Boys Underwear
If you thumb through the underwear section of the Sears Catalogue, which doesn’t exist anymore, it becomes very clear that the people who design, manufacture, package, distribute, advertise, and retail foundational garments are trying to convince us of something about ourselves far beyond whatever practical means there are to wearing something under your blue jeans.
I’m referring now to the bottom parts of underwear, not the top parts. There are some engineering and practical aspects involved with the top parts of women’s underwear that go far beyond the scope of this discussion, which some women don’t need at all, and seem to be evenly divided between comfort and aesthetics. The practical parts can be pretty interesting engineering, but the aesthetic parts are entirely cultural constructs, and sometimes border on moral questions regarding what we intend women’s bodies for, far beyond moving women’s minds from one spot to another.
I support the notion that you should be able to choose the words you use to describe yourself, and other people should respect that. They are, after all, just words. That people should choose their own pronouns so bedevils some people provides me with a not-too-secret amusement. For the purposes of this paper, though, I’d like to use the pronouns of the characters in it to reflect what they were projecting at the moment. For all people, life is a journey. Some people travel farther than others just to show us what they were from the start.
The president of the United States wants to make June a second month devoted to veterans because he collects a great deal of political power and support every time he attacks the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Trans, Queer, plus community. Building one’s presidency on the hate of other Americans is beyond distressing to me. November is already devoted to veterans and their families. That the president didn’t know that when he began his attack on Pride Month should tell you something.
I thought about doing an omnibus Pride Month story, but I realized the story was beyond that. There are too many people I love, some here now, some gone for a while, who are impacted by these issues to make it be just one story.
Elliot Page first drew my attention when “she” was cast, at nineteen, as Kitty Pryde in the X-Men movies. I kept reading comics longer than a lot of my classmates. Kitty Pryde was invented by Chris Claremont and John Byrne; she was an outsider, a mutant, and the unofficially adopted kid sister of Wolverine. Besides looking very much like the original drawings of Shadowcat, Page projected the sort of wounded outsider with a secret aspect to the character, which was both truthful to the comic books and to Page “herself.”
The person we now know as Elliot Page next drew our attention for what we then saw as “her” acting when “she” had just turned twenty, and made a movie called “Juno,” about a sixteen-year-old girl who finds herself pregnant by a friend, plans to have an abortion, but then chooses not to. Page is a very small person with very young features, so they were able to play a sixteen-year-old effectively, even though “she” was twenty. I didn’t see Juno because I saw it as a film for another generation, and movies about sixteen-year-olds who might get pregnant made me nervous because I was trying to raise one.
Before turning thirty, Page released a photo of “herself” holding a placard that read “I wear boys’ underwear.” It was part of an art project where actors and other performers were supposed to reveal hidden parts of themselves, but because Page was young and unusually beautiful, her photograph was taken to be something flirtatious, ridiculously feminine, and appealing to men. “She” had already done a lingerie photoshoot and all the other things expected of a beautiful young “actress,” and, while there were rumors Page might be a lesbian, few people sought a deeper truth under that.
Page was involuntarily outed by “her” director during the filming of “X-Men: The Last Stand.” Because coming out can become such an essential part of a person’s identity, I’m of the opinion that they should control it, not people around them. That we consider “straight” as the base state creates problems, starting with the fact that it’s not true. Everyone exists on a spectrum of sexuality. Sometimes we pick a spot on it to identify ourselves, sometimes the spot is chosen for us.
That there is such a thing as female to male transgenderism is often overlooked by people who hate transgenderism. Women have been cutting their hair and wearing men’s clothing for centuries. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for cutting her hair and wearing men’s clothing. People who start with a baseline definition of female and then find themselves as male on the spectrum of gender and sexuality are often considered invisible because society doesn’t notice them.
Casey Parks, whom I first knew as a mohawk-wielding, very energetic young lesbian student, wrote a book called “Diary of a Missfit” about what she discovered about a female to male transgender person she dimly knew from her youth, but also told the story of how she discovered her own spot on the spectrum of gender and sexuality.
Because I don’t deal with loss and death very well, I hid myself away from the world for over ten years. When I emerged, I returned to the things I cared about the most: theater and writing. Ironically, just as I came back into the sunlight, Millsaps College announced that they were taking the Theater Department out of abeyance, and had hired one of Brent’s star students to run it.
One of the first new theater kids I met was introduced to me as Michael Montgomery, a man. Michael, I also knew from the Galloway choir. No one sat me down and explained what was happening with Michael. Most college students exhibit an air of vulnerability and flexibility, and to see it in Michael wasn’t surprising.
We often describe a person’s developing sexuality as a “voyage of discovery,” but often they already know where they want to be on the spectrum of sexuality and gender; they just don’t know how to make the world see it. Whatever was happening with Michael, he’d tell me about it if he wanted to; otherwise, I’d just sit back and watch what develops.
Telling a young person that you support them as they are can be very awkward for them, and even come off as condescending. Often, it’s best to just feel it and trust that they will pick up on it. Michael wasn’t just a theater kid; he was one of my theater kids, a fact that’s rarely discussed with them, but they figure it out sooner or later. I love them because Lance loved them, and Frank loved them, and Brent loved them, and now Sam loves them. They are a part of us.
It was very clear that Michael was transitioning from what to what would remain to be seen. A twenty-year-old is not entirely baked through yet. Seeing Michael now, he’s clearly just a dude, an artsy-fartsy dude, but they still count. Looking at much younger photos of Michael wearing dresses and making basic attempts at makeup, it's obvious that a journey was underway, but isn’t that always the case?
Saying he likes to wear boys’ underwear was Elliot Page trying to reveal something about himself to a world that saw him as a pretty girl product that might sell fashion magazines and lingerie. No one picked up on the message, other than that he might be a hot lipstick lesbian or bisexual like Madonna.
Although I might have just been projecting what I knew of Kitty Pryde onto Page, I felt like I could see there was some deeper movement going on there. I couldn’t see what it was as it hadn’t manifested yet.
Page played a second comic book character in Umbrella Academy, one of the early experiments by Netflix at having their own continuing series. One day, the press began saying that Page himself was announcing his transition from female to male, and changing his name from Ellen to Elliot. Slowly, photographs of a short-haired Page, sans breasts, began to emerge.
Page threw himself into exercise, enjoying the effects of the male hormones in his body. I had also taken male hormones to develop muscles once, so I had a pretty good idea what he was feeling. Besides losing body fat, his face changed little, but gone was the sort of wounded innocence typically associated with Ellen Page. He was now a small, but pretty spunky dude, and clearly wanted you to know so.
We are all on a journey of discovering where we fit in the fabric of space, time, and culture. As I get older, I’m learning that the journey never really ends and it never slows down, even if you wish it would sometimes.
Transgenderism is one of the least common descriptors of humanity, and yet it’s intersected my personal story, these three times. I’m a very anti-social creature. If it’s intersecting my story, then it’s intersecting your story.
Traditionally, American society assigned two roles to transgender people: freaks or invisible. Male to Female becomes a bit more visible, so they become the freaks. Female to Male is less noticeable, so they become invisible. Both are something we project onto people that have nothing to do with what they choose for themselves.
Elliot Page says he wears boys’ underwear because he is a boy. He didn’t look like a boy, so the world tried to make him into something else, but he corrected it. That’s his choice. That’s his right.
June is Pride month because people try to define gender and sexuality as a very small part of a very large spectrum, and can be uncommonly cruel to people who fall outside of their constructed constraints. I became involved when people I loved became targets to people who don’t know them.
Elliot Page wears boys’ underwear. So do I. My wife did too, sometimes, as have most of the women I know. It turns out that boys’ underwear can be both more practical and more comfortable than womens’ underwear.
