Elliot Page says he never felt like a girl and tried to learn how to pee standing up
Page explains how his gender dysphoria affected him as a child.
Elliot Page has revealed in his upcoming memoir that he never felt like a girl and that he tried to learn how to pee standing up when he was a child.
In his new book, Pageboy: A Memoir, the 34-year-old also talked about moving to Toronto at 16 to pursue his acting career, while also experiencing intense discomfort about his body.
Recounting his early years as a child, he explained that he didn't consider himself a girl while growing up.
At 4-years-old, Page said that he would try to urinate whist standing.
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He wrote: "I would press on my vagina, holding it, pinching and squeezing it, hoping I could aim.”
Page noted that throwing himself into acting was a means to 'feel things' through his characters in a candid interview with The Guardian.
He said: "There was an element of escape. You're going to a place where it's your job to feel and connect as much as possible, and we live in a world that encourages us on some level not to.”
"I was feeling things through other characters without permitting myself to do so in my life.”
At 26, he publicly announced to the world that he was gay in 2014, before coming out as a transgender man in 2020.
Page has spoken out about his experiences of sexual harassment, and in his book, he revealed that a famous actor once threatened to assault him.
In the chapter entitled 'Famous A**hole at Party', Page writes that he was at a birthday party in Los Angeles in 2014 when he was approached by the famous star.
He says the star, who is described as an ‘acquaintance’, told him: “You aren’t gay. That doesn’t exist. You are just afraid of men.”
The unnamed actor then threatened: “I’m going to f**k you to make you realize you aren’t gay.”
Page says the pair ran into each other at the gym a few days later, when the actor told him he ‘didn’t have a problem’ with gay people, to which Page replied: “I think you might.”
The Umbrella Academy star told People magazine: "I've had some version of that happen many times throughout my life.
"A lot of queer and trans people deal with it incessantly. These moments that we often like don't talk about or we're supposed to just brush off, when actually it's very awful.
"I put that story in the book because it’s about highlighting the reality, the s**t we deal with and what gets sent to us constantly, particularly in environments that are predominantly cis and heterosexual.
“How we navigate that world where you either have more extreme, overt moments like that. Or you have the more, like, subtle jokes.
"[In Hollywood] these are very powerful people. They're the ones choosing what stories are being told and creating content for people to see all around the world."
He went on to say that while he had opted not to name the actor, ‘he will hear about this and know it’s him’.
Topics: Elliot Page, Transgender, Celebrity, LGBTQ, News, US News
Britt Jones