Elliot Page Part 2 — Connecting the Dots
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While you read this, please sometimes pause and consider what latitude you lend me given the gender I’ve identified myself as (lesbian), versus what you would if I’d they’d myself up top or if I referred to myself a trans man.
Fast-forward to January of 2019, when I caught them wringing their hands on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Watching this now, I feel like I’m watching Kamala Harris: the politiciany hand gestures, the playing the crowd for indignation regarding oppression that people similar to them experience. Of course, Jussie Smollett had made the whole thing up. Not that it mattered. No apology was due as everyone knew that such a hate crime could have happened, even though in Page’s own letter addressing the reality that it didn’t, the only example of a recent gay hate crime in the US that Page could drum up was a drunk idiot at a hockey game two months prior who harassed and physically accosted two lesbians before being tackled to the ground by other nearby fans. If anything, this anecdote demonstrates that our society has progressed to the point where toxic masculinity is punished by a good pummeling.
An excerpt from E.P.’s letter:
On Colbert, Page had blamed our political leaders for the hatred and wouldn’t take it back just because the particular story that had set this sermon off had turned out to be a hoax.
So when a few days ago they came out again, this time notably early for a trans person after such a late-in-the-game gayness outing, I couldn’t help but feel some cynicism toward a chunk of their letter to us.
“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,” Page asserts.
Yes, that all “has been reported,” but the past year has also seen journalists brave enough to tell a truth many…
