I’ve had a crush on Elliot Page since I first saw Juno (2007), when I was around 13. I didn’t see it in theatres; my dad, my brother, and I used to go to Blockbuster every Friday night to rent one movie each, and I picked the movie out on a whim, probably because I couldn’t find a horror movie I hadn’t seen. I liked the orange and white stripes on the cover, the twee font choice that resonated with my blossoming ~alternative~ style. We had one tv in our house, and when it was my turn to use it, I was charmed from the moment that iconic Kimya Dawson soundtrack kicked off. I watched alone in our tiny basement tv room on a scratchy yellow-and-orange plaid couch, and to be honest, a lot of the jokes went over my head. I don’t think I really understood what an abortion was, for example, or what was so wrong about Mark’s behaviour, which speaks to its sinister realism. But I fell in love with Juno’s courage and wit, her coolness, her understated beauty. Page was perfect for that role, and I became a little obsessed with watching all his films. Hard Candy, The Tracey Fragments, Mouth to Mouth, and Whip It are still among my favourite movies, because I watched them so many times as a teenager (usually on letmewatchthis or putlocker or some other sketchy website, the movie always framed with porn ads).
The week after I watched Juno, when he was driving me to school one morning, my dad said to me: “I watched that movie you rented. I can’t believe you watched that.” He shook his head in disgust. I didn’t understand what he meant, exactly, but I knew to feel ashamed. There was sex in the movie, I guess. There were dick jokes (“pork swords,” to be precise). I was defensive, and mortified, and judged. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me liking the film. I saw myself in Juno, like a lot of people did, and my father’s disapproval hurt my feelings, because I felt more seen by that film than I did by most of the real people in my life. I felt permission to be an individual, to be funny, to be a “tomboy,” to feel love and isolation and all the big human feelings you’re growing into during high school. And there was nothing wrong with the movie, as far as I could tell. No one was hurt making it. But I don’t think I understood then how conservative my family was. I couldn’t explain the crack that was widening between me and them. Even at 13, I felt so different, so unseen and misunderstood. This was just another example of that run-of-the-mill pain: being a kid and hearing a parent make fun of the thing you love, feeling stupid for wanting their approval, feeling ashamed for not being able to be exactly who my family wanted me to be.
I didn’t even know when I saw Juno that Elliot’s sexuality was being speculated on in the media. I didn’t associate the film at all with queerness - there are no gay characters or storylines in it. It spoke to me because it portrayed “a girl like me.” Of course, Elliot was queer the whole time, and has since come out as a trans man. (In his memoir, he reveals that he and his Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby had a sexual relationship while filming, one of his first happy and healthy queer relationships.) Page’s roles, style, and public persona spoke to me for their androgyneity. I was enamoured with his shaved head, his pixie cut, his beautiful features and lack of makeup. In one of my high school journals, on the front page, I made a list of artists I looked up to. The names on it have little in common: Yann Martel, Anthony Burgess, Kathleen Hanna, Beyonce, Win and Regine Butler, John Green. Elliot Page was on the list too.
Page and I had more in common than I knew. Elliot, born in 1987, is 8 years older than me. He was born in Halifax, NS, a four-hour drive from my hometown of Fredericton, NB. Fredericton is smaller than Halifax, but the vibe is similar: a maritime university city with a high queer population, a lot of white people, and a lot of poverty. Both are on colonized Mi’kmaq land, a fact Page emphasizes in his memoir. Besides both being AFAB maritimers of a similar age, Elliott and I have both had some experience of growing up queer and closeted. Obviously his experience as a trans man is different from mine, a queer woman (?), but there is overlap. In 2015, when I dropped out of university, I moved to Halifax for two years. I applied to work at Video Difference, a massive movie rental store on Quinpool where Elliot, I had heard, once worked. The store had three levels and the largest, most diverse collection of films I had ever seen. It was considered a rite of passage among local youths to be rejected by the place; they had stacks of applications next to the door, and I cringe to imagine how many of them were put straight into the garbage by faux-interested managers. My boyfriend-at-the-time and I went to their closing sale in 2016. I bought a DVD of the 2015 Amy Winehouse documentary Amy; I don’t remember if my ex bought anything for himself. The store had been in business for 34 years.
At 28 years old I am single again, and I stick out in a place like Fredericton, where most people settle down by 25. It’s like people think their lives are over after university here—they just want to get married and buy a house and have kids ASAP. I can’t help but feel out of place, especially knowing that in places like Hamilton, it was normal and common to be in your late 20s and still having fun, going to school, figuring out your dating life. This feeling reminds me of a concept my friend Steph told me about in grad school: queer time. The idea is that, for the heterosexual majority, there is a typical timeline to be followed. Straight/cis people date in high school and college, get full-time jobs, get married, have kids, buy houses, raise the kids, become empty-nesters, retire, and die. And there’s certainly nothing wrong with a life that looks like that. But for a multitude of reasons, queer people’s lives often deviate from that trajectory. Dating as a gay person is harder, more limited, and often cannot begin until later in life. Marriage and children, if not off the table completely, contain implicit obstacles for gays that straight people don’t face. The narrative, the timeline, is different for queers; hence “queer time.” (As an aside, I might note that one of my trans exes thought this was a stupid theory, and that no real queer person would care about it, because it was too academic. In the moment I agreed with him, because I try to be conscious of elitism in academia and the alienation of anyone who’s not in higher education. In hindsight I think it’s a simple and useful concept that probably speaks to a lot of queers outside the academy, and he was just insecure.)
At first I was excited to read Pageboy, but once I started it, I found it heavier than I’d anticipated. It became a brick at the bottom of my tote bag for most of pride month. While I’m not a trans man, much of Elliot’s coming-of-age journey rings true for me, re-opening old wounds and forcing me to confront truths about my childhood. I find the book uncomfortable to hold; there’s this sour feeling in my heart, an ache, a bizarre urge to cry when I think too much about Elliot Page. (Sidenote: as a cis person (?) I’m aware that it might be perceived as insensitive to talk about how Page’s experience of homophobia and transphobia made me feel. But as I said, he means a lot to me, and I think there is significant enough overlap in our experiences to explain my emotional response.)
I read the book on and off over the course of June 2023, and finished it yesterday. Near the end I was spiraling a bit. I think what I find so hard about it is the realization that growing up gay is full of tiny tragedies. Relationships that you have to mourn for what they could have been, but weren’t, because of compulsory heterosexuality. Grieving loves that never got to flourish because one or both of you were closeted. It’s a lot of… not loss, exactly, but absence, formative experiences that you miss out on, feelings that you can’t acknowledge until years later. There’s shame for being cowardly, shame for being deviant, shame for not knowing what you’re so ashamed of. I can’t imagine coping with any of this in the public eye, and I applaud Page for handling it as well as he has.
I do have qualms with the book, and here, again, I am hyperaware of my identity and whose job it is to question these things. First of all, if I’m being blunt, the prose is very awkward. There is so much confusing comma placement and awkward sentence structure. The imagery is… reaching. Page is not a writer by trade, so fair enough, but I think better editing would have made this book more readable; I skimmed through a lot of flimsy metaphors, all forgivable.
But, secondly, my main issue with the text was Elliot’s reliance on the born-this-way narrative about his queerness. He talks about dressing up like a boy as a child, emphasizes the emotional pain of being in the wrong body, never doubts that he is a man, feels nothing but relief about top surgery. As someone who has dated and befriended many trans people in my life, this feels like a potentially unrealistic narrative, intended to convince cis people of Page’s validity as a trans man, rather than an absolutely honest reflection on the nuances of gender performance and transitioning. And that’s reasonable—Page has a rare opportunity, and perhaps feels a responsibility, as one of the first out trans celebrities, to be “convincing” to cis people. But that’s not what being trans has to look like. People can change their minds, people can choose to be trans, there can be doubt and fluidity and regret, and none of these feelings undermine the validity of that person’s identity. But more importantly: having doubts, changing your mind, not knowing from the time you’re five years old that you’re trans–these don’t negate your right to be trans. The problem with predicating cis people’s respect for trans experience on the “born this way” narrative is that that’s far from the only way to be trans. It doesn’t leave much breathing room for nonbinary people, for experimentation, for play and performance, and the risk is that the gender binary is still being implicitly invoked as gospel. The notion that all trans people are just “born in the wrong body” and “always knew” appeals (panders) to a cis conception of gender that I fear will prove harmful to queer people in the long run. Gender changes should not need to be justified in reference to biology or binary; gender is an open world, a sandbox, not the shortest distance between point A and point B.
I want to be clear on this point: I am a firm supporter of Page and his transition. I admire him, I have for over a decade, and I feel privileged to read his story. I just want to inject a bit more radicality, a bit more queerness, if you will, into mainstream queer narratives. Pageboy made me cry, it turned me on, it made me hurt on Page’s behalf. It was hard to read, and I’m glad I read it. But I hope that it isn’t adopted by the mainstream as the definitive book about transgenderism, because no one book, or one voice, should carry the burden of speaking for an entire community in that way. I hope Page has opened the door a bit wider for other trans writers to join him; I hope these writers’ perspectives are respected for their individuality, and that the diversity of their experiences is honoured by cis audiences.