’t want to do anything girlie. I did this for a long time. I played [football] for two years and they didn’t know, no one knew I was a boy.”
Sam is still a big football fan
Explaining how she kept her secret, Sam continued: "I had to wait until everybody had gone and then I had to go in and get changed afterwards. I was top scorer for the club!"
The singer also claimed that she wanted to change gender completely, as she “did not want to be a girl”.
“If somebody had said to me at nine, ten, 'You have an opportunity to be a boy,' that state of mind I was in, I would have said, ‘Yeah, go on,’” she said.
"It was nothing to do with sexuality, it was nothing to do with fancying girls or anything like that, it was just that I wanted to dress like a boy.
"I know so many people that were tomboys, I just didn’t want to be a girl. It was a phase for me, it was a phase. I hadn’t gone through puberty until I was sixteen, seventeen. I didn’t start forming until then, so this boy that is nine years old, it might be going on for a long time, his mother is respecting that but my concern is when he starts to hit puberty, things will change, his mindset will change, kids have phases,” she added.