BRENDAN O’NEILL: The violent purging of womanhood.
I couldn’t help thinking of these self-punishing brides of Christ as I read Elliot Page’s disturbing autobiography, Pageboy. Once Ellen, an actress well known for her turns in Juno, Inception and numerous other movies, Elliot Page of course seems starkly different to yesteryear’s self-flagellating seekers after Christ. Yes, Page has also ‘amputated from nature and spirit what made them female’ – including her breasts – but she is not ‘religious at all’, she says in passing in her life story of transing from female to male. And yet the self-loathing and self-harm of the crazed saints of the early Church find an eerie echo in this tome, on nearly every page. It’s chilling, and we need to talk about it.
Like those women, Elliot writes of her dread of womanhood. She speaks of female physiology with a contempt that would be damned as misogyny if it came from a man. Her first period horrifies her: ‘That smell of metallic blood, [like] a robot leaking.’ Puberty, and in particular the growth of her breasts, sickens her. ‘I’d forever feel this disgust, and I punished my body for it’, she writes. She does everything she can to conceal her breasts – no, not beneath a nail-studded hairshirt, like our poor saints, but under ‘oversized concealing t-shirts’. And also through contorting her body: ‘My posture began to fold, shoulders caving in.’ ‘The unbearable weight of… self-disgust’ is how she describes her emotional response to turning from a tomboy who was often mistaken for an actual boy into a woman. She no longer felt ‘present in my flesh’. Instead, she felt a ‘compulsion to tear apart my flesh, a sort of scolding’ (my emphasis).
Like the female saints, Page cut herself, starved herself, repressed herself. ‘People cut themselves, I’ll try that’, she writes. She would ‘take a small knife to my room… pressing down, dragging it slightly, enough to see that red, enough for that relief’. Like St Margaret Mary Alacoque, she used a knife to mortify her womanly flesh. ‘People stop eating, I’ll try that’, she writes. In response to her developing body, she eats less and less. She relishes the opportunity to play ‘a character that was partially starved to death’ – in the 2007 film An American Crime – because it means she can ‘lean in to my desire to disappear, to punish myself’. Where female saints starved themselves ‘in the service of holiness’, in Rudolph Bell’s words, Page starves herself in the service of alleviating the ‘filling out’ of her body, her ‘growing breasts’. Her stomach feels like ‘a dirty old cloth’, ill-deserving of food, she writes.
And like the saints, she hears voices. This part of the book feels incredibly disquieting. It is undeniably religious. A voice tells her to stop eating. ‘[It] spoke with a sinister tone’, she says. ‘That can’t go inside of you’, the voice demands in relation to a pizza Page orders. This ‘minacious voice’ returns. It tells her, ‘You deserve the humiliation. You are an abomination.’ Later, however, ‘that fucking voice’ brings salvation: it reveals unto her the trans resurrection she must undergo to deliver herself from self-hatred. ‘You don’t have to feel this way’, it says. What is this? God? The same being that instructed Catherine of Siena to eat nothing but the Holy Eucharist? We never find out. But I guess if God can tell St Catherine not to consume food, He can tell Elliot Page not to eat pizza.
Earlier: The Return of Paganism.
As G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote, “When a man ceases to believe in God, it’s not that he believes in nothing, it’s that he’ll believe in anything.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Call me crazy, but if the voice has a “sinister tone” it probably doesn’t come from God, but from the other guy.
