Last week, the Canadian actress Ellen Page, who now goes by the name “Elliot” and claims to be a man, delivered a speech at the Juno Awards — Canada’s equivalent to the Grammys — in which she argued that “the rights of LGBTQ2+ people” are under attack. These “rights,” she asserted, are being “revoked, restricted and eliminated throughout the world.” Her speech drew headlines and corresponded with the release of the first clip from her new film, Close to You, in which Page plays a “transgender man” for the first time.

Page has long been a famous actress, but her announcement of her transgenderism in December 2020 has turbocharged her fame and given her reason to be a leading activist on LGBTQ issues. This week, she was the headlining name on a statement signed by many Canadian celebrities to speak out against “Anti-Trans Legislation in Canada”; the statement expressed horror at provinces’ requirements that children obtain parental consent for a transgender identity. Page’s transgender identity also was the reason that Pageboy, her memoir, immediately topped the New York Times’ bestseller list upon its release last year.

Given Page’s increasing impact on the transgender movement, I picked up Pageboy to get an understanding of how she sees the ideology that she so adamantly subscribes to. What I found is an extremely credulous person in desperate need of help. She has suffered from anorexia and depression, was repeatedly sexually assaulted, and feels disgusted with her body.

In the book, she embraces left-wing ideology with such enthusiasm that you could image even the most diehard leftists telling her that they never meant anyone to take it that far. In one chapter, in which she describes living at an environmental “learning center,” she informs her readers, with a deep seriousness, that we only have a short number of years left before the world will cease to exist due to the “climate crisis.” At another time, she claims that Hollywood does not lead the way when it comes to LGBTQ issues but follows far behind.

Page adopts this same credulousness for leftist ideology in regard to the sexual revolution. She has fully bought into the idea that the purpose of life is to seek sexual pleasure with various people, as the bulk of her memoir is a scattered listing of her sexual escapades in an incoherent timeline. In describing all of these relationships, she is desperate to prove that she has sexual desires.

Interspersed in these dragging descriptions of her sexual relationships — many of which have no dimension to them apart from lust, a fact that she acknowledges — are attempts to retroactively project her newfound transgender identity onto her past. Early on, Page describes her joy at being mistaken for a boy at 9 years old when she was playing soccer on a co-ed team. Later, she describes feeling uncomfortable with her film character wearing a skirt. If there is any cohesive narrative in her book, it is this attempt to explain her transition and to prove that she was always “transgender.”

Given that she identified as a girl or woman throughout the vast majority of her life and was extremely feminine, her retroactive insertion of a transgender identity is less than believable. It instead seems that, once tired of the sexual liberation served up to her by Hollywood, she then, always credulous, turned to its next movement: transgenderism. Her fitting of transgenderism onto her life finds its manifestation mostly in claims that she wished to be rid of her female body throughout her life. All throughout this insertion of a transgender identity, whether it is in regard to growing up in Nova Scotia in the 1990s or coming out as a lesbian in 2014, she describes a person who very much has the personality of a girl or woman. And never does she talk about wanting to have conventionally masculine characteristics; instead, she shows a distaste for men, such as when she complains about having to work in “a cast full of cis men” while filming Inception. Later, she explains away acting as a woman for the entirety of her “marriage,” which lasted from 2018 until she came out as “transgender,” by calling it “an emotional disguise” and saying that she had “numbed” herself to the “truth.”

When Page starts thinking about taking on a transgender identity, it seems to be an effort to erase her feminine identity rather than an effort to take on a masculine identity. When she begins filming The Umbrella Academy, for example, she informs the showrunners that she wants to wear a tight-fitting sports bra in all scenes. When acting in the show, she tries to tone down the femininity of the original comic book character. She also describes a feeling of alienation from her body. She calls her body a “flesh vessel” and describes it as having a personality apart from herself.

Then, when she decides to “transition” after her “marriage” falls apart (but before divorce proceedings begin), she immediately begins a mad, desperate dash to cut off her breasts as quickly as possible. In fact, she describes contacting a surgeon for a double mastectomy as the first real step to adopting her transgender identity. Her surgery comes within months after her first consultation. She explains that her “flesh vessel” is “always smarter” than her and had known, even before her, that she is really a man.

This is not a coherent ideology. This is deep confusion by a vulnerable woman.

*****

Last weekend, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles published an interview with two liberal college students. One is a man who identifies as a transgender woman; the other is a woman who identifies as nonbinary. Both insisted to Knowles that transgender activists understand that biological sex exists and that people are either biologically male or biologically female. “We know that sex is unambiguous,” said the student who identifies as transgender. “I don’t think that we’re denying that.” To this, the student who identifies as nonbinary responded, “There’s this odd idea among conservatives that transgender people don’t understand that biological sex exists.”

But for many transgender activists, such an explanation is deeply offensive. For example, a gender-affirming therapist that fellow Daily Wire host Matt Walsh spoke to in his film What Is a Woman? told him that she was “assigned female” at birth but that she is a “not a woman.” She explained: “We know now that sex and gender are so much more than just this binary. Some women have penises, right. Some men have vaginas.”

As for Page, she falls into the latter camp that claims “a transgender man is a man.” She repeatedly says in her activism that people who deny that she is a man deny her “right to exist.”

When these mantras are repeated alongside the theory of transgenderism, they can convince many. But when told alongside the reality of a person’s life, they start to fall apart. Nothing about Page projects masculinity or manhood — not even her scratchy, slightly deepened voice that is still clearly that of a woman. Instead, her transgender identity exists in self-hatred and self-alienation, especially in regard to her feminine traits and characteristics. It is a misogyny directed at herself.

The ideological transgenderism Page subscribes to does not speak of a reason for why a particular person is “transgender”; it claims a person was simply born that way. But the reality of Page’s life story shows that there indeed was a long series of terrible events and mistakes that culminated in her rejecting the reality that she is a woman. Transgenderism was not inherent. She chose it.