Mick Hartley

Brendan O'Neill notes the alarming correspondence between transman Ellen Page's horrified repudation of her womanhood, and the medieval women saints who purged their bodies to remove the sins of female flesh and get nearer to God:

The female saints of the medieval era were dab hands at self-mutilation. St Jeanne de Valois pushed silver nails into her breasts. St Margaret Mary Alacoque cut her chest with a knife and injured it with fire. St Angela of Foligno drank water that had been polluted by cuts of flesh from a leper. The young woman who longed for a more perfect relationship with Christ would ‘cut off her hair, scourge her face and wear coarse rags’, wrote historian Rudolph Bell in his classic study, Holy Anorexia. She would stop eating, walk about with sharp stones in her shoes, beat herself with her own fists. All so that she might become ‘more beautiful in God’s eyes’.

The chief target of these holy hysterics’ self-mortification was their own womanhood. They feared and detested the arrival of sexual maturity. They shaved their heads, squashed their breasts beneath ill-fitting hairshirts, scalded their vaginas with pork fat. They were determined to become, in the title of Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg’s 1998 book on female sanctity in the pre-modern era, Forgetful of Their Sex. Their ‘rigorous repudiation of their own sexuality’ had one aim, writes Schulenburg – to push them towards ‘perfect manhood’.

You're seeing the connection?

I couldn’t help thinking of these self-punishing brides of Christ as I read Elliot Page’s disturbing autobiography, Pageboy. Once Ellen, an actress well known for her turns in Juno, Inception and numerous other movies, Elliot Page of course seems starkly different to yesteryear’s self-flagellating seekers after Christ. Yes, Page has also ‘amputated from nature and spirit what made them female’ – including her breasts – but she is not ‘religious at all’, she says in passing in her life story of transing from female to male. And yet the self-loathing and self-harm of the crazed saints of the early Church find an eerie echo in this tome, on nearly every page. It’s chilling, and we need to talk about it.

Like those women, Elliot writes of her dread of womanhood. She speaks of female physiology with a contempt that would be damned as misogyny if it came from a man. Her first period horrifies her: ‘That smell of metallic blood, [like] a robot leaking.’ Puberty, and in particular the growth of her breasts, sickens her. ‘I’d forever feel this disgust, and I punished my body for it’, she writes. She does everything she can to conceal her breasts – no, not beneath a nail-studded hairshirt, like our poor saints, but under ‘oversized concealing t-shirts’. And also through contorting her body: ‘My posture began to fold, shoulders caving in.’ ‘The unbearable weight of… self-disgust’ is how she describes her emotional response to turning from a tomboy who was often mistaken for an actual boy into a woman. She no longer felt ‘present in my flesh’. Instead, she felt a ‘compulsion to tear apart my flesh, a sort of scolding’ (my emphasis)….

Distressingly, like the old delirious devotees of Christ, Page self-flagellates. She beats herself. ‘Hard and sharp, I struck myself with my knuckles… WHAM! Again. And again. Harder. Sharper. I pummeled my face, pounding next to my right eye.’ All this self-violence isn’t really her, she says – it’s ‘some other force’ working to ‘knock [her] out’. What is this madness? It is after this act of self-mortification, this physical enactment of her earlier desire to ‘tear apart my flesh’, that she has a vision of what needs to be done: she must become male. She will cease to be a woman and will be called a man.

This is the final act of Elliot Page’s secular mortification, of her punishment of the flesh for its sin of femaleness – she moves towards manhood. Here, the connection between this modern celebrity’s life story and the lives of long-dead female saints is as clear as it is disconcerting. Like them, Page ‘rigorously repudiates’ her sex and aspires to ‘perfect manhood’. No, she does not drive silver nails into her breasts, as St Jeanne de Valois did as part of her striving for maleness-cum-godliness. Instead, she has her breasts removed. I know the chapter on her double mastectomy – ‘top surgery’, as it is euphemistically called – is meant to make us feel warm and fuzzy. But to me it reads like pure tragedy.

And Ellen Page is just the big-name tip of an iceberg,  with thousands of young girls, horrified by puberty and gripped by the social contagion of gender dysphoria, persuaded that the answer must lie in mutilation, and repudiation of their womanhood.

There's also a grim parallel between the old saints' aim of transcendence and communion with God, and the supposed "trans joy" that Ellen Page now proclaims.