Transgender actor Elliot Page has shared his ‘joy’ at wearing swimming trunks for the first time, five months after publicly coming out and just two months after revealing he had undergone top surgery to remove his breasts.
The 34-year-old Juno star marked the milestone moment on his Instagram account on Monday, when he posted a smiling photo of himself sporting red swim shorts and showing off incredibly defined abs, with his top surgery scars also faintly visible in the image.
‘Trans bb’s first swim trunks,’ he captioned the candid snap, before adding the hashtags #transjoy and #transisbeautiful.
The post was flooded with supportive comments from Page’s fellow Hollywood stars, including Miley Cyrus, Nina Dobrev, and his Umbrella Academy co-star Justin Cornwell, who was quick to praise the star’s muscular physique.
‘Dude I see why you crushed me in that workout!’ Justin wrote, while Nina added: ‘You look amazing… and most of all happy.’
Page, who first found fame for starring as a pregnant teenager in the hit 2007 movie Juno, has previously spoken out about his childhood struggle with gender dysmorphia.
Page first came out to the public on Instagram on December 1, saying that his pronouns were he/they, and wrote: ‘I love that I am trans. And I love that I am queer … I can’t begin to express how remarkable it feels to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self.’
Now, speaking to Oprah, he said that he built up to that point by coming out to people close to him.
‘I was expressing this to people in my life, you know, much before posting that letter, and telling people for the first time and knowing I have wanted a moment, of course, to become comfortable in myself and to be able to kind of be able to get to that point,’ he said.
Now that he has come out, ‘on some level it feels just like the most miraculous, amazing thing — and it’s also just the experience of, “Oh, there I am.”
But another part of him has wondered, ‘Oh my god, why was that so hard? Why?’