It was some five years ago that actress Ellen Page removed her healthy breasts and announced on social media that she was ‘transitioning’ and changing her name. “I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot,” she wrote.
Page, who was born female, rose to fame playing the titular character in the 2007 hit Juno about a 16-year-old student who finds herself pregnant and chooses to give the child up for adoption. She was at the center of casting controversy earlier this spring after rumors began to swirl that she could be playing Greek hero Achilles in Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated adaption of The Odyssey.
That casting has not been confirmed, but Page is once again making headlines – this time for claiming she has cracked the code on… “healthy masculinity.”
Page on ‘Healthy’ Masculinity
As part of a media tour to promote a documentary she executive produced and narrated about “gender and sexuality in the animal world,” Page sat down with comedian Ilana Glazer on her It’s Open podcast where the topic of masculinity came up.
“What healthy masculinity to me is, or even just something I’ve felt like transitioning, is like leaning away from whenever there is some sort of impulse or expectation you’ve put on yourself to like shut down or conform in a way that usually feels like… I am closing off,” Page claimed.
As she explained, men are generally closed off and more reluctant to share their feelings. “I remember kind of being like, ‘Oh Elliot, maybe you should, you know, talk with your hands a little faster,'” Page recalled.
Page said that she smiles all the time in photos since transitioning and called out other men for not doing the same. “I’ll be taking [photos and]… dude’s like, ‘Hey, are you Victor from Umbrella Academy,'” she noted. “You know, and we’re doing a photo together and he’s very [makes a stoic face] and I’m very [smiles] and having that moment where I’m like, ‘Oh, should I also not? Like, should I also be [closed off]? And it’s just like, what the fuck, Elliot?”
In Page’s view, recognizing natural male inclinations makes her “part of the problem.”
“To me, healthy masculinity would be, well, you know what? Healthiness for anyone to just, you know, love themselves; be able to care for themselves; ideally get rest when they can, you know, like, just the practical basic — drink water, like, eat a banana,” the 39 year old said.
What’s more? “Healthy masculinity could just mean a really good cry,” Page added.
Regressive Progressives
While Page may feel like – after five years of pretending to be a man – she is an authority on the subject, the backlash was swift. On Monday’s edition of The Megyn Kelly Show, Megyn attempted to follow her logic.
“So, it’s now toxically male to not gesticulate, talk with your hands a lot, to not overshare, to be a dignified, stoic man – that’s toxic,” Megyn posited. “And Elliot will show all the rest of you actual men what it really means to be masculine… If you just regurgitate every feeling and gesticulate with your hands while doing it – Gavin Newsom style – you might say that’s the good kind of masculinity like Elliot lives.”
Many noticed that the “healthy masculinity” Page spoke of sounded a lot more like good ol’ fashioned femininity, and Megyn’s guest, Glenn Greenwald, was inclined to agree.
“That discourse, everything I heard Elliot Page say, codes is very female to me, which is so ironic,” he said. “No men I know think that way or talk that way. Here she is saying, ‘I’m a man,’ and it sounds like… a standard liberal woman in New York on the Upper West Side in therapy and intent on trying to understand her own shyness or inhibitions or whatever.”
In Greenwald’s view, the type of masculinity and gender norms Page talks about is as stereotypical as they come. “They are imposing these extremely rigid gender roles that I thought we had moved past to the point that now, if some celebrity parent looks at their six year old who was born a girl but likes sports, they immediately say, ‘Oh, you’re not a girl, you’re a boy,'” he explained. “It’s such a regressive form of looking at gender dressed up as this very progressive and radical movement, and you see that so manifest in the way that Elliot Page is lecturing us about what it means to be a man.”
That is why he believes this latest form of LGBTQ+ activism is doing more harm than good. “There are so many things that have been bothering me about this new iteration of what is now called the LGBTQ and all those other acronyms, and one of the things that bothers me the most is that we actually made progress, I think, in society where people weren’t as confined to gender roles,” he explained.
“To be a little girl didn’t mean you can’t play sports, or to be a boy started to mean that it was fine to have an interest in art or fashion… Women were allowed to be in the workplace; men could have more interest in raising kids,” Greenwald concluded. “These things kind of became fine, and so much of this discourse is so regressive.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Greenwald by tuning in to episode 1,339 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.