Pageboy: A Memoir

by Elliot Page

Shame had been drilled into my bones since I was my tiniest self, and I struggled to rid my body of that old toxic and erosive marrow. But there was a joy in the room, it lifted me, forced a reaction in the jaw, an uncontrolled, steady smile. Dancing, sweat dripping down my back, down my chest.

I suggested a suit. They said I should wear a dress and heels. After they discussed this with the director, he called me. He said he agreed with them, insisting that I play the part.

“When did you know?” she asked as we stood outside, leaning against a wall. She loomed over me. For a brief moment, I wondered what she meant. This is something I’m asked frequently and not something I wish for during a casual night out. I’d experienced this inquiry as a queer woman, but as a trans guy it’s perpetual. Code for—I don’t believe you.

Those were some of the best times of my life, traveling to another dimension where I was … me. And not just a boy but a man, a man who could fall in love and be loved back. Why do we lose that ability? To create a whole world? A bunk bed was a kingdom, I was a boy. My imagination was a lifeline. It was where I felt the most unrestrained, unselfconscious, real. Not a visualization, far more natural. Not a wishing, but an understanding. When I was present with myself, I knew, without exception. I saw with startling clarity then. I miss that.

My mother let me exist as me in many ways when I was young, when it was just us. It was on picture days, the rare church visit, weddings, recitals, Christmas parties, other special occasions when it wasn’t just the two of us, that I had to wear a dress. A barrette in my hair with a baby-blue butterfly. I wanted to tear it out, taking my hair with it. I’d throw a fit, a feeling of betrayal spreading through me, as my mom tried to dress me. The sensation of tights squeezing my legs exacerbated all the discomforts that I couldn’t yet put words to.

I didn’t grow out of this “phase” when I was supposed to, and my mom’s distaste for what I wore and whom I befriended grew. Masculine clothes and boys as friends should have been over, that whole tomboy thing—a label that never felt quite right to me, but it was what everyone called me so eventually it was what I called myself—a hazy memory. I should be turning into a young lady, my mother’s idea of one at least.

I love you. Over. Click. I love you, too. Over. Click. It is so sad that all the static had to get in the way as I aged.

I could breathe, it seemed like that episode of Degrassi had ended.

Research has shown that transgender and gender-nonconforming youth are four times more likely to struggle with an eating disorder.

is not as easy to forgive my father. I’m going to come to Toronto and kick your ass. When his kid needed safety, when his kid needed love, when his kid needed protection, he threatened violence. Outraged because I had the audacity to communicate with an older man on the internet when I was a minor. If I didn’t deserve care in that moment, if I didn’t deserve safety and love, when would I ever? That sentence has lived in my body much longer than the man’s threats, his obsession, his fingers fondling my arm.

This was around when I was arriving at the age where being a tomboy was no longer a cute look. The lurking pressure to change was omnipresent, a consistent state of disapproval.

Turning eighteen further frayed my boundaries, an unspoken permission slip I didn’t consent to.

No matter what came after, a different kind of exposure, vulnerability, it was all worth it. All a step. I’d rather feel pain while living than hiding. My shoulders opened, my heart was bare, I could be in the world in ways that felt impossible before—holding hands. But deep down an emptiness lurked. That undertone. Its whisper still ripe and in my ear.

I think about that moment a lot—the anger that man felt entitled to display and my response to it. In our society anger and masculinity are so intertwined—I hope to redefine that in my own life.

Characters affected me in various ways, how could they not? It’s an exploration of another human’s experience. A never-ending exercise in empathy, opening the heart, hoping it all sinks in, waiting for that release of emotion.

We met making a film wherein she murders me. In the real world she was the only thing saving me.

Loneliness had always been a staple for me, an inherent disconnect from my surroundings, a foundational dissociation. Lured away from my existence, I thought those around me wanted me to disappear—that I was preferred as an illusion.

I had something meaningful to focus on after feeling unequivocally no meaning at all. Depression had sucked me dry.

For me, Juno was emblematic of what could be possible, a space beyond the binary.

Eleven was the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent. As an adult, I would say, “I just want to be a ten-year-old boy,” whenever dysphoria belted out its annoying song, a pop hit that you know the words to and don’t know why. It’s hard to explain gender dysphoria to people who don’t experience it. It’s an awful voice in the back of your head, you assume everyone else hears it, but they don’t.

Eleven was when I last felt present in my flesh, not suspended above, transient and frantic to return. It was a departure of sorts, a path to a false identity in a shell of a disguise, entering witness protection. He’d seen too much.

“We are just kidding around,” he said, whispering, rubbing my back. “It’s just a joke.” No sorry. Never a sorry. No stop. Never an “Are you okay?”

As I got older, I did not want to go to Dennis and Linda when I was in pain or afraid, any negative or disruptive emotion that veered from my usual “happy” self, a performance in its own. I would shove it back down. As I held my breath, it would leak into my stomach, finding a place to rest.

pushed myself to dispel the truth for fear of banishment, but I was despondent, trapped in a dismal disguise. An empty, aimless shell.

Nothing I had enjoyed before stimulated me. I’d pretend, but, in reality, I felt dead inside.

I was being told to lie and hide. It puzzled me to watch cis straight actors play queer and trans characters and be revered. Nominations, wins, people exclaiming, “How brave!”

Hollywood is built on leveraging queerness. Tucking it away when needed, pulling it out when beneficial, while patting themselves on the back. Hollywood doesn’t lead the way, it responds, it follows, slowly and far behind. The depth of that closet, the trove of secrets buried, indifferent to the consequences. I was punished for being queer while I watched others be protected and celebrated, who gleefully abused people in the wide open.

“The system is twisted so that the cruelty looks normative and regular and the desire to address and overturn it looks strange,” Sarah Schulman writes in her required read, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences.

Despite always being invited in, I buzzed around the fringes, unable to wholly connect.

I felt too afraid to text a friend to make a plan, as if my presence was an endless burden. I was sinking in slow motion, like a nightmare where you go to scream but nothing comes out. Mouth wide, lips parting, wanting it, you try again … silence. And down you go.

Rewarded for lying and punished for sharing the secret.

My lack of motivation alarming, my desire for nothing too big.

When the topic of gender came up, I could not speak, I would just weep. It was too hot to touch. It would take another decade before I properly addressed it, until I was able to sit with myself long enough to listen. Until I was pushed so far that I didn’t have a choice. The last fork in the road.

E.T. is one of my favorite movies of all time, I even have EP PHONE HOME tattooed on my arm. I probably watch it once a year, and never have I not bawled my eyes out. I wished so badly to be Elliott when I was a little boy. For my first Halloween after I came out as trans, I donned a red hoodie and by chance already had sneakers that looked just like his in the film. I dressed up as Elliott, hit the streets of Manhattan with some pals, and had the best Halloween ever. Wishes can come true.

We spoke of similarities in our childhoods, families, unrequited loves, hometowns, and although we were part of different systems, something about our upbringings connected us, a roundedness and similar suffering. It was as if we entered a field of pain, yes, but also one of camaraderie and healing.

We were both in a space of needing not only a respite but also new ways to see things. Seeking comfort, yet leaning into our discomfort as well. A risk-taking through wanting rest and a desire for community that was connected to our queerness, digging through the layers to find it. We craved a paradigm shift from other worlds, and required other eyes that didn’t hold us down to old narratives.

Our shame at the time bonded us, a recognized pain and internal strife. Our mutual self-loathing bringing us close. “Every self-respecting person hates themselves,” Carrie said once, making me laugh.

There’s a shared joy in knowing that the love did come. A bond shifting from shame to healing.

I devoured books, almost always nonfiction. I didn’t want to stop growing and expanding, and I was terrified I would. I still strive to grow and remind myself to set my self-righteousness aside, there’s always more to learn.

My nerves hummed around certain girls, I’d have to avoid them. It must be so obvious, I’d worry.

As I aged, it became clearer that I wasn’t going to be a pretty straight girl. The pressure from my mother to alter my appearance began to increase, alongside the bullying at school. I tried. My mom’s joy and relief faded to disappointment as I began to return to my original state. She did not want me hanging out exclusively with boys anymore.

She didn’t want me hanging with the kids who were dressed in all black with various colors of hair, purple, green-blue, poking out from under hoods and beanies. The freaks, the artists … let’s be real, the queers. At one point, suspecting it was a group of pot smokers (it was), she said I couldn’t be around them, despite being aware of the extreme drinking in the jock scene.

Agony in isolation, the shame and pain that I thought was mine alone. My heart aches for my younger self.

What a difference it would have been to sit with queer and trans pals and have them say, I feel that way, too. I felt that way, too. We don’t have to feel that way. You don’t have to feel that way. Not a magic eraser of shame, but it would have undoubtedly quickened things up.

We do not realize the extent of the energy we are losing until we find where it is seeping from. Invisible until it is not. A thought just out of reach. Only now do I understand just how much I was consumed, the degree to which my brain was taken by a desperate, insatiable need to control. A watchtower enforcing my own personal isolation.

everything is in degrees, people meet at different points of their journey, unable to sync up the tracks.

How frighteningly casual some memories can be.

Often at parties we would hardly look at each other. As if a sudden catch of the eyes would spill the queer beans.

I remember napping in the late afternoon, waking up to the gloaming, her favorite time of day. She slept with my head on her chest, I soaked in the silence, her smell. I wish I could bottle this, I thought. I felt the quiet pain that comes with being in love, the risk of it all.

Someone will break your heart but you will break one, too.