Elliot Page’s friends not shocked by transition

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Elliot Page’s friends were not shocked by his transition.

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The 36-year-old actor announced in 2020 that he is transgender but revealed that his close friends were not surprised as it is something he had talked about for years.

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“For people super-close to me it was definitely not shocking,” he told The Guardian newspaper. “I was hanging out with a friend the other day, and they were telling me something I said when I was 27 and we were working together. I saw just how much I had been talking about it. For years! And then proceeding to talk myself out of it.

“It came mostly from internalized shame, internalized transphobia. I was overwhelmed by the fact that I was a known actor, and what is that going to mean? I was trying to wrap my head around it.

“But before coming out as queer in 2014, I’d already made the decision that living my life, to me, was going to be more important than being in movies. I was like: ‘What am I doing? This is my one chance to be alive; like, this just isn’t f— worth it. It’s just not.’ So I thought less about the work and more about what does it mean to transition publicly and felt overwhelmed by it. It just kept coming up. It was not letting go.”

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And Page revealed he has felt a great deal of “body euphoria” since transitioning.

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“To be honest, I experience it every single day when I wake up in the morning,” he said. “When I say that I was always consumed by discomfort, I mean it. So the fact that I get up in the morning and get out of bed and stretch like this [he extends his arms to their full length] – that to me is body euphoria.

“Working out this morning without my shirt on, and just being sweaty and jumping in the shower, just being able to be present in my body and the joy of it … When I say I never thought I’d feel this way I really, really mean that. I never thought I would just feel: ‘Oh here I am and I’m going about my day.’ So for me body euphoria is the most obvious stuff – getting out of the shower, seeing myself in the mirror, walking down the street with my shoulders back and just feeling like I can engage with the world in a present way.”