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.

Felt

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” Vonnegut wrote.

Think July Fourth, but with less independence from the Crown, more “Canada’s birthday.” As a white kid growing up in Nova Scotia, I’d no clue about our history or our present. I was not taught it, the degree of our genocidal roots, the systemic racism, the segregation.

The success of Juno coincided with people in the industry telling me no one could know I was queer. That it wouldn’t be good for me, that I should have options, to trust that this was for the best. So I put on the dresses and the makeup. I did the photo shoots. I kept Paula hidden. I was struggling with depression and having panic attacks so bad I would collapse.

I was planning on wearing jeans and a western(ish) shirt to Juno’s world premiere. I thought it was a cool look, and it had a collar. That’s fancy, right? I thought. When the Fox Searchlight publicity team learned about my outfit, they urgently took me to Holt Renfrew on Bloor Street, with a dramatic rushing that is characteristic of the Hollywood circulatory system. 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. Michael Cera rocked sneakers, slacks, and a collared shirt. He looked fancy to me. I wonder why they didn’t take him to Holt Renfrew.

Growing up I was taught the Mont-Blanc explosion was an “accident,” a “mistake.” Two ships collided and one had explosives and that was that. It wasn’t an accident, though—it was a consequence of war.

“I just want what’s best for you … I want to protect you … I don’t want you to have a hard life.” These sentiments would slide over me. What was best meant fitting neatly into our society’s expectations. Staying inside the lines. The perfect heroine’s journey preemptively and unknowingly written for me.

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

It 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.

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.

The Hollywood ball game was a whole other story, riddled with confusing rules that constantly changed. And I had changed. I was different here, she wasn’t. 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.

This one really doesn't sit easy with me, it bothers me. A lot.

“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.

it was overwhelming how little I knew. It struck me as sad, I should already have this knowledge. Instead, my mind had been shaped and plugged into a system that makes us sick while we make the planet sick.

Here was a space with dreams beyond self and ideals that truthfully felt no different from what we’d learned in primary school—be kind, collaborate, take care of the Earth, share—concepts that don’t jibe well with our capitalist system, the ones they push us to forget.

Based

Carrie and I became good pals and still are. 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.

Lmao truth

I thoroughly enjoyed learning, well, if it was something I had an interest in, if not, I was stubborn. I wanted my ignorance to be revealed, for new perspectives to take the place of the dominant narratives I’d grown up with, rooted in bigotry and white supremacy. Since I did not attend school after graduating, I devoured books, almost always nonfiction. I didn’t want to stop growing and expanding, and I was terrified I would.

I knew I liked Elliot, relatable content

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.

Goddamn

My mom tells me he made his sermons joyful, youthful. Standing at the altar when he was the minister at St. Paul’s, he would reference Beatles lyrics, interweaving them with the words and lessons of Jesus.

It is not trans people who suffer from a sickness, but the society that fosters such hate.

💯💯💯

I will receive enormous waves of hate, not because I made harmful jokes, but because I am trans. It often seems like more people step forward to defend being unkind than they do to support trans people as we deal with an onslaught of cruelty and violence.

I am sick of the creepy focus on my body and compulsion to infantilize (which I have always experienced, but nothing like this). And it isn’t just people online, or on the street, or strangers at a party, but good acquaintances and friends.

“I guess that is just something you don’t make a comment about,” one of my dearest friends said on the heels of a long pause after I shared my decision to get top surgery, one of the first people I told. She most certainly made “a comment” without “making a comment” and proceeded to make more, offering her opinion unprompted. I couldn’t talk to her for a long time.

I know these instances and remarks may seem tiny, but when your existence is constantly debated and denied, it sucks you dry. Sprawled out, bare, I crave gentleness.