It was necessary, he says, to meet his deadline, turning in 5,000 words to his editor, Bryn Clark, every Wednesday.Ĭlark, an executive editor at Flatiron Books, had been chasing a book by Page since 2019. But he forced himself to stick to a strict routine. Hoisted his body onto the spike of his mother’s bed frame in an effort to impale himself. When he started acting as a teenager, he once had to shave his head for a role his grandmother responded to the look by asking Page’s father what he would do if his daughter was a “dyke.”Īt 16, Page’s dysphoria began manifesting in self-destructive behavior. His mother, a minister’s daughter, told her son that homosexuality didn’t exist. When he started to explore the idea that he might be gay, his family was not accepting. He didn’t even learn the word until he was a senior in high school. It was crystal clear to me.”īut growing up in Halifax in the ’90s, Page had no examples of what it meant to be transgender. “I was just in my own world as the boy that I was. “That private play let me experience a gender euphoria, because I wasn’t being seen by anyone else,” he says. In the imaginary love letters he wrote to a fake girlfriend, signed, “Love, Jason.” At age 6, asking his mom if he could be a boy.Īs a kid, he hid out in his room playing with Batman and Robin action figures and Barbies from Happy Meals whose hair he had chopped off.
Since age 4, when in the bathroom at his YMCA preschool he tried to pee while standing up. But there’s also this worry, he says, that the glossy pictures “allow people to go, ‘Oh, well, look. Because representation makes a difference. When asked to pose for a magazine cover under a headline about his “euphoria,” Page wants to take the opportunity. The constant reminder that the vast majority of trans people face a reality drastically different from his own. Raw, harrowing and often heartbreaking to read, it comes out this week.īut there has also been this weight. He even decided to write a book of his own, “Pageboy,” a memoir in which he reckons with his journey to self-acceptance. His mind clear of distressing thoughts, he regained his ability to focus while reading. Casting directors reached out in droves, saying they’d love to work with him. He presented at the Oscars in his outfit of choice, a tuxedo. In his new body, which he shared for the first time online, grinning in a pair of swim trunks.
Within a span of a few months, he had become the most famous transgender man in the world.Īnd there was so much joy.
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