Review of memoir: ‘Page Boy’ by Elliott Page

Another day, another trans memoir.

Contains spoilers. 

Introduction

Probably the cleverest thing about Page Boy is its title.  Otherwise it is a fairly short (but not enough) unimaginative reflection, mostly of Ellen Page’s teen years, growing up in Nova Scotia, Canada.  In order to bulk out the subject’s meagre experiences, the now Elliott Page ties her reminisces into the landscape and history of the area she grew up in (or more likely a ghostwriter did).  As you will already be aware if you’re a terf, Page directly ascribes her self-loathing to being same sex attracted.  However, there are other issues which arise which I believe most commentators haven’t highlighted yet, which I will address later. 

Page casts her whole family aside with this memoir as none of them are spared or forgiven for even minor infractions, whereas the rich and famous are protected (I guess Page has just enough money to fend off her family and some D-list celebrities).  Worst of all though, the whole thing – and this can’t be overstated – is utterly utterly humourless.  Not a single smile, wry or otherwise, was raised.

One day I will learn to do a proper review of a book, rather than a ridiculous chapter by chapter summary. If you just want to know why I thought the book was a pile of shite please go straight to the conclusion.

Page Boy has been on the best sellers’ lists since its publication.

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Author’s Note

Page begins the book with an Author’s Note, an explicitly political diatribe, in which we are reminded that although she will be talking about her past self, it definitely isn’t okay for us to do the same.  Predictably we are told there is currently an attack on ‘gender affirming healthcare’.  Philosophical musings include ‘at last I can sit with myself in this body’.

Paula

The first recollection and issue we are presented with, to broach upfront before the trans stuff comes up, is her same sex attraction. Paula is the girl she was in love with when she was twenty.  Page tells us that: ‘Shame had been drilled into my bones since my tiniest self’ (page 2).  She met Paula just before Juno premiered.  

Sexuality Sweepstakes 

Here Page addresses how the gossip of Tattle Town regarding her sexuality badly affected her.  Less believable though is the claim that during her school days she was pushed into the boys bathroom because she was considered ‘dykey’.  

Ellen Page, ladies and gentleman:

Grandma apparently asks her father, because she had shaved her head for a film role: ‘[W]hat are you gonna do if Ellen’s a dyke?’.  Page reflects with a tear in her eye this was the same woman who had bought her a teddy bear with rainbows on its paws and ears.  Crucially we aren’t told how her father answered.  Meanwhile Page was still dating Paula but keeping her secret from the family and the press.  

Boy

The lesbianism out the way, we are launched into Page’s world of living her life identifying as a man.  For Page, this means dating women, but has the problem of not being able to sit on tall barstools because she is too petite.  Cue the claim that she knew she was a boy aged 4, that she tried to pee standing up and that she asked her mother: ‘Can I be a boy?’ (page 14).  

Petite Page then claims that from the age of 10 she was addressed as if she were a boy, things like being told ‘thanks bud’.  Her internal world, she claims, was taken up by her imagining herself as male and identifying herself with male heroes, Batman and the like (as nearly all girls do for the lack of heroines).  

It was boys who provided her with her first sexual experiences.  Page’s sexuality is more than a little bit undecided, regardless of her protestations of her preference for females, an ambivalence which is never explained.  The first boy she kissed, she would pass notes with, which made a ‘flutter in her lower back’ (page 18).  Neatly subverting this heterosexuality into a queer experience, she claims that when she and her boyfriend were together they would be called ‘faggots’. 

Action figures

Aged 8 she moved with her mother to live in a new neighbourhood.  The year was 1994.  We learn that life was essentially comfortable – her mother was able to afford to buy a home – but that ominously the area had been previously razed to the ground by the Halifax explosion.  Mum was a schoolteacher, so must have been around for the holidays to look after her little girl, yet the picture which is painted is of this relationship is tinged with sadness, despite recollections of being taken out on days out and visits to restaurants.  ‘It is so sad that all the static had to get in the way as I aged,’ says Page, reflecting on the relationship now.  

Roughhousing

Page genuinely had some very unstable family arrangements.  Living two weeks with her mother and then two weeks with her father, Linda her stepmother and Linda’s children.  

Further in this chapter Page expands on what sounds very much like nascent sexual attraction but offered as proof of her male gender identity.  She reflects that she likes the way men move when they play golf or the way a chain would dangle when a sweater was pulled off, revealing a male torso.  In her new bedroom at her father’s house she puts up posters of male teen idols of the day and in real life she was beginning to like the smell of the friends of her older stepbrother.

She also describes episodes of violence at the hands of this stepbrother, which she describes thus: 

Like any sibling, he could get too rough, whether wrenching my arm until I screamed or putting me in a sleeper hold, making slip me under for a moment, blurred stars dancing in front of a black backdrop. 

page 36

Despite her classification of this violence as normal and everyday, she reveals that she often cried and begged him to stop and one dramatic incident found her lying on the floor barely able to move or breath, kept secret from the adults. His abuse of her was also emotional, including targeting her cuddly toys.  

Linda also turns out to be a wicked stepmother, labelling her a brat, and behaving appallingly to her behind her father’s back, in particular accusing her of being unpopular and comparing her lack of success with that of her son, who was assistant captain of the hockey team.  (In fact, by this time, Page already had an acting career and was playing junior league soccer, making it a slightly unbelievable claim.) 

On the other hand, her father is painted as her saviour, pledging his devotion and loyalty to her (‘you are the love of my life,’ page 37).

Jump Scare

Suddenly we are into the world of Page’s acting career and her first stalker.  Nothing is explained how her TV and film career came to be, although it is clear that all three care givers must have had played a part in enabling her career to take off.  A young girl confident enough to face auditions and appearing on camera is distinctly at odds with the picture that Page paints of herself.  

Page had her first professional acting job aged 11 in a CBC drama called Pit Pony, although she was cast in the role aged just 9. 

It was off the back of that programme that an adult man contacted her via a website she had made for herself, just for fun.  They corresponded for two years in secret and she felt like she had a special connection with him.  She got the willies though when he announced deeper feelings, issuing a threat to visit and she finally realised that she didn’t want anything to to do with him, persuading him not to come and responded to his emails less and less.  Page makes a joke about this but it fails to land: 

I’m going to cum on you in the clouds of heaven, he wrote.  
He’d send me links to missing children websites. 
By then I was sixteen years old. 
And worst of all, Creed lyrics. 

page 45 

When dad finds out that she has a stalker, his response is at odds with the love he professed to her earlier, telling her he was going to ‘kick her ass’ (page 48).  Page says this single response was more damaging than anything sent by her stalker.  Self-harming with a knife soon followed.  

Leeches

I learned early on I could not have my parents at work with me.

page 55

We have still not been told yet which parent thrust her into the limelight, indeed Page paints the opposing scenario: her parents weren’t on set with her and took little interest in her pathway to stardom (someone was driving her to those sets though).   

Abandoned on sets, which she stresses was what she preferred, she details at least two adult men tried to groom her.  But the more serious claim is that when she was eighteen an adult woman, a crew member on set, forcibly dry humped her (whereas the men had just acted like dicks).  In fact, Page relates that she continued the relationship with the woman who had forcibly dry humped her, submitting herself to regular episodes from the same.  Page gives no explanation as to why she continued the relationship with the non-entity crew member who always orgasmed after dry humping her.  

Famous Asshole at Party

We flit forward to Page aged 27, living in Beverley Hills, and having security cameras installed to investigate an obsessed fan leaving unwanted roses and messages outside her house.  

It is also the time she came out as a lesbian, whilst giving a speech at the HRC conference (see above).  Page alleges that ‘one of the most famous actors in the world’ approached her after this revelation at a party, threatening to ‘fuck her’ until she realised she wasn’t gay.  Friends and other party goers apparently witnessed this incident which lasted several minutes and included him following her around the house party.  The incident was the talk of the town with people with friends who weren’t even there hearing about it. 

Pink Dot

We jump forward to 2022 and Page has transitioned and met a new woman – Madisyn.  We learn that she is having the best sex ever:

How deeply freeing to have someone love fucking my dick and my pussy and permitting myself to enjoy it.  

page 69

Madisyn makes Page ‘hard’.  Despite this new found manliness from a cock that doesn’t exist (I don’t even think Page has had a phalloplasty) Page now faces rampant homophobia on the gayest streets of LA.  A man informs her, delivering a line of dialogue which would embarrass even Jussie Smollet:

“I’m going to fucking gay bash you, faggot.”

page 71

Surely, the real response on seeing Ellen/Elliott Page in LA would be: Look, there’s thingy from Inception!

That Little Indie

Page goes into great detail of a movie that she appeared in, An American Crime, in which her character is sadistically tortured. Page makes ‘friends’ with the actress Catherine Keener, who plays the mother character.  She becomes anorexic because her character, Sylvia, is starved.  

She was also dating a guy at this time, who she informed, whilst they were ‘fucking’, that she thought she might be gay.  Funnily enough he disagreed.

A therapist was engaged to help with her eating issues, meanwhile the opportunity of Juno, her big breakout movie, that she really wanted to do, loomed.  Page claims that she can to learn how to chew and swallow food again and to ‘stay calm, to not have to get drunk first’ (page 83), although this apparent alcohol dependency has not been mentioned before nor is it again.

Despite previously claiming her parents never attended sets with her, we are now told her mother now accompanied her when she went to audition for Juno and they met Michael Cera, who had travelled with his dad.  Acting the part of a pregnant teenage girl apparently gave her the opportunity to explore ‘a space beyond the binary’ (page 85).  Mum stayed with her throughout filming.  

Page claims she started a sexual relationship with one of her co-stars in Juno, Olivia Thirlby, and says she is the first woman to ‘make me cum’ (note the porn spelling), though mum has no idea that they are making out all the time, at the hotel and on set, etc.  (Thirlby has not commented publicly on this story and I have nagging suspicious that it is not true and that Page simply wants to divert attention away from the fact that Juno is a nice ‘heteronormative’ movie.)

Only Kidding

We’re back to the onset of puberty again in this chapter with Page describing it as a ‘shift from boy to girl without my consent’ (page 89) and ‘a path to a false identity’. 

After a particularly nasty food poisoning episode she passes out in the family bathroom, too scared to disturb her sleeping father and stepmother.  The stepmother, however, does get up and with a ‘cold laugh’ fetches mop and bucket for Page to clean up the mess (only shit, because – similar to a certain Prince – she has a physiological inability to vomit).  

The following day after her explosive diarrhoea episode her mom forces her to play soccer.  Again, we are confronted again with a central contradiction in the narrative – her completely hands off parents pushing her to do stuff. 

Page returns to her Cinderella complex.  The whole family is against her, but particularly her stepmother, who spitefully nicknames her ‘Skid Mark’ because of her dirty underwear.  The familial amnesia about her acting career is very striking by this point, as literally no one mentions it.

Then in a freak accident whilst out rollerblading she goes flying and manages to tear her vagina.  I know, I don’t understand how that could happen either.  She crawls home and up the stairs, sodden with blood and later taken to the hospital by her father and stepmother to have a dissolvable adhesive tape put in her vagina to mend the wound (so didn’t even require stitches).  

Roller Derby

Page ramps up the gender dysphoria story by conveniently claiming that she turned down a lead role in a film following the success of Juno because it was going to involve wearing ladies historical costume.  Instead she filmed Roller Derby, directed by that other famous child star, Drew Barrymore.  She was with Paula at that time, and claims that Paula’s parents were super religious and homophobic and that her own mother had a distaste about her sexuality which was also biblically-induced.  She claims she was under pressure from her manager to stay in the closet but finally a therapist suggested that she needed to come out.  Page was far too repressed to discuss her ‘gender’ with this therapist and could only weep.  It was another ten years down the line before she could open up about that. 

Buckets

Page is obsessed by the movie E.T. and apparently chose the name Elliott in homage to the character in the film.  She also had ‘ET PHONE HOME’ tattooed on her arm (since modified to read ‘EP phone home’ – geddit.   

Post shoot of the roller derby movie, she spent a month living in an eco village and tries to persuade us that being in tune with nature is of the highest value to her.  Whilst there she mets her next boyfriend, a fellow hippie, Ian (no explanation is given as to why she identifies as a lesbian when she is still falling in love and having sex with men).  Unsurprisingly her relationship with her girlfriend deteriorates.  

U-Haul 

Page claims that when she told her mother she thought she may be gay, the mum screamed: “That doesn’t exist!” (page 127).  Then her mother put pressure on her to not hang out ‘exclusively with boys anymore’, preferring her to instead hang out with girls on her soccer team.  (Does this make sense to anyone?) 

She broached the subject of her sexuality with her mum again aged 20 when she told her that Paula was her girlfriend.  

Now her and mum are reconciled, having made up shortly after Page went on Oprah to talk about being trans.  Mum has become an ally and Page comments that:

[It] was the most beautiful and meaningful [thing] to watch her bloom as her old narratives and doctrines faded. 

page 134

“Ryan”

Page starts dating a woman who is even more in the closet than she is (this is well post- many of the rumours being shared about her publicly, so doesn’t really make sense) and even the parents of the new girlfriend aren’t aware it is a sexual relationship, despite the paparazzi snapping Page all the time.  Although the pair are heavily closeted, they are in an open relationship and go off and indulge in a lots of ‘discreet but adventurous sex’.  The woman in question is apparently another famous film star … 

Speedo

More on her puberty.  Getting her period and having to wear trainer bras.  Gaining weight also unsettled her.  She describes excitement at getting to wear boys’ speedo pants whilst at someone’s house.  She claims she is called a ‘faggot’ for eyeing a boy’s crotch in his speedos. 

Crash

Page talks about her relationship with her father, now calling him Dennis.  Dennis visited her in LA when she was 25.  Before arriving he’d warned that he wanted to discuss her childhood, but instead of the expected and hoped for apology, he only confirmed that he was very happy with his wife and not sad he had had to break up his relationship with her mother.  For Page this was devastating, rather than taking it as an explanation of how things had panned out, she felt it meant he didn’t see her at all.  

Page complains about having to do photoshoots but has no powers of reflection that, if so, she has simply chosen the wrong career.

Intuition

Aged 12 Page gained the absolute certainty that she was going to make it in Hollywood.  Her parents, however, apparently did not share this vision and prepared her for disappointment.  It is the only time her parents comment on her acting career. Yet again we are reminded that she hasn’t shared one anecdote where a peer had expressed jealousy of her fame or wanted to be friends with her just because she is famous.  No one in her life comments on her acting career at all.

Just Lean In 

Page tells us all about a girl she fancied call Nikki, however whilst lusting after Nikki, she was giving blow jobs to a boy she fancied, leaving class to do this in the school toilets.  Again, zero reflections or insights as to why she might do this if she wasn’t enjoying it, though it is clear that she has had too much sex, too young. Another contradiction in the narrative is that she is filled with guilt for same-sex relations, which she blames on religion, but there is no similar anxiety about her flings with men, so it feels like she is just following a well worn narrative from the LGBT lobby.

Flatliners

Whilst filming Flatliners, Page refused to wear a skirt for the character she was playing.  The head of production confronted her about this and asked her was she refusing because she was a lesbian.  She told him that lesbians do wear skirts but simultaneously claims that they were trying to make her look less queer and blames misogyny and queerphobia.  

Also on Flatliners she claims she was subject to an unsafe stunt but didn’t speak up about it at the time.  Wearing skirts though, an entirely different matter. 

U-Turn

I’d always been told I was gay, made fun of for being a dyke.  I felt more comfortable in environments with queer women, but inherently something in me knew that I was transgender. 

page 193

Like nearly all trans-identified people, she claims that she always knew but that she only knew knew when she was X age.  In her case this was around her 30th birthday, around four years before she came out as trans publicly in December 2020.  Therefore her revelation came around the time of the Trans Tipping Point.  

This chapter is called U-Turn because she decided not to confront it aged 30.  

Interestingly, after addressing the criticisms that she is simply ashamed of being a lesbian and that she has mutilated her body, she quotes the trans-identified male actor Jen Richards, who admitted that transitioning had helped him be ‘more emphatic, more engaged in social justice’ (page 196).  

When she discussed gender with her therapist she would be ‘lost in sobs’.  

Then Page got married to Emma Portner and ‘ignored’ therapy for two years until the relationship broke down. 

Your Heavenly Daddy

After telling us of numerous sexual encounters she has had, she now claims that she has a one night stand for the first time ever. This woman chokes her in bed but she didn’t say anything.  Page doesn’t like a full throttle but does enjoy ‘a hand on the throat, some pressure, a squeeze’ describing it as ‘fun’.  Later she has an episode of diarrhoea (remember she can’t puke) when she learns that the woman who throttled her is bisexual, after bumping into her boyfriend at a party. 

Then in complete contradiction to that, she embarks on a sexual relationship with the actress Kate Mara, despite the fact she knows she has a boyfriend (the actor Max Minghella).  The boyfriend doesn’t mind so they meet up for regular sex, then Page falls hard, but Kate doesn’t want to give her man up.  A fact which must have surely played into Page’s trans narrative at that point; she would never be as good as a man. Shortly after that break-up, she does a full on sex scene with Max Minghella on Into the Forest. 

Choosing Family 

At 13 Page told her mother she only wanted to live with her, yet another clue it was her mother driving her career.  When dad is informed he collapses in a pool of tears so she quickly changes her mind back.  

Shortly after her 30th birthday she decided to stop talking to her father ‘for a while’ (page 227) and she details some of her histrionics around blaming both her father and stepmother for making her feel uncomfortable.  Linda even writes Page a letter of apology and that she loves her, which is rejected out of hand.  

At the time Page wrote this memoir, she hadn’t spoken to her father for five and half years, only once considering a conversation moderated via a therapist, which he refused, requesting instead they meet alone.   

She tells us that she is unlikely to ever meet her father again, because he liked a tweet that Jordan Peterson posted after he was let back on Twitter following being banned for tweeting about Page’s breast removal being criminal.   The chapter ends with her thanking her chosen family.  

Mask

People often mistook her for male when she wore masks but immediately corrected themselves when they heard her voice.  Despite this, we have several paragraphs of so-called gender euphoria, in which she claims she finally feels grounded and happy in her body.  The other added benefit of masking was that people didn’t recognise her anymore as someone famous.  She started to consider ‘top surgery’ at this time. 

She spent the first lockdown in a log cabin, and her mum and her mum’s friends dropped off groceries for her.  Then Nikki, a girlfriend comes to stay for a bit.  She gets more dysphoric about her breasts.  

Portal  

Page films in London and visits various squats in Dalston, one of the most gentrified areas of London, and even she admits that one of the squats looks posh.  Later, on set in Portugal, she had to do a sex scene with a man, a sort of rape scene, and she is freaked out because the actor was very ‘method’.  

She thinks more about the fact she might be trans and ends up punching herself in the face until a bruise appears.  She decides to have top surgery because she ‘loves’ herself. 

No words 

Page’s consultation for bilateral mastectomy was done over Zoom with the procedure booked two weeks later.  She was 33 years old.  She pays lip service to the fact that she was able to afford this and many others aren’t (it cost $12,000) and describes the lack of access to such mutilating surgeries as ‘perverse and manipulative’ and describes her own surgery as ‘life saving’, despite her not having described any suicidal episodes at all throughout the entire memoir.  

Her very close male friend, Mark, spent about ten days with her, helping her recover, whilst she was high on pain medication. 

She reflects when she came out as lesbian in 2014 the vast majority believed her and did not ask for proof, not so with being trans.  She tells us that she has a ‘new sense of calm’ about herself since she started injecting herself ‘with forty milligrams of T’.

Peaches

Page ends her memoir with a reminisce about the time she went to a nightclub aged 15 or 16.  A singer called Peaches vomited on the audience (using fake blood) and Page was so delighted she didn’t wash her arm stained with the dye for two weeks.  She reflects that it was a moment when she was able to connect with her queerness. That’s her closing thought.

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Conclusion

The central mystery at the heart of this memoir isn’t how Elliott Page became trans, or her confused sexual orientation, it is how she became a child star.  We all know that nine year old children do not decide for themselves to become TV stars so at least one of her parents was instrumental to this ambition, if not the driving force. More likely though is that all three were involved, given her living arrangements. Imagine all the co-ordination and commitment it must have required by them to make it work? There must have been acting classes to go to and pay for, contracts to negotiate, work permits to apply for and think of all the school which must have been missed. It is really rather notable that in her reflections none of her friends at school notice that they have a star in their midst – she is neither bullied nor cheered for it – just a complete absence of detail.

Furthermore, she could not have been on set without the presence of a legal guardian under the age of 18 and clearly lies about this aspect in the memoir, so there’s a whole story here which isn’t being told, but why?  Was it that she was a shy and nervous child thrust into the limelight and by an overambitious parent and her subsequent identity meltdown related to that?  I think so and I think she’s too scared to touch it.  I think she still feels like a controlled child and her bid to become male a last ditch attempt to finally become adult.

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