Critics adored her. “Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary,” enthused Roger Ebert. “I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.” Juno won her an Oscar nomination for best actress. But it wasn’t craft alone that made Page so appealing. It was also something about her as a person — as a girl. In a period when the dominant mode of female celebrity was the “trainwreck”, Page was different. She was big-eyed and skinny, but she didn’t party. She didn’t cycle through boyfriends. She didn’t drink-drive. You never, ever saw her falling out of a club — or out of her clothes. 

“If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends,” wrote Helen Pidd. “Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong).”

Page’s peers were quizzed about their sex lives and their scandals. Page talked about politics and feminism. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools,” she told Pidd. “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?”

Still, Page wasn’t unscathed by the gossip machine. The very fact that she didn’t date, and did dress like a tomboy, raised a whole other set of questions: was she (whisper it) a lesbian? “Is Juno a you know?” asked an article in the Village Voice. Ellen DeGeneres had successfully negotiated coming out in 1997, but she’d done so as the beloved lead of a hit sitcom. Page was only just getting established, and a preference for flannel shirts was hardly compatible with the part of the rising starlet.

It took till 2014 — when Page was 26 — for her to declare her sexuality publicly. “I am tired of lying by omission,” she said in a speech to the Human Rights Congress. The scrutiny of her perceived failure at femininity had taken a toll. She told the audience that a website had recently run photos of her in sweatpants, with the question: “Why does this petite beauty insist on dressing like a massive man?” With audible exasperation, she delivered her answer: “Because I like to be comfortable.”

Page seemed, for a while, happy. She wore suits on the red carpet: an adorable baby butch. She got married to choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. And then, in 2020, Page came out again — this time as transgender. “Dressing like a man” had never merely been about comfort, apparently: it had been about actually being a man. 

Page had top surgery — a double mastectomy. In an interview with Time, Page called this “not only life-changing but lifesaving”, and described it as a remedy to the “total hell” of puberty. The public reaction was widely supportive: Netflix immediately announced that it would update the credits on The Umbrella Academy, in which Page stars, to reflect Page’s chosen name. Ellen Page disappeared. Elliot Page emerged instead.

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The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

In the Time interview, Page said that the journey to identifying as trans started with reading trans people’s memoirs, in particular Becoming a Man by P. Carl. Through identifying with Carl, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.” So it makes sense that Page has now contributed his own volume to the genre — Pageboy, released for this Pride month. “An ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy,” according to the flyleaf. 

But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.

In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.

Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.

Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat. 

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By Hadley Freeman

But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all. 

As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.

But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”

Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.

Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

Trauma is a commonplace of trans memoir, or rather, of trans men’s memoirs. Trans women’s memoirs are, for the most part, exuberant narratives of self-actualisation (albeit usually with some background homophobia, similar to Page’s mother’s). Trans men’s memoirs are often wrenching accounts of rape and self-harm, climaxing in irreversible body modification. Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive features a harrowing description of the author as a 10-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by her father (the abuse started when McBee was four). It initiated a “split” between self and body. “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden,” writes McBee, who nonetheless separates his masculine identification from the depersonalisation caused by the abuse. 

Carl (in the book that inspired Page) also relates being sexually assaulted at the age of 11 or 12, also by his father: “You’re becoming a woman. Your breasts are beginning to show. I like watching you change,” Carl recalls him saying. Later, the first stage in Carl’s transition is a double mastectomy. “I feel a fiery rage … for what men did to me,” Carl writes, before adding: “I feel so much joy living in a man’s body.”

For Page, these experiences of rejection and violation are incorporated into a story of latent maleness — or rather, of boyness. As the title suggests, there is little interest in being seen as an adult male. Even his new name, Elliot, is inspired by the boy hero of Spielberg’s E.T. Ceasing to be a woman confers a sort of immunity to time. Carl, who transitions in midlife, is spurred to take action by impending menopause: “I knew menopause, becoming an older woman, would kill me, that menopause would shove my femaleness in my face in a way that would make me too sick to live.”

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In retrospect, the Noughties insistence that Page was different to the other girls could be seen as an excuse to mistreat her peers: by casting them as sluts in contrast to Page’s “good girl” figure, the media could suggest that they deserved what they got. Yet Page received much the same abuse; and her reaction was not entirely different. Rather than responding with public self-destruction, Page redoubled a private war against her own body — now his body. Britney shaved her head; Page removed her breasts; both cut away what gave them away as female. 

It feels a long, sad distance from the woman who once protested that she was entitled to wear whatever made her “comfortable”; longer still from the girl who, back during promo for Juno, spoke up for a woman’s right to be at the centre of her own story. In Pageboy, Page’s girl-self seems passive and tragic: a sleeping beauty, held in suspended animation, afraid to grow up, and kissed without her consent. (There is, I suspect, some retconning here. Achieving a career such as Page’s takes considerable determination, and Page does not suggest this was driven by parental ambition. Yet Page never addresses where this drive to act comes from, or attributes his professional success to more than luck.)

As a “trangender guy”, Page can be Aladdin: the main character, capable of making decisions that affect reality. No more pressure to wear the dress or play the princess. But the fairytale Pageboy reminds me of most of all is the Little Mermaid. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, the mermaid fails to meet the condition of her womanhood. Her suffering ends when she is transformed into one of “the daughters of the air”; finally incorporeal, she makes an impossible, fantastical escape from her betraying body.

On the surface, Pageboy is a euphoric account of Page “finding himself”: the model narrative of the trans memoir. The happy ending is Page waking up in a hospital bed, breastless. Between the lines, though, there’s another story, of a self-hating girl who engineers a flit from femininity. It’s obligatory now to be shocked by the cruelty of Noughties culture. When, I wonder, will we recognise the even greater cruelty of inviting women and girls to barter their body parts for self-determination?

*

Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties is available to pre-order.

The sight of Ellen DeGeneres and George W. Bush sitting together in the owner’s box at a Dallas Cowboys game was so unexpected, and caused such fierce debate across Hollywood, that the comedian felt she had to come out and defend herself. Opinion was viciously divided — and loud. Many of DeGeneres’ famous colleagues supported her cross-political companionship, while others condemned any association with Bush as beyond the pale.

Such was the fascination with this pairing, that a scene that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a skit on a late night comedy show inspired the final question posed to Democratic presidential candidates during the last debate.

Laura & George Bush sitting with Ellen Degeneres and Portia de Rossi is not something I expected to see at an NFL game pic.twitter.com/AbWbhXd3RC

— CJ Fogler account may or may not be notable (@cjzero) October 6, 2019

This was a pivotal moment in President Bush’s long march back into the public consciousness. And it provides an opportunity to reassess one of the most polarising leaders in US history; he’s particularly useful at the moment, as he serves as a lens through which to view the current political divide in the United States.

George W. Bush’s presidency was divisive before it even started: he won the 2000 election, despite losing the popular vote due to the idiosyncrasies of the American Electoral College (sound familiar?) and a controversial Supreme Court decision over “hanging chads” (kids, look it up) in Florida. He was, in the eyes of many, illegitimate.

Support may then have soared at home and abroad in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the early days of the War in Afghanistan. But his administration squandered all that goodwill with their adventures in Iraq (Bush found an eager ally in Tony Blair, who suffered a similar reputational collapse) and bullying foreign policy.

As the political baggage of two increasingly unpopular wars was compounded by the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, Bush finally united Americans — in their disapproval of his performance. His approval rating bottomed out at 22% as he left office, retired as the least popular president in US history and arguably the most hated man in America.

But, over time, a curious thing happened. He recovered. To the extent that, by January 2018, a CNN opinion poll showed that Bush’s approval rating had nearly tripled from his end-of-term low, climbing to 61% (just a bit below Barack Obama’s rating at the time).

This means that about half of those who disapproved of him by the end of his presidency have turned their opinions around.  And this bifurcation is not as simple as the Republican/Democrat divide; in fact, by 2017, even a slim majority of Democrats held favourable opinions of Bush.

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So what’s caused the Bush revival? What is this middle ground hankering for?  I suspect, to an extent it is the “absence makes the heart grow fonder” effect. Bush has kept a pretty low profile since retiring, and a significant number of his public appearances have been disaster relief events or showcases of his newfound passion for painting amateur portraits of dogs, world leaders and veterans (somehow, this isn’t a late-night sketch either), not exactly the most offensive material.

Bush also made several public appearances during various periods of mourning, including at the memorial of his intra-party political foe John McCain and the funerals of his mother, Barbara, and father, George H.W. Bush, all of whom died last year. These were also occasions at which his other unlikely but very real friendship — with former First Lady Michelle Obama — became obvious. And surely anyone who’s friends with Mrs Obama must have something good going for them.

It also helps that there is obviously no love lost between Donald Trump and the Bush family. Trump basically bullied Jeb Bush out of the presidential race in 2016, and destroyed the TV career of Bush cousin Billy with his vulgar conversation with the then-host of Access Hollywood. The Bushes have given Trump the cold shoulder ever since.

Sure, President Trump has set a low bar against which any ex-president can stand favourably — using military aid to Ukraine for political purposes, for example, and telling mostly American-born minority congresswomen to “go back” to their countries to name only two controversies to date. But there’s a more specific quality that “W” possessed which has been lacking in American politics in recent years: sincerity.

Throughout his political career, Bush presented himself as an honest straight shooter: even if you didn’t agree with him, you knew where he stood. This attitude largely came from his Evangelical faith, which drove many of his policies and provided him with a fairly unflappable base. That base remains loyal. You could sense it when Donald Trump attacked the Iraq War as part of a defence of his Middle East policy during a recent speech at the Value Voters Summit in Washington DC; the previously enthusiastic Evangelical crowd grew noticeably quiet.

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Will the Evangelicals dump Trump?

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To the delight of Bush’s Evangelical supporters — and the horror of liberals and libertarians dedicated to the strict separation of church and state — President Bush wore his faith on his sleeve. The Evangelical label has, of late, become more of a political term than a religious tag, signifying a certain brand of American conservativism, Bush’s faith went beyond the political. Both Bush and his wife, Laura, publicly credited his conversion (with an assist from legendary preacher Billy Graham) with helping him end his drinking and hard-partying ways at the age of 40, paving the way for his political career.

Bush’s policies were inextricably linked to his faith. He labeled his approach “compassionate conservatism”, and while other Republicans have cynically abused this slogan, Bush seemed to genuinely value both halves of it.

He was surely conservative, a son of the Religious Right that had brought Ronald Reagan and Bush’s own father into the White House. The George W. Bush administration had hardline approaches to abortion and same-sex marriage. It banned stem cell research, and channeled money to religious groups through its Faith-Based Initiatives program.

But Bush also expanded Medicare access, proposed immigration reform that included a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, and increased aide to sub-Saharan Africa. These policies may be anathema to the current Republican leadership — but they make sense under a genuine commitment to the compassion that Bush claimed. To moderate Republicans today, approval for Bush represents nostalgia for a version of conservatism that could credibly, even proudly proclaim to have the best interests of the country and the world at heart.

On the other side of the political fence, moderate Democrats remember that even when there were sharp policy disagreements between the Bush administration and those on the Left, few people (Kanye West aside) could accuse him of basing his policies on animosity towards any groups of Americans.

Educators and reformers may have opposed Bush’s No Child Left Behind education reforms, but it was clear that he genuinely sought to combat “the soft bigotry of low expectations” regarding America’s worst-performing public schools. His anti-abortion stances and opposition to marriage equality may have been driven by religion, but they weren’t fueled by misogyny or homophobia; Bush did not resort to trotting out the “some of my best friends are…” defence for his policies, but his wife, Laura, apparently helped soften his political stance on same-sex marriage out of respect for their same-sex couple friends (whom, we now know, include Ellen and her wife, actress Portia DeRossi).

In contrast, Donald Trump has presented a presidency rife with prejudices and aspersions against various groups, seemingly unguided by any larger sense of purpose or philosophy (and some would say completely unguided by morality more generally). And he is unchallenged by any Republicans of principle. They have either retired (like former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan) or have decided that having a Republican in the White House with a rabid voter base was worth the price of swallowing their own principles (see Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and even Majority Leader Mitch McConnell).

Outside of Evangelicals, whose fervent (but possibly wavering) support for Trump has not displaced their allegiance to Bush, the Trump wing of the party sees Bush as part of the Right-wing establishment that Trump overpowered during the 2016 Republican primaries. The anti-Bush Trump supporters include white nationalists, previously fringe elements of the conservative movement who have been courted by Trump but thoroughly condemned by the Bush family.

This cohort sees the Iraq War, in particular, as the albatross around Bush’s neck. While most Republicans remain supportive of the decision to go into Iraq, the Trump wing considers it to have been a colossal waste of lives and money. They have singled out this particular military adventure as the source of America’s current open-ended commitments in the region and its “never-ending wars” — despite the fact that America has been deeply embroiled in the Middle East for decades. And while Bush was criticised at the time for going to war war really being over oil, Trump himself has recently castigated Bush for not actually seizing the oil to America’s profit; in other words, they fault Bush for not actually measuring up to the crude caricature they painted.

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On the other extreme, the current crop of Democratic challengers are pulling to the Left with ever-increasingly liberal policies that seem at times to be more about virtue signalling than practical visions for the country. (I can’t help but think that the voter desire for political sincerity, which Bush so appealed to, is why Bernie Sanders, the candidate who was socialist decades before it was cool, remains a viable force, even as younger and healthier candidates have vied for his position on the Left.)

For these resolute Bush detractors on the Left, the Iraq War was not only a mistake but a crime. Bush and his advisors (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others) were not straight shooters or patriots, but cynical opportunists who concocted a false story of Weapons of Mass Destruction to launch an invasion in order to gain access to Iraq’s oil reserves. “Bush lied, people died”.

Beyond lingering feelings about the Iraq War, the renewed animosity toward Bush among progressives has been fed by two trends currently occupying the Left: cancel culture and anti-wealth sentiment. The criticisms lobbed at Ellen DeGeneres by some of her Hollywood colleagues centre around this idea that President Bush should be regarded as a war criminal, and absent some kind of legal accountability, should at least be shunned from public life. Both Tim Robbins and Avengers actor Mark Ruffalo, have chided the comedian for her personal choices.

Her friendship has also been used to further the Left’s obsession with class antagonisms. For these progressives, the fact that a lesbian, liberal talk-show host could pal around with a staunch religious conservative who opposed not just same-sex marriage but many of DeGeneres’ values, well, it just goes to show that wealth trumps everything else in American politics.

Ellen and W may be divided by ideologies and beliefs, the narrative goes, but they are nonetheless joined together in a plutocracy that is out of touch if not actively hostile towards average Americans. DeGeneres herself has joked about her lifestyle in the ironically-titled standup special Relatable, but now she and George W. Bush are being cast as members of an ultra-elite who need to be put in check for the good of the country.

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It is, I believe, a mistake to think the American public is poised to demonise wealth. In any case, even though Bush is rich, he has not been one to particularly flaunt that wealth (tax cuts during his presidency notwithstanding). And furthermore, the fact that Iraq did emerge with its own elected government, no matter how dysfunctional, and with control of its own oil fields somewhat blunts the worst of their condemnations of the war as a complete sham or failure.

Many Democrats, meanwhile, are watching their party leaders enact increasingly stringent purity tests and an unwillingness for dialogue, much less forgiveness, for those who violate progressive norms or even associate with violators. These standards are, for many, impossible to keep, counterproductive to real progress, and represent the replacement of practical politics with disingenuous virtue signalling.

Essentially, in an era when Trump has taken hold of the reins of Republicanism, and his most prominent critics within the party have died, retired or capitulated, the public rehabilitation of Bush represents a nostalgia for a party that was both conservative and principled.

Compared to current insincerity, nihilism or extremism dominating politics in the United States, many Americans find themselves longing for the days of a true believer. For them, it was refreshing to see a conservative Christian and a gay Hollywood liberal daring to be seen talking to one another, a scene that increasingly feels like a comedy sketch because it is so far removed from real politics today.