How Ellen Page Prayed Away The Gay

An immoral fable for our times

According to the LA Times, actress Ellen Page experienced her religious conversion into “Elliot” during an ascetic sojourn at a cabin in Nova Scotia.

Reporter Amy Kaufman says that Page used a combination of self-flagellating violence, fasting, and forced solitude to achieve gnosis and hear the voice of God.

The breakthrough occurred while sitting on a porch chair ruminating on the manifold humiliations of a life in the Hollywood sleaze machine.

“You don’t have to feel this way,” Page says a voice told her. The “discomfort [she] felt in [her] body” was explained in an instant. The pain of a lifetime had all been metaphysical discomfort with her flesh. She was born in the wrong body! Of course.

It was definitely not the lifelong homophobia Ellen Page experienced from her own family. Nope, no way this trans stuff is just ‘pray away the gay’ with genderspirits. No way. Unpossible:

When [she] started to explore the idea that [she] might be gay, [her] family was not accepting. [Her] mother, a minister’s daughter, told her [daughter] that homosexuality didn’t exist. When [she] started acting as a teenager, [she] once had to shave [her] head for a role; [her] grandmother responded to the look by asking Page’s father what he would do if his daughter was a “dyke.”

Page’s mother is now very accepting of her ‘son.’ Strangely (or not) she never achieved this same acceptance of a lesbian daughter. One wonders what has really been gained.

Hollywood has also embraced Page’s Damascene conversion with enthusiasm. Have they reckoned with the legacy of homophobia in Tinseltown, though? Of course not.

A few months later, at the 2008 Academy Awards, Page was even more uncomfortable. [She] was dating a woman at the time but had been urged by [her] manager to hide this relationship from the press, so [she] did not have [her] partner by [her] side.

Hollywood does not want to consider that Page is expressing the trauma inflicted on a young lesbian by a career of constant male sexual harassment. Even Page does not want to have that confrontation. Much easier to change religions.

Director Brett Ratner outed and sexually harassed Page on the set of an X-Men film in 2006. Conveniently, Ratner can be name-checked in the article because he was already cancelled for #MeToo crimes in 2017.

All the rest of the perpetrators’ names are redacted from the telling. Kaufman says that in her new autobiography,

Page writes, a man who “was and still is one of the most famous actors in the world,” approached [her] at a Hollywood house party and hissed: “I’m going to f — you to make you realize you aren’t gay,” the star said, going on to graphically describe a sexual act he planned to perform on Page.

A nameless grip is described sexually assaulting Page, “abuse that did not stem from [her] gender or sexual identity,” weirdly enough, but from Page being female. We are not not supposed to say this out loud. We are not told who these men are.

At least two men made serious unwanted sexual advances on Page during her career. Each time she “froze,” an instinctive reaction to danger that often amplifies the sense of humiliation in victims of rape and assault.

Remember, this was happening to Page as a minor.

“That behavior was happening on sets when I was so young that you don’t talk about it,” Page says now. “I used to just shove it away. Like, ‘Oh, what are you complaining about? It’s no big deal.’ It took time to go, ‘Oh, wow, that actually caused damage.’”

Page has been processing the trauma all this time even while it was still going on.

When [she] started going to therapy at 23, the analyst responded to the stories from [her] upbringing by telling [her she]’d “had a fair amount of trauma.”

“Trauma?” Page says [she] responded. “What are you talking about? I haven’t had trauma.”

Image is everything to Hollywood. Actresses face career limits and pressures that male actors do not. Totalizing beauty standards rubbed against the grain of a ‘gender nonconforming’ woman who always preferred sweat pants and jeans.

In [her] memoir, Page writes about how [she] wanted to wear jeans and a western shirt to the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. But the publicity team at Fox Searchlight rejected the idea, rushing [her] to a local department store to find something they deemed more feminine.

A gender nonconforming actress was having a bad time in Los Angeles, while the gender conforming “trans man” is now comfortable in “his” own skin. We are supposed to celebrate this.

We are not supposed to see a woman surrounded by intense social pressures to conform. We are not invited to consider how inhumane this industry can be, that it can make an actress feel an unhealthy “unease in [her] own skin.”

While making 2017’s “Flatliners,” Page asked that [her] character not wear a skirt; a member of the production team asked him: “Are you mad that this character isn’t gay?”

Page began self-harming at 16. “[She] restricted [her] calories,” an early sign of body dysmorphia. Page “smashed [her] head with a hairbrush. Cut [her] shoulder with a knife. Hoisted [her] body onto the spike of [her] mother’s bed frame in an effort to impale [herself].”

As with any religious conversion, the past has been reconstructed to explain the present convictions. Page, we are told, has always known that “he” was a boy because Page liked ‘boy stuff.’

Since age 4, when in the bathroom at [her] YMCA preschool he tried to pee while standing up. At age 6, asking [her] mom if [she] could be a boy.

As a kid, [she] hid out in [her] room playing with Batman and Robin action figures and Barbies from Happy Meals whose hair [she] had chopped off. In the imaginary love letters [she] wrote to a fake girlfriend, signed, “Love, Jason.”

Batman is the most fantasized-about superhero among women. Page internalized the idea that this was a ‘boy’ trait when it is decidedly not.

Childish pursuits are not childish anymore, but examples of “gender euphoria” experienced by the invisible, ineffable Elliot Page-genderbeing trapped in the body of a woman that horny Hollywood men want to rape.

“It was a small voice” on the porch, Kaufman writes, “barely discernible. But it kept echoing in [her] head. A way out.”

Sounds like psychosis, but okay. A way out of what, though? We are not supposed to analyze that. Too many interests are at stake.

Page stopped being an unhappy lesbian to become a euphoric “trans man” in a matter of weeks, abandoning a three-year marriage. We are meant to believe this was due to the demands of the production schedule for Umbrella Academy rather than the intensity of the conversion experience of a new believer.

Now single, Page is on dating apps, but not because Page is dating. “Whoa, I’m alone, and it feels really good,” Page says. Rather, social media provides the illusion of connection. A bubble of affirmation protects the newly sanctified ego-formation. Even the man yelling “faggot!” at her outside of the Pink Dot because he mistakes her for a young twink boy is offering a kind of affirmation, now.

No one ever cared about the crucifixion of a lesbian, but now everyone in the world of celebrity and culture celebrates the death of Ellen, and Page’s resurrection as Elliot, to wash away their own sins.