Fairest: A Memoir by Meredith Talusan (320 pages) A coming-of-age memoir of a Filipino boy with albinism whose story travels from an immigrant childhood to Harvard to a gender transition and illuminates the illusions of race, disability, and gender. In Fairest's carefully nuanced and detailed analysis, Talusan articulates the ways in which people of color create solidarity when there are only one or two non-white individuals in these elite.

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• Fairest A Memoir By Meredith Talusan

Meredith Talusan's Fairest is like nothing you've ever read before.

Over the past decade, there has been an influx of memoirs chronicling the lives of transgender people, but few are like Talusan's. With its lyrical prose, Fairest takes readers on a harrowing journey — from Talusan's grandmother's kitchen in the Philippines, where she attempted to navigate boyhood, to the campus of Harvard University where she was seen as a white-passing gay man. Later, she writes about letting go of her obsession with masculinity and becoming as gender non-conforming person to finally transitioning into a woman.

With each page, the award-winning journalist is wisely self-aware and brutally honest when discussing how the intersections of her identity have informed her life — including how her obsession with whiteness once led her to use her pale to skin to deny that she was Asian. It's a stunning revelation, filled with pain, loneliness, and exhaustion, but it's clear that to speak her truth, Talusan had to tell all of it: the good, bad, and the achingly ugly.

Recently, Talusaun opened up to Shondaland about what inspired her to write Fairest, overcoming internalized racism, and how there isn't just one way for a trans person to be or tell their story.

KELLEE TERRELL: What prompted you to write a memoir?

MEREDITH TALUSAN: A few years ago, when I was a staff writer at Buzzfeed, they did this criticism piece surveying trans memoirs, which required me to read a span of seven or eight books in two weeks. One of the things I noticed, to different degrees, was that they were telling their story like this: This is my experience and let me explain it to you as someone who isn't trans. Let me translate my experience and why I am struggling with this particular issue.

That's not how a lot of memoirs that aren't about trans people are written. So, I wanted to write about my experience and take stock of it myself, from cover to cover, and that meant examining my perspective and being clear that I couldn't discuss my gender, without discussing how my race was perceived. And I was not going to stop when the topic of race got 'too complicated' for a cisgender person or put it in a bracket to explain because the trans part is the only thing they might get.

KT: Reading this, it was clear who your audience was and I appreciated that. I also appreciated your honesty when talking about your family's obsession with whiteness and how that guided your life. That couldn't have been easy.

MT: From my earliest memories, my family encouraged my 'difference,' my albinism, as something special. But the idea of me being special was rooted in ugly racist ideology that people who have lighter skin are better. As a kid in the Philippines, my child brain was not able to grasp the subtlety of that position; I just wanted to be loved and I grabbed on to anything that would make me feel like I was not going to fall, or be shunned. So much of the book is about how do you come to terms with that, and how you can't undo all of that over the years. That's not possible; it's just the beginning.

KT: Yet, even as smart and resilient as you are, being white-passing played a role in your upward mobility.

MT: Exactly. I can never forget that I have also been perceived as white and we have no idea what would have happened, had I not been white passing. But we definitely know that very few first-generation Filipino immigrants that came to the U.S. at 15, living in poverty, with parents that abandoned her, ended up going to Harvard and holding an executive position at Condé Nast. That alone should give people pause about how race operates.

KT: Having to be that open now must have been difficult. How did you get to be this self-aware?

MT: Over the years, I have been in therapy on and off. What's funny is that I was there more for my issues with race than with my gender, especially when my brother died. Our life trajectory was so different because he was perceived as Latino, while I was perceived as white. But I think so much of my awareness has come from my [people of color] friends and forming those close relationships with these people who have so much integrity and awareness in their strengths and their flaws. That has also been super constructive and inspiring because all of the passing was exhausting, especially as my career was evolving, and I was becoming part of those inner circles.

I refused to be tokenized or confirm what these powerful white people were saying about race, like, 'Well, Meredith says it's OK or that it's not a big deal.' And to be that kind of minority in those rooms assuming those 'white values' is worse than the white people saying it.

KT: You spend a lot of time discussing your life as a young boy and a gay man before your transition — you even share your dead name. It's important to point out this is not how all trans people prefer to talk about their lives, pre-transition, and it's not okay for cis people, like me, to refer to trans people that way.

MT: You're absolutely right. I had to be very clear that being trans was not this traumatic event that happened in my life. I wasn't dysmorphic, and I never had a memory of wanting to be a girl when I was a child. For me, being a boy was fine; being a man was fine; I just ended up preferring to be a woman. In other trans memoirs, the experiences can be, 'I'm doing this as a man, but I really should be a woman.'

So in Fairest, [the structure of the book] reflected me really wanting to encompass all of my history. To look at the entirety of my life and understand how I moved through the world in this body over the years. And I couldn't do that without understanding that I had been a boy and a man with all of the privileges of my gender at the time. Sharing my 'dead name,' my birth name, wasn't traumatic for me. But if a non-trans person is going out of their way to use it or use it to insult or demean me, that's not okay. There are words and certain pronouns trans people can use to describe themselves and say to each other that non-trans people should not use — ever.

KT: Finally, what did being the 'fairest' mean to you then, and what does it mean to you now?

MT: Fairest then definitely meant I was special and beautiful and prized because I was 'white.' I think fairest to me now is more about doing everything I can to dismantle that image of myself so that I can lead a life that is fair to other people.

Meredith Talusan Wiki

Kellee Terrell is a Los Angeles based writer. Follow her on Twitter @kelleent

Fairest A Memoir By Meredith Talusan

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