Pageboy: A Memoir

by Elliot Page

If I had to conform, why shouldn’t you have to? I wonder about the magnitude of what my mom was unable to do and explore. How these confines affected her. Amid all of the untangling that’s led me to me, no matter the difficulties or moments of distance, I’ve never doubted my mother’s love for me. How lucky I am for that.

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

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.

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.