At first glance, one might think that Elliot Page would be the last person to have written an explosive Hollywood memoir. The 36-year-old Page, who has starred in iconic films like the X-Men series, Juno and Inception, as well as Netflix’s hit urban fantasy series The Umbrella Academy, arguably built his career on a mild personality. mannered chill.
But Elliot Page is also queer and trans, coming out as trans in 2020, and his decision to publish a memoir during Pride month amid aggressive anti-trans actions in the red states of the US makes Pageboy a surprisingly brave political one statements. Page may be an unlikely poster child for trans rights, but that’s possibly what gives his story so much power.
Who is Elliot Page again?
Originally from Canada, Page had a normal upbringing in Halifax, Nova Scotia, except for his dual roles as a child star. Page’s first acting job in Pit Pony (1997), a family drama in which he also starred, earned him critical acclaim before he was 11 and launched him into a stellar career. A decade later, after critically acclaimed roles in films like 2004’s dramedy Wilby Wonderful and 2005’s dark thriller Hard Candy, in which his character uses her false innocence as a weapon to catch a child kidnapper, Page took over the role of Kitty Pryde in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), a part that has since become an iconic queer ambassador.
The following year, he landed the title role in one of the most unexpectedly polarizing films of the decade: Diablo Cody’s comedy about teenage pregnancy, Juno (2007). Starring Page as the titular unmarried high school student who becomes pregnant by her sometime boyfriend (Michael Cera), the film’s refreshingly easygoing take on teenage pregnancy divided critics and activists from across the political spectrum and sparked a wave of odd attitudes. Time Magazine blamed a nonexistent “Juno Effect” for “glamorizing” teenage pregnancy and causing a pregnancy spate in any high school. The seemingly quick denial of abortion as an option for its protagonist in the film led many viewers to conclude that it was an anti-abortion allegation, a claim Cody is still quick to refute.
In “Juno,” Page and Cera deftly toss the classic Cody quotes (“I still have your underwear.” “I still have your virginity!”) while embodying the shameful awkwardness of teenage life. Both actors built their roles on such a performative normality; Page became known for that particular brand of reserved, world-weary innocence. In 2010, he played Ariadne, the architect of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” whose mix of wide-eyed wonder and blank eye-rolling at her own dreamscapes proves to be the perfect grounding element the entire story needs. If Page had an identifiable public figure in the 2010s, it was one of armed ambivalence.
That all changed in 2014, however, when Page shakily came out as gay during an instantly viral speech for the Human Rights campaign on Valentine’s Day. Page spoke of the “crushing standards” Hollywood imposed on people and his struggle to live authentically despite social stigma and homophobia. “Trying to mentally picture your life, what on earth is going to happen to you, can be a little overwhelming every day,” he said. His coming-out speech made international headlines and made Page one of the most Googled celebrities of 2014; He then directed the series Gaycation for Vice, in which he used his newfound status as a queer icon to explore the queer identities and experiences of average people around the world.
Although Page has not yet come out as trans, his 2014 coming-out speech is also full of references to Page’s trans identity. A 2015 profile of Page in The New York Times reported that Page had presented himself as transmasculine from an early age and had written a high school newspaper questioning the existence of a binary gender distribution. While this profile tried to be definitive, it also seemed to have trouble understanding Page’s persona; Author Sam Anderson notes Page’s aura of “profound moral seriousness,” but then weaves away to be fixated on Page’s forehead lines for an entire paragraph, concluding, “That’s the essence of Ellen Page: the face like a doll; the gnarled elegance of the forehead.”
It’s a questioning approach to an actor who, as Anderson’s profile confirms and the memoir later confirms, has spent his entire career staunchly rejecting pressure to be more feminine and play the role of a female sex symbol. Throughout Pageboy – the title is a clever nod to Page’s lifelong androgynous demeanor prior to its release – it seems as if the mere passive rejection of such pressure turns Page into a confrontational powder keg that evokes reactions. “We get it, you’re gay!” A supervisor at his (former) agency reportedly responded when Page got the message about gaycation. When Jordan Peterson was finally banned from Twitter, a tweet with dead names and a mocking side was over, of all things.
But Page, of course, is aware of that. The memoir makes it clear that despite a career built on a semblance of harmless insouciance, Page is smart and wise about the mental and emotional toll the celluloid closet — and the process of getting out of it — can take.
What do we learn about Page in his memoirs?
Pageboy makes for easy reading, ranging from emotionally charged personal encounters to the grim realities of Hollywood and the perils of navigating society’s enforced gender binary. Skimming his rise to Hollywood stardom, Page picks up most of his narrative after his post-Juno success, when the pressure to conform really mounted. He drops riveting details in the classic tradition of scandalous Hollywood narrative: everything from delightful asides (Hugh Jackman is a really nice guy! Page has Catherine Keener’s name tattooed on his shoulder!) to deeper musings about his relationships, among other things with his Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby and an indecisive, arguably manipulative Kate Mara, who refused to choose between Page and her then-longtime boyfriend Max Minghella.
At the same time, Page moves back and forth over time, chronicling a lifetime of exploring his sexual and gender identity and seemingly also a lifetime of gendered and queerphobic harassment and violence. Page recounts horrific incidents, including repeated abuse of gay people, intense stalking online and in person, alleged emotional abuse at the hands of his father and stepmother, and the time he was an unnamed A-lister, reportedly still one of the most famous men Hollywoods, repeatedly molested him at a party and threatened to rape him to prove that being gay wasn’t real. Along the way, he battles an eating disorder, gender dysphoria, and a series of horrific sexual encounters throughout his life. In these encounters he never gives his consent, nor is his consent asked for; that is, he was repeatedly raped. He completely dissociates in such moments, but makes it clear that his passivity is a fear reaction. That’s not to say the book is cheerless; Indeed, it’s scenes like this that lead to a joy and delight in his contrasting descriptions of sex later on, after Page has come out, changed and formed more positive relationships. Ultimately, Pageboy is arguably not just a work of trans survival, but also of trans euphoria.
Although the memoir is rarely explicitly political – despite Page’s openly progressive politics, the book focuses on his personal experiences – it is an act of political activism by simply portraying the reality of queer trans identity. Lurking on the fringes is a sense that Page, even at 36, has been disenfranchised by the escalating war over transgender rights and the use of transgender people as a target in the culture war like any other vulnerable transgender child. Experience his heartbreaking description of his estrangement from his father. “To be honest, it’s hard to re-imagine a relationship,” he writes, noting that his father and stepmother “support those with massive platforms who have attacked and ridiculed me on a global scale.” He goes on to say that after Elon Musk allowed Peterson to rejoin Twitter, his father “liked” Peterson’s first reply tweet, which was about “unsubscribing” through Page.
“I have no idea at this point what my father thinks of his son,” Page writes. “Regardless of what came before, it’s painful to think that someone who raised you could support those who deny your existence.”
It all makes for heady reading, but it’s already having an impact: on June 6, the day the memoir was released, trolls on Twitter trolled his name alongside disgraced actor Jussie Smollett, who famously committed a gay bashing incident staged, trended Attempting to discredit one of Page’s more impactful (and by no means isolated) descriptions, in which he described being verbally assaulted and threatened with violence while walking Sunset Boulevard in early 2022.
But the seething anger expressed online at Page’s story only served to confirm the veracity of his portrayal — which, again, was one of many experienced by Page over the course of his memoir and underscores how normalized this violence is for so many straight living queer and transgender people is your life.
That might be the key to understanding Page himself. Aside from the wave of aggressive anti-trans laws facing trans people across the country, there is a broader push to challenge the validity of trans identity – to challenge the idea that trans people are real at all. And while there are a number of prominent trans women in pop culture who visibly represent trans femininity in the public eye—Laverne Cox, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, Caitlyn Jenner, and Janet Mock, for example—there are far fewer examples of famous trans men to look out for .
That’s why it’s important that our most famous transmask star, Elliot Page, is also an actor who has arguably always been known for his authenticity. Long before he came out as trans, he displayed his trans identity in ways that could not be concealed, in ways that prompted cisgender writers to strive to force traditionalist gender interpretations on him. At some point, E! Online published a series of horrifying, now-deleted, posts questioning why Page dressed like a “vagrant” rather than flaunting his “petite beauty.” No matter where you fall on the gender spectrum, the fact that Page stayed true to himself by such ridiculous standards makes him universally relatable. And a well-known transgender celebrity might be just what we need right now.