Elliot Page on ‘Pageboy’ his memoir, and coming out as transgender
Like so many of us, as the world came to a shocking halt during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Elliot Page faced the prospect of a major reset. For him, the vision of another future was something very literal.
It was springtime in New York and Page saw his own reflection in a shop window, wearing a hoodie, his face half hidden behind a mask, and saw a glimmer of possibility. “It was a boy,” he writes, “his body, his gait, the profile with the ball cap.” As the Nova Scotia-born actor, producer and director recounts in his thrilling new memoir, “Pageboy,” the experience was “a gateway to a new world.”
That moment served as both a catalyst and a confirmation. A few months later, on December 1, 2020, Page would come out as transgender and share his truth and his name in a cautiously upbeat Instagram post. “I saw what other people saw when I was addressed as ‘sir’ or ‘dude’ or ‘monsieur’ and I knew that was what I wanted,” Page says now. While that desire wasn’t a new revelation, “I’d always talked myself out of it, always convinced myself it was too much—that I was acting dramatic, that I just needed to learn to be comfortable, wear tighter sports bras.” or cut my hair a certain way.”
At the age of 36, Page has gained the strength to exist in the world as he has longed for years. On the day we speak, this world includes a skyscraper in downtown Toronto, where he perches in a greige club chair to match his outfit: khaki and a loose Members Only-style jacket in non-confrontational neutrals.
Some stars radiate a kind of straight that consumes all the oxygen in a room; Page is the opposite. At least he tries to give up space. His voice is so soft it’s almost a whisper; he is unfailingly polite and gracious, but he seems exhausted. It’s a week and turns into his tour for “Pageboy,” a book anchored in the pivotal transformation he’s faced over the past few years. The memoir debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list – not a big surprise, given Page’s celebrity and the fact that, simply because he is himself, he represents one of the most polarizing cultural “debates” today. (Note the deliberate quotation marks: the life, rights and happiness of transgender people are not up for debate.)
“Pageboy” is a riveting, deeply poignant read. It’s nonlinear and unvarnished, hopping between episodes in the actor’s life in a way that gently teases recurring themes and echoes. This was somewhat intentional, Page says, but it also reflects his instinctive process: to focus on a particular moment or relationship in his life and just let his mind wander.
The stream-of-consciousness effect is underlined by his tendency to write sentences that alternate between concise, weighty fragments and rippling, comma-linked chains of three or four sentences. Page writes candidly about past relationships (tabloids gleefully preoccupied the names he mentioned). But what really stands out is the way he evokes the physical experience of life in his body. This is reflected in his account of that revealing moment in the spring of 2020 and in his descriptions of sex (both consensual and not). It comes out when he tries to explain what gender dysphoria feels like to him: “Imagine the most uncomfortable, degrading thing you could wear. You writhe in your skin. It’s tight, you want to peel it off your body, tear it off, but you can’t.” That somatic quality, Page says, was relatively organic, but also had an urgency. Not that trans and queer lives and bodies aren’t always politicized. But it is clear that everything is at an intense fever pitch right now.
Page has been called the world’s most visible transgender man, a responsibility he feels deep in his heart and bravely tries to balance on his narrow shoulders. Two summers ago, in May 2021, he shared another post on Instagram: a full-body photo of himself, radiant and shirtless in swimming trunks, another glimpse of possibility. In a climate where both conservatives and radical feminists have politicized transgender bodies — and even worked to undermine transgender existence — that image spoke volumes. It was a concrete illustration of what it can mean to have access to gender-affirming care; a way of basing a speculative and often vicious debate on lived reality. And it was a rare, brilliant flash of trans euphoria, a powerful reminder that a trans person’s life is about beauty and happiness, not just navigating moments of trauma.
That swimsuit photo is reminiscent of a scene in “Pageboy,” in which Page, who has just hit puberty, sits in a friend’s backyard on a sweltering summer day, watching a wading pool fill up. He didn’t bring his own bathing suit, so his friend’s father knocks over a boy’s Speedo. Page is not ashamed of his bare chest. “The only shift was in my happiness,” he writes, “amplifying all the colors and sounds. A wave of joy.”
It is a reminder of how this fundamental tension – between the person he knew he was and the person he felt compelled to present himself to the world – was a constant theme in Page’s life. Even as a little kid in Halifax, he was happy organizing bath-diving competitions for his superhero figurines and eating ketchup chips while watching “Hockey Night in Canada,” but that comfort zone was broken on the rare occasions when he had to change clothes – skirts, barrettes – for special events or photos. In 1997, around the age of 10, Page was cast in the period drama “Pit Pony,” a role that required him to wear petticoats and a wig to play a young girl in a 1900s maritime mining town.
Given his penchant for escaping into his own stories—something he describes in the book as a “journey of the imagination”—it’s perhaps unsurprising that Page had a natural talent for acting; from then on he was consistently on screen and in the spotlight. In 2007, his performance as a wry, pregnant teenager in “Juno” earned critical acclaim and a well-deserved Oscar nomination. (As Page has noted, both in his memoirs and in interviews, of all the roles he played, he felt very much at home in the guise of this world-weary, hoodie-wearing, excited tomboy. What could possibly be,” he writes, “a space beyond the binary.”
Those accolades led to more work (including a superhero role in the “X-Men” franchise) and more scrutiny, in a dizzying churn through Hollywood’s darker depths. In “Pageboy,” the actor neatly sheds light on the ways in which his discomfort and vulnerability as a young performer left him particularly susceptible to a myriad of abuses, from assault on film sets to crude speculation about his sexuality. Page eventually came out as queer, in a trembling speech at an event supporting LGBTQ2S rights on Valentine’s Day in 2014.
Acknowledging some of his truth was a start, but it was not a solution. Page struggled with spiteful whispers and backlash. “Hollywood was built on exploiting queerness,” he notes in the book, while also describing how coming out complicated his personal and professional life. He drew on his experience and privilege to find advocacy opportunities; he produced and starred in the 2015 movie ‘Freeheld’, about the true story of a lesbian who didn’t get a pension after her partner died; with best friend Ian Daniel, he helmed the VICE documentary series “Gaycation,” a look at LGBTQ2S communities around the world, which premiered in 2016 and ran for two seasons. He was finally able to live openly with queer partners, including his wife Emma Portner, whom he married in 2018 and divorced in 2021. In general, he kept himself very busy.
But reading “Pageboy” also makes you feel like the busyness served as a buffer — a way of deflecting a reality or realization he wasn’t ready to face yet. And so it wasn’t until 2020, when he was forced to stay with his own thoughts, that Page finally looked at himself in the mirror.
“Life had become a bit connect-the-dots for me,” he says. “I didn’t really feel alive or inspired. And having the space to leave New York and not have to stress that I’m not working – don’t make me play the next thing I was contractually obligated to do, the girl I’m supposed to play. It was very difficult at times, but it brought me closer and closer to the truth that I kept trying to push away.
For all the pain he’s endured as a public figure, it’s unequivocally clear that nothing has been more brutal to Page than the experience of living with his own unwieldy mess of self-loathing and dysphoria. His memoirs contain numerous examples of the ways he tormented and injured himself, from cutting to starvation to hitting himself in the head. And even to see him now, pale and exhausted, but on a quest to use his position in the world to advocate for change, it’s clear this isn’t an easy fix. He certainly does not suggest that it is so. But, says Page, he’s found new joy in the work: “Something in me was so tight and constricted, and I now feel embodied in a way I never thought possible. There is now a full sigh of relief.
He has started a production company, Page Boy Productions, with the aim of reaching out to queer people, transgender people and people from other marginalized groups, regardless of their experience, to bring new stories to light. (For example, “Len & Cub,” a six-part series about the secret romance between two men in a remote part of New Brunswick in the early 20th century, greenlit by Paramount Plus.)
“In many ways, I feel like I barely made it,” he says. “I really struggled for years and years. When I think about what it took to get to where I can be today, with the resources I have, access to mental health care – let alone gender and trans affirmative care – it absolutely motivates me to want to use this platform forever.”
