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The actress formerly known as Ellen Page announced that she was changing her name to Elliot in December 2020. Since that announcement, Page has become Hollywood’s most visible transgender celebrity. At the time, she found immediate industry support from the writers of the show The Umbrella Academy, who rewrote her character as trans mid-series. But she hasn’t landed a post-switch role in a big tentpole film until now, with her casting in Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming Odyssey.
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It was rumored that she was going to play Achilles, an obviously bizarre choice. But now it’s emerged that she is in fact playing a character who doesn’t feature in the original poem at all: the Greek warrior Sinon, a player in Virgil’s Aeneid. Sinon is key to the sack of Troy, which Nolan evidently wants to milk for maximal cinematic effect. A trickster figure, the warrior stays behind and persuades the Trojans to welcome the infamous horse. There are hints that the film will trace Sinon’s grim arc, including what may be a brief glimpse of his afterlife in the Underworld. In one sense, you could say it’s a morbidly fitting role: a doomed trickster who lives and dies by deception.
ELLIOT PAGE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE PROMISE OF TRANSITION
Between this choice and the discourse around Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, speculation is flying about Nolan’s goals. Is he simply showing his usual loyalty to trusted cast members, given Page’s work on Inception? Is he ragebaiting? Is he Oscarbaiting, trying to check the Academy’s new diversity boxes in the most politically correct way possible?
I suspect that Nolan is driven more by personal loyalty than by the need to check a box. But he clearly doesn’t recognize anything enabling or exploitative about participating in Page’s public delusion.
In the usual Orwellian style that defines the discourse around trans celebrities, every establishment organ has done their bit to erase Page’s life as a woman. Pre-Elon, Twitter banned Jordan Peterson for “deadnaming” her and calling the surgeon who removed her breasts a “criminal physician.” Even post-Elon, Grok will perform an artificially sanctimonious impression of this public ritual, refusing to use female pronouns when prompted. Mainstream media outlets change the pronouns when they quote old reviews of Page’s work, like this Vanity Fair article quoting a review of Hard Candy.
That film was Page’s breakout performance, playing a teen vigilante who hunts down a pedophile. In her book Pageboy, she claimed that as a still underage star, she suffered real-life harassment and assault from men on various film sets. She said she had felt helpless to report any of these instances at the time. While granting that we have only her word for this, it’s certainly not implausible, and it’s common to the backstories of many women who experience gender dysphoria.
On X, Mary Harrington suggests it is more accurate to look to this root cause than to say “Wokeness killed Ellen Page.” But it’s not inaccurate to say that woke propaganda finds soft targets in already vulnerable women like Page. In a painful Stephen Colbert interview, taped the year before her switch, Page is angry, unfocused, and downright incoherent as she topic-hops her way across various leftist causes du jour. She channels Greta Thunberg with some doomer prophecy about the climate, rails against Mike Pence for being anti-gay, and blames Donald Trump for Jussie Smollett’s alleged assault (which would infamously emerge as a hoax). “Connect the dots!” she adjures the audience through tears. Colbert solemnly nods and shakes her hand.
Harrington’s coinage of the term “omnicause” captures this kind of amorphous hysteria, in which the leftist holds forth about everything all at once at an artificial fever pitch of intensity. It takes hold with especially devastating effects in people who are already predisposed to anxiety or mental unwellness (or in cases like Thunberg, people with trait autism). Page clearly fell into this category.
In a glowing post-switch LA Times profile, Page describes her gender epiphany as the culmination of an intense episode of self-harm, driven by “voices” in her head. The article graphically describes how she “took [her] knuckles to [her] face and pounded over and over until bruises formed.” Page claims the loud voices then gave way to a quiet, “gentle and loving” voice encouraging her to explore becoming a man. Mere weeks later, she was on Zoom with a doctor who gave her a referral for a mastectomy.
It would seem relevant in this context that 29.6% of people with gender dysphoria have a dissociative identity disorder. Such inconvenient facts don’t seem to have given Page’s doctor pause. But then facts have never been an obstacle for the ideologues running the “transition” racket.
Page protests too much that she is happier and healthier than ever before, posting desperate topless selfies to show off her artificially bulked-up torso. But her new, uncanny metallic voice always sounds like it’s on the edge of tears, and her once soft feminine face now appears sunken and lined. Clips like her red carpet appearance with a towering bodyguard are making the clickbait rounds. “Before/after” posts juxtapose cute feminine Ellen on the left with miserable, hollowed-out Elliot on the right. It’s doubtful that most of the posters have a genuine care for Page’s well-being. They’re just here for the clicks.
THE SUPREME COURT’S DEFERENCE TO BIOLOGY
Personally, I feel compassion for Page. I recognize that as a public figure, she is culpable for spreading the contagion of this ideology to other vulnerable people. But I’m also a very petite woman, about Page’s size, and this makes me feel a particular sadness as I watch her health disintegrate in public. Due to my size and other congenital factors, I live life very conscious of my fragility, my dependence on people around me who are more physically capable. I accept that I need my male neighbor to mow the lawn for me. I accept that I need help to schlep my bag into the overhead compartment on a plane. Yet I am at peace with this as part of accepting and loving the whole shape of my femininity. When I look at Page, I see a fragile woman who could not learn to love herself.
One hopes there will be a moment in Page’s future when she wakes up and turns back. Such a moment is unlikely, but if it ever happened, it would certainly show who her real friends are.
