Actor Elliot Page, of “Juno” fame, comes out as transgender

The Oscar nominated actor Elliot Page, know for his roles in Juno and The Umbrella Academy, has come out as transgender.

The actor (who was formerly referred to as Ellen Page) posted this announcement on twitter:

Hi friends, I want to share with you that I am trans, my pronouns are he/they and my name is Elliot. I feel lucky to be writing this. To be here. To have arrived at this place in my life.
I feel overwhelming gratitude for the incredible people who have supported me along this journey. I can’t begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self. I’ve been endlessly inspired by so many in the trans community.
Thank you for your courage, your generosity and ceaselessly working to make this world a more inclusive and compassionate place. I will offer whatever support I can and continue to strive for a more loving and equal society.
I also ask for patience. My joy is real, but it is also fragile. The truth is, despite feeling profoundly happy right now and knowing how much privilege I carry, I am also scared. I’m scared of the invasiveness, the hate, the “jokes” and of violence.
To be clear, I am not trying to dampen a moment that is joyous and one that I celebrate, but I want to address the full picture. The statistics are staggering. The discrimination towards trans people is rife, insidious and cruel, resulting in horrific consequences. In 2020 alone it has been reported that at least 40 transgender people have been murdered, the majority of which were Black and Latinx trans women.
To the political leaders who work to criminalize trans health care and deny our right to exist and to all of those with a massive platform who continue to spew hostility towards the trans community: you have blood on your hands.
You unleash a fury of vile and demeaning rage that lands on the shoulders of the trans community, a community in which 40% of trans adults report attempting suicide. Enough is enough. You aren’t being “cancelled,” you are hurting people. I am one of those people and we won’t be silent in the face of your attacks.
I love that I am trans. And I love that I am queer. And the more I hold myself close and fully embrace who I am, the more I dream, the more my heart grows and the more I thrive. To all trans people who deal with harassment, self-loathing, abuse and the threat of violence every day: I see you, I love you and I will do everything I can to change this world for the better.
Thank you for reading this. All my love, Elliot

UPDATE DECEMBER 2:

Elliot Page will continue to play the role of Vanya Hargreeves in “The Umbrella Academy.” Netflix is in the process of updating Page’s name in the metadata across all titles he is involved with, Variety reports.

Conversion therapy stopped him from transitioning for decades

Let me make this clear from the very beginning: Conversion therapy does not work.

As far as transgender people go: If you have consistently experienced a misalignment between your assigned gender and you experienced gender over a longer period of time, you can be confident that that identity is an unavoidable and essential part of who you are. It cannot be removed. The same applies to sexual orientation.

They are not helping

In spite of this you will find parents and partners and other “friends” and “peers” who are so afraid of the stigma attached to being trans or gay that they are willing to do anything to “help” people become cis or straight.

Make no mistake about it: They are mostly doing this to help themselves, not you. They fear the social exclusion and embarrassment that they think will follow from having a queer family member.

Alternatively: The gender binary is such an essential part of their world view and tribal identity that they do not dare question it. This applies, for instance, to “gender critical” TERFs and religious fanatics.

To the extent there is an ounce of good will here, it is often based on the horrible logical error that it is better to suffer in the closet than to live your real life out in the open.

In this day and age that is rarely true, and the transphobia and homophobia that drive conversion therapy supporters only make life worse for all LGBTQA people.

Fight for your life!

This means that if anyone tries to get you to undergo conversion therapy, do everything you can to stop them. You may be fighting for your life. Literally!

Seek out real friends, Find a pro-queer therapists. Contact LGBTQA organizations in your neighborhood. Do everything you can, because conversion therapy is true evil.

How Jules was forced into conversion therapy

In an article over at Xtra Canadian trans man Jules Sherred tells a story about pressure to conform that is far too typical:

My parents never provided any clarity. I would get physically punished for any signs of gender nonconformity, so I didn’t feel safe asking them questions. As a young child, I became convinced that the lie my sister and I made up about me being intersex was true. I needed it to be, so that there would be some sort of “normal” explanation for the way I felt.

Leaving this dysfunctional family he lived through a period of homelessness, experiencing sexual assault. He was offered foster care on the condition that he underwent regular therapy.

Every few weeks, my therapist would ask me how I was feeling about my body, and I’d have to admit I still felt dysphoric. When I did, he would guilt me, questioning why I let myself continue to be so misogynistic. I felt like I was failing. I so deeply wanted to please the adults in my life, but I couldn’t. The more I “failed,” the more depressed I got. What was so deeply broken inside me that I couldn’t accept myself? What was I doing wrong?

It was the “therapist” who was wrong. Jues continues:

I threw myself into an excruciating period of trying to dress and behave hyper-femininely. I had absolutely no self-worth. I ended up in abusive relationship after abusive relationship because I legitimately believed I deserved to be treated badly….
Society punishes trans women for displaying any sign of femininity and rates of violence against trans women are high. People will accept masculine traits in people assigned female at birth, but you have to identify as female. There’s a line. If you cross it and say, “I’m actually a man,” then the message is, “How dare you try to take a privilege that doesn’t belong to you?” I bought into it.

That cycle continued until 2011, when, at 35, he came out to his partner:

He was the first boyfriend to accept me, and his support and love helped me come out publicly and change my name and gender marker. Last year, we updated our marriage certificate with my proper gender marker, and our relationship was recognized legally as a same-sex marriage.

If it had not been for that transphobic “therapist”, Jules might have been accepted much earlier.

Many countries have banned conversion therapy. More are in the process of doing so. Good!

Map on conversion therapy bans from Wikipedia.

Top photo of Jules Sherred; Francesca Roh/Xtra

Jules on twitter.

Flowerkid, a young trans man, makes music that speaks to us all

“I want people to understand that there are always people out there who feel the same pain and that they are never alone,” Flowerkid, whose real name is Flynn Sant, told HuffPost.

“I hope to show people my everyday struggles and to let them know that there’s more to everyone than meets the eye.”

He hopes he’ll be able to “help others to understand what it is to be transgender” through music and, in doing so, create “a future which is more accepting of LGBTQ+ people.”

The new song, “miss andry” (embedded below) is about “distrust, hatred, acceptance and redemption.”

Lilo writes over at twitter:

Being masculine doesn’t make you bad. Wanting to be masculine doesn’t make you bad. Choosing to uphold toxic masculinity and the patriarchy is harmful. Don’t do that one. Masculinity isn’t inherently toxic.

This is important. The kind of parody hyper-masculinity we find expressed by bigots like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is not representative of masculinity in general.

You might argue that it is impossible to define what masculinity is without ending up with long lists of gender stereotypes. You would be right.

Still, the need and desire to express oneself as a man or as masculine is real, and this desire is often (but not always) anchored in a firm male gender identity.

That masculinity does not have to be aggressive, arrogant, violent prone, sexist and misogynistic. It can be compassionate, protecting, expressive, and chivalrous (just to mention a few adjectives that come to mind).

None of the trans men I know embody the ideals of toxic masculinity. Indeed, I would argue that most trans men can and will contribute to the refinement of a new non-toxic masculinity.

Anonymous asked

Hello i want to write an adult book with a trans characters but im afraid it might be transphobic if i do, so i wanted to ask do you think it would be alright to write sexual scenarios with trans male characters and if so, would it be better for me to write them after than had bottom surgery or before? Thank you, and i hope this does not sound to werid

crossdreamers answered

I answered a related question a few months ago – about cis persons writing about trans persons – and my comment from back then is relevant to your question as well:

Do you treat your transgender protagonist with respect? By this I do not mean that all trans characters have to be heroes. They do not. What I mean is that they should be presented as complete human beings instead of clichés of what cis people think trans people should be like.

Respect also includes the proper use of pronouns. If this is a story about a trans man, the voice of the author should make use of male pronouns throughout. If you have transphobic characters and antagonists, you can let them use the wrong pronouns and names, but only if that helps the reader understand the conditions your trans character lives under.

It would make sense to ask a trans person read your manuscript before you publish it, though, just to be sure that you have found the right balance.

I have heard some trans people argue that cis people should never write about trans people, because they cannot possibly know how trans people experience the world. This is true on one level. Still, I probably have more faith in good artists than they have.

After all, male writers have written good stories about women for a long time, as have female writers about men. It is possible to use empathy, sensibility, intelligence and research in order to imagine what it is like to be someone else.

And we definitely need some more positive transgender representation in books and movies.

Let me add here that all of this, in my opinion, should also apply to good erotic fiction, even though that kind of literature adds some complexity, especially the danger of fetishizing the transgender body.

Yeah, I know: Fetishes are a natural part of human sexuality and erotic literature would probably not survive without them. The point here, however, is that you should not reduce a trans person to an object of desire only. You should not turn him, her or them into a “thing” defined by the fact that they are trans.

Again: The point is that you should describe everyone as living, breathing, complex human beings with agency and and a personality of their own.

It is not transphobic to include trans people in stories and movies, no more than it is bad to include cis people. Including trans people may actually reduce the stigma attached to being trans, if you do it in the right way.

Whether the character have had surgery or not does not make much of a difference, if you ask me, unless – of course – the genitals becomes the key sexual element in the story. You should not go there unless you are trans yourself and you are confident that you know what you are doing.

By the way: Keep in mind that trans men present as much diversity as regards sexual preferences and personalities as cis men.

Illustration: Victor Tongdee

Australian transgender man gives birth to child with COVID-19

Alex Turner-Cohen, from News.com Australia, reports on Maaike van Eijk, a transgender man from Queensland, who made medical history twice.

“My partner birthed his baby while in quarantine, making medical history as the first birth to COVID-positive parents outside of China, and the first unassisted COVID birth in the world,” Maaike’s partner of two years, Holly Zwalf, says.

Maike is a 43 year old father-of-two, and has given birth to both kids.

However, for this pregnancy he was impregnated with the help of a friend.
His partner Ms Zwalf also has a child of her own from a previous relationship.
“We were always going to be the unconventional family in the birthing ward, but we never anticipated quite how much of a stir we would cause,” Ms Zwalf wrote.

Mr van Eijk was forced to stop taking hormones during the pregnancy and “chest feed” the baby while in quarantine away from his partner for a month, The Daily Mail reports.

More here!

Chaz Bono on J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia:”It just sucked”

Chaz Bono, trans man (and son of Cher, in case you did not know that), has been interviewed by the British podcast A Gay and A Nongay.

They also talked about Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling’s decent into transphobia. Advocate reports:

“When the person who writes your favorite series of books about oppressed people decides to start oppressing you, it’s very strange. It doesn’t make any sense,” the American Horror Story star said. “It’s hard to wrap your head around. On a personal note, it just sucked. Politically, it’s dangerous because I don’t think people realize that she’s just regurgitating the same things that people are saying about us, that have been debunked for 30 years. It’s just wrapped up in a new package with a zillion Twitter followers.”

He says he is still trying to wrap his head around “this idea of white privileged feminists that think somehow transgender women are a threat to their rights, their existence.”

He is right. It is insane, but it seems that irrational projections of undigested prejudice and fear can be found in all groups, also among people who call themselves feminists (but who aren’t really). I guess hating others makes it easier for them to forget what they hate about themselves.

TERFs like Rowling are not only invalidating trans women. They are also invalidating trans men, arguing that they are misguided women.

Bon replies:

“You just gotta keep trying to fight it and have people tell their stories so hopefully people can understand what the reality is. They’re trying to address a problem that doesn’t exist, this idea of female spaces. They’re looking at transgender women like their men. They’re looking at transgender men like they’re women. We’re not. I am a man. Transgender women are women. Look at them that way. Listen to our stories. Get to know us. Anybody who’s around me for two seconds will know that I’m a man. There’s nothing female about me.”

“I’m not a lesbian. I never fit in,” he says. “I tried for 30 years, then it took me about 10 years to get the courage to actually be who I am.”

People don’t seem to understand that even if you come to it later in life, or figuring it out, trans people are trans people. I was never a lesbian, nor was I ever a woman. I was always transgender. I took time to figure it out. Now we see people figuring it out much earlier because they’re able to see it. There are people out there they can look at and say, ‘That’s me.’”

More here.

Photo: Gaga Skidmore

‘Tell Me Why’ is the first blockbuster game to feature a playable trans character

CNN reports on the new Xbox/Windows game Tell Me Why, which has a transgender man as a playable character:

The narrative-based game comes from from Xbox Game Studios and Dontnod, developers of the hit series “Life is Strange.” “Tell Me Why” is about twins who can see visions of the past.
Tyler Ronan is the first trans character from a major studio. And it follows the recent release of “The Last of Us Part II, which features a queer protagonist who smashes zombies and hunts for revenge.
"As the first playable transgender protagonist in a major studio release, Tyler is an important step forward for representation in gaming,” said Nick Adams, GLAAD’s director of Transgender Representation, in an email, “I hope that the care and thoughtfulness that Dontnod and Xbox put into creating Tyler’s story will show that writing fully realized trans characters is good for both storytelling and culture overall.”

There is an interesting discussion about this game over in the r/transgender subreddit.

The Rock Praises Trans Titan Games Athlete Mitch Harrison: “You Are Breaking Barriers”

Men’s Health reports:

Mitch Harrison is a 31-year-old security guard and former college basketball star from Kenai, Alaska. He’s also transgender, and his appearance on The Titan Games marked his first opportunity to come out as a trans athlete.

The Titan Games is an American reality sports series hosted by Dwayne Johnson (”The Rock”), featuring people from across America competing in endurance-based mental and physical challenges. The fact that The Rock includes a trans man in the series says a lot about his view on trans matters.

Raised in what he describes in his Titan Games intro as a “very, very conservative” family, Harrison says he struggled with the decision to transition: “Choosing the gender transition would have helped me be happier, but I knew that it was going to create a lot of conflict, a lot of turmoil.” The turning point, he said, was finding a supportive partner in his wife, who encouraged him to do it. “Most of immediate family does not speak to me,” Harrison said. “They’re missing out on such a better version of me than they ever knew.”
When he introduced Harrison’s showdown against Exodus Rogers in the “Over the Edge” challenge, The Rock talked about the impact Harrison would have on viewers: “Mitch, man, you are breaking barriers and showing people how to live their truth.”

See the video here:

Trans men are men!

Another transgender gem from tiktok.