(LifeSiteNews) — Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Page—who now goes by the name “Elliot” and identifies as a man—recently told an interviewer that she is now experiencing “healthy masculinity.” Ilana Glazer, host of the “It’s Open” podcast, asked Page about her “gender journey.”
Trans actress Elliot Page explains how she feels ‘healthy masculinity.’
“Healthy masculinity to me is…like leaning away from whenever there is some sort of impulse or expectation you’ve put on yourself to like shut down.” pic.twitter.com/4cuI1Bky1A
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) June 12, 2026
“I’ve been asking people about masculinity and femininity,” Glazer said. “In your gender journey, which to me as someone who knows you but also as someone consuming you as a public figure, to me you appear healthy and continually finding more health and security. What does it mean to you to hear me say ‘healthy masculinity’?”
Page admitted that she struggles with it. “Healthy masculinity to me is or even just something I’ve felt as trans … is like leaning away from whenever there is some sort of impulse or expectation you’ve put on yourself to shut down or conform in a way that usually feels like this, like I am closing off,” she said. “I remember kind of being like, ‘Oh, Elliot, maybe you should, you know, talk with your hands a little less.’”
Glazer nods and mhmms affirmingly throughout Page’s answer, no doubt eager to prove that she is an ally. In Hollywood, it is considered entirely sane to ask a young woman who was sexually assaulted and harassed as a young actress, had her breasts amputated, and now identifies as a man, what “healthy masculinity” looks like. Aside from the fact that Page often looks depressed and sad, asking a woman to define her “masculinity” is obviously a self-defeating proposition.
A man cannot identify as a woman because he claims to “feel” like a woman, because he cannot know what it feels like to be a woman. A woman cannot identify as a man because she claims to “feel” like a man, because she cannot know what it feels like to be a man. Writing those words makes me feel mildly crazy because it seems like such an obvious point to make. Yet here we are.
Later in the interview, Page tells Glazer that “trans and gender non-conforming people” can offer the world a glimpse of what it looks like to be liberated from shame, despite pushback from the “white supremacist patriarchal structures don’t want people to feel liberated and feel that sense of power and feel that sense of possibility, nor do they want to lose a societal structure that keeps so many people oppressed and resources extracted and everything that it leads to.” Whatever that means.
The truth is that the story of Ellen Page is not a story of triumph and personal liberation. It is the story of a vulnerable young girl in Hollywood who was preyed on by major players in the industry—players that she referenced in her 2023 memoir Pageboy but would not name. She came out as “transgender” on social media in December 2020, and a 2021 TIME cover story featured a photo shoot of a sad-looking, post-transition Page. She told TIME that she was “fully who I am,” now that there was less of her.
Undergoing “transition,” she told the magazine at the time, rescued her from the “total hell” she’d suffered since puberty. She also described the anxiety and depression she’d endured and that trans activists such as Laverne Cox had been helpful in her journey; P. Carl’s memoir Becoming a Man was a favorite. But in her memoir two years later, she revealed that she had a psychotic breakdown a week prior to her surgeries and that voices in her head told her to transition.
Page’s memoir should have prompted questions about the dark, ugly path that led her to lie down on the surgeon’s table. It didn’t. Instead, Hollywood rushed to affirm her new “transness,” bid farewell to Ellen, and welcomed Elliot. The anonymous predators who targeted her for being a girl no doubt did so with slightly panicked enthusiasm. Now Page is not asked about the crimes that were perpetrated against her because she was a girl. She is asked about how, having tried to surgically escape the body that made her a target, she views “healthy masculinity.”
There’s a lot going on here, but “liberation” has nothing to do with it.
