I first
heard about Josh Oppenheimer on my initial Harvard visit, the spring of my
senior year in high school after I got accepted. Josh would go on to be a
well-known documentary filmmaker, but back then, my host described him as this
brilliant queer performance artist who lived in his entryway and was doing a
show the following night in a drained swimming pool. When he invited me to come
along, I was too intrigued to resist.
But once
I found myself crowded around the far end of the pool at Adams House, I
couldn’t really follow what the piece was about. I only witnessed the teetering
danger of Josh potentially falling into the pool as he pontificated at the
edge, bald-headed in a white minimalist tube of a gown that made him both
androgynous and alien. His pronouncements had an air of importance, the
youthful conviction that his words had never been said before. Even the moments
when he had to get into the pool using the rungs of a ladder, an awkward
maneuver at best, were imbued with a certain delicacy of purpose, lit as he was
by those clip lights you get at the hardware store. As he declaimed, and
asserted, and pronounced, in ways that resisted my attempts to comprehend, I
did understand that if this was something I could do at Harvard — witness and
celebrate the illegible yet ardent manifesto of a gowned man in a drained
swimming pool — then maybe I could blend right in.
But
instead of following Josh’s focused example, I’d spent so much of my time at
school craving boys, too many hours cruising for them on‑ and offline. I heard of a kiss-in he and some friends were planning for
Ralph Reed, the head of the Christian Coalition, who was coming to Harvard that
fall; I decided to join.
Josh
explained the details of the action at a meeting, though the logic remained
unclear to me. We were to dress conservatively and pretend to be homophobes by
holding up signs borrowed from Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church,
like GOD HATES FAGS and NO RIGHTS FOR SODOMITES. The signs were meant to expose
Ralph Reed’s hypocrisy and Harvard’s disingenuousness for inviting him. Though
Reed seemed benign and respectable, he still reeked of the same homophobia as
Phelps and his cronies. This logic made sense in a somersaulting kind of way,
though I still wondered why we couldn’t just kiss as we were and send a less
confusing message.
Though I
got on board in the end and put on the black wool suit I wore to interviews,
procured at Filene’s Basement with extra money from the Winter Coat Fund, which
gave every Harvard freshman from west of the Mississippi $300 to buy warm
clothes. The suit was an armor I didn’t want, that cover of respectability and
dominance as a man. I couldn’t handle the idea of wearing a tie, so I settled
for a linen shirt with a mandarin collar, unclassic but respectable.
I got to
the auditorium early and made my way to the queer section in the center near
the back. The group wasn’t big, maybe twenty kids or so. I was chatting with
one of them when Josh appeared in the periphery of my vision wearing a white
dress, and I hadn’t quite absorbed his outfit before he asked, “Would you be my
kiss-in partner?”
That was
when I noticed he was not only wearing white but that his head was covered in a
wimple, and I recognized the familiar crisp fabric of a nun’s habit from my
dozen years in Catholic school. I had no idea why he asked me, the two of us
having never hung out as friends over four years, but I nodded yes. Maybe it
was as simple as me having the right look, a studious blond man in conservative
clothes. I sat next to him as Ralph Reed’s talk began, though there were still
murmurs among us about who was ready to take action and who wasn’t, who was
risking arrest and negative backlash, or some sort of permanent smirch on some
record, official or otherwise.
I had my
doubts as Reed started his speech. I still wasn’t quite getting the point of
all the theatricality, as I held a sign that read DYKES WILL BURN IN HELL. Was
this all a manifestation of Josh’s ego? Judging by the absence of the more
mainstream queers among us, the gay guys with their tight shirts and muscles,
there didn’t seem to be full consensus that this was a good idea.
Yet I
also didn’t have much to lose. I was already queer, albino, poor. I had no
reputation to protect, no parental expectation to live up to. Something told me
it was worth the risk, that whatever it was on the other side of Josh’s parted
lips would have meaning.
We stood
up to begin the kissiin at the start of the Q&A. I felt Josh tug at my
jacket, a gesture that betrayed our lack of intimacy even as we were about to
perform an intimate act in public. There was something unremittingly attractive
in Josh’s subversion, something that drew me to his face surrounded by cloth,
the memory of my years among the nuns. So that by the time Josh’s forehead
nearly brushed the rims of my glasses as his lips touched mine, I felt ready.
Am I
kissing a man? That was a question I found myself asking in the ensuing
confusion like drowning, as my fear merged with the audience’s agitation. Am I
even a man? I had never kissed a girl before, and Josh was the closest by far.
But the feeling of plugged ears under the sea prevented me from quite
understanding what was happening, punctuated by moments when my consciousness
bobbed for air even when my lips didn’t catch a breath.
In one
of those moments of clarity, Josh’s kiss shook me into the awareness that I was
not quite a man. I wanted to be in his nun’s habit and not my suit, because a
dress to me meant a release from the shackles of forced masculinity, a giving
up that I felt somewhere between and within my heart, my gut, and my groin. It
took Josh’s kiss for me to admit to myself that I desired to be taken, not that
only men take and women receive but that I could never be just a taker and
never be just a taker as a man. I tensed then, gripped his lips with the
confident force of learning who I was between tongues.
Even
when the guards tried to break us apart, our tensed arms held on to each other.
Our legs splayed as those guards pulled our feet from under us, and still we
didn’t let go. Those guards had to carry us out of the room, entwined and
horizontal. Finally, as I lay on top of him on the pavement outside, Josh
opened his oracular eyes and we broke apart. By then, I knew that my
fascination with women, from their art to their plight, wasn’t just a part of
me I could parcel off, but that womanhood itself might be the vessel that best
contained my being.
Excerpt
from Fairest by Meredith Talusan, published on May 26, 2020
by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.
‘Would
You Be My Kiss‑in Partner?’ During a protest at Harvard, Josh Oppenheimer’s kiss shook me into the awareness that I was not quite a man. By
Meredith Talusan. Vulture, May 26, 2020.
It was
sophomore year, the Saturday before Halloween, 1994. I ended up on the top
floor of the farthest entryway in Adams House, which I didn’t mind because the
eaves made my room feel like a garret. I’d recently learned that word at a
lecture on Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, where the professor proposed
the garret as an ideal space for writers in search of quiet and contemplation.
I felt inspired in that room, even though I occasionally bumped my head when I
sat up in bed.
I’d
skipped breakfast that day, so it was past noon by the time I shuffled into the
dining hall. I hoped to see people I recognized after I got food, but when I
didn’t, I sat alone at one of the square tables in the middle of that vast
space with its dark wood paneling and red velvet curtains, hoping still that
someone I knew would come along and join me. I had only lived in the house for
six weeks and was slow to make friends.
At the
next table, I overheard some juniors I didn’t know well talking about Drag
Night, an Adams tradition I’d heard about but didn’t realize was happening over
dinner that evening. They were planning to do a number to “It’s Raining Men.”
“We need
to go to the thrift store to get costumes,” a compact blond man named Zach
said.
“And he
needs to shave,” a redheaded girl named Sarah commented. I sneaked a peek to
see who she was talking about, someone whose name I didn’t know, who had dark
curly hair and patches of stubble.
“It’ll
be funnier if I don’t shave,” the guy said, who I immediately assumed was
straight.
I
wondered if I should ask to join their group, but I couldn’t rely on them not
to laugh in my face or make excuses not to let me in. Anyway, just because I
was gay didn’t mean I should automatically do drag. I’d never dressed in
women’s clothes before, not even in private or, for that matter, gone out in
costume for Halloween, since we didn’t have Halloween in the Philippines. No
one at lunch seemed interested in asking me anyway.
I walked
over to the mailboxes after my meal and ran into a girl I’d gotten friendly
with the day I moved in, another sophomore named Lucy Bisognano.
“So,”
she began, “what are you doing for Drag Night?”
“Just
watching.”
“You
have to at least dress up. Come over to my room. I have dresses that would
probably fit you.”
I agreed
to meet Lucy later that afternoon. Though I was excited to wear women’s clothes
for the first time, I was even more thrilled that someone at Harvard cared
enough to hang out with me, especially someone as popular as Lucy, small‑boned and fine‑featured yet unfailingly jovial,
like a bird in mid‑flight. I was a poor kid who’d gone
to a mediocre public school in Chino, California, in the smoggy, working‑class part of Los Angeles where my uncle worked as a nurse, so that was
where we ended up when my family immigrated four years earlier. My brain and my
will got me to Harvard, but I didn’t want to be the poor immigrant kid once I
got there. I pretended to be like everyone else, did a good enough job with my
accent to pass for white and native‑born but not a good enough job that
I could keep other kids from thinking I was weird. Hardly anyone wanted to be
my friend, and the few who did I didn’t really care for, not until Lucy came
along.
A couple
of hours before dinner and the Drag Night festivities, I knocked on the door of
Lucy’s suite, and she led me through the halogen‑lit common room
into her bedroom, where Monet and Degas posters livened up the beige walls. Her
room barely fit her desk and single bed, which suited me fine because I liked
being near her.
“I’m not
sure what will fit you so let me just show you what I have.”
As I sat
on Lucy’s bed, on a comforter adorned with tiny pink flowers I couldn’t
identify—maybe peonies, or gardenias—she opened her closet door and pulled out
dresses on hangers one by one, then draped them in front of her. I wanted to
examine the details of those garments, admire the lace pattern of one and the
pleating of another, but I would have needed to get really close, and it felt
too early to expose my poor vision to my new friend. But she must have sensed a
heightened reaction when she showed me a sleeveless dress made of black velvet,
a fabric I immediately identified because its shade was darker than any other
cloth, a depth of color I hadn’t known back home.
“I bet
this would look great against your skin,” Lucy said.
She left
the room so I could change. After I stripped down to my white briefs, I stepped
into the dress, put my arms through the sleeve holes, and shivered at that
forbidden thrill I’d only known about secondhand, of being a man in women’s
clothes. I’d grown up seeing such men, had even worked with a few when I was a
child actor in the Philippines, those bakla a staple of slapstick comedies on
TV and in movies. But while my culture tolerated bakla, nobody ever took them
seriously, so I wasn’t interested in being like them. But maybe because I knew
I could dress up as a girl if I wanted to, I also didn’t really find the idea
particularly exciting, not until I got to America and noticed how men dressing
up as women seemed so much more taboo than it did back home.
I was
able to zip the dress up most of the way, as it stretched to encompass my back,
muscular from pull‑ups at the gym. The neckline scooped
tastefully in front and was bordered in a shiny material, maybe satin, which I
didn’t notice from afar. I looked down to
observe that the dress ended a couple of inches above my knee and had a slit on
one side. I remembered a woman on a talk show say that every girl needs a
little black dress in her closet; this was the kind of dress she must have
meant.
“I hate
you,” Lucy said when she came back into the room and helped me zip up the rest
of the way. “This looks way better on you than it does on me.”
As Lucy
looked through her jewelry box to see what might work with my outfit, I
recalled the moment a few years earlier, I must have been thirteen, when my
cousin Baby walked in on me as I was about to put a shirt on in front of our
old wooden house’s only mirror, attached to a weathered armoire.
“You
have a woman’s waist,” she observed, as she brushed her palm down my side to
demonstrate how my body curved in below my rib cage and then back out toward my
hips. I smiled into the mirror at my cousin’s compliment and felt an echo of
that pleasure with Lucy.
“Your
hands are so dainty and small!” my friend marveled as she held one and slipped
a gold bangle through my fingers. I looked down and noticed that my hand was
indeed smaller than Lucy’s, though that was only because I was Asian. My hands
weren’t particularly small by Filipino standards, but people judged my body
differently in America, especially someone like Lucy, who didn’t know I was
albino.
We sat
on the bed as Lucy applied gray eyeshadow to my lids with a tiny, padded brush,
then used a stick whose end reminded me of a spider’s legs to rub the tops and
bottoms of my nearly white lashes with mascara, a cosmetic item I hadn’t known
existed until that moment. She ordered me not to blink even though my eyes
started to water, and I felt the heavy thickness of the substance when she was
done. Lucy complimented what she called my “cupid’s bow” before she uncapped a
black tube of bloodred lipstick and rubbed it against my lips. She stood up and
looked under piles of papers on her desk until she found a gold‑and‑black hair ornament she called a barrette and affixed it to my short
hair right above my forehead.
“You’re
almost ready,” she said. “We just need some pumps.”
Lucy
gave me a pair of narrow black shoes made of plastic that was as shiny as the
velvet of my dress was matte, with heels that tapered at the bottom, a couple
of inches high. When I stood up after I put them on, pleased that they fit, I
also found that I didn’t have as much trouble walking in them as I expected.
Lucy led me back to her common room, where she opened a closet door. With a
flourish of her hands, she motioned me toward the mirror on the other side.
When I ambled over, I realized I was looking down because I was afraid to fall,
so I tilted my head upward to see myself. “Not bad,” I said. I didn’t look
nearly as ridiculous as I expected. “Come on, you look great!” Lucy countered,
and I smiled to please her, grateful she took so much effort to get me ready.
Lucy’s
suite was in an entryway near the dining hall, and as we walked downstairs
toward the Gold Room—the vestibule before the main eating area that was
literally painted gold—I came upon a few guys wearing dresses. In makeup and
wigs, the thick hair on their faces and arms looked out of place, their
movements clumsy as they loomed above me despite my heels, which clattered on
the emerald tile floor.
“Whoa,
you look like a real woman,” Kit Clark observed as he greeted me in the Gold
Room. “It’s almost too convincing.”
Kit came
dressed in a turquoise medieval gown that swooped to the floor, his curly hair
in a low ponytail. He would have made a plausible woman too if not for his
stubble, and a chin that was even broader than mine.
“What do
you mean, too convincing?” I asked.
“Drag is
supposed to be ironic,” he replied. “You just look like a girl.”
I
understood what he meant when Zach and his friends did their “It’s Raining Men”
number that night and wore ridiculous blond wigs as they sashayed and stomped
on a makeshift stage in the middle of the dining hall, fingers splayed and
wrists bent. Other men performed classics like “I Will Survive” and more recent
Top 40 hits like “Express Yourself” with that same ludicrous air that felt
designed to make fun of women.
Still in
my outfit, I went clubbing with some gay friends after dinner, who let me hang
around because we were all queer and at Harvard, even though none of them gave
me the time of day romantically.
There
was a Central Square club named ManRay whose Liquid night on Saturdays catered
to a mixed crowd, and, befitting the name, people were encouraged to gender‑bend. I’d gone there a
few times in shiny tops or spandex bell‑bottoms, but
this was the first time I’d bent my
gender all the way.
It was
amusing to see curious looks from men who gave off straight vibes as I danced
to bands like New Order and Pet Shop Boys throughout the night. Though my feet
started to hurt after a while, I enjoyed the way my heels made my butt wiggle
as I walked out of the club. I didn’t have the money to take a cab, so I left
shortly after midnight to catch the T before it closed and ambled down the
brick pavement of Mount Auburn Street toward Adams, after I got out at Harvard
Square.
I hadn’t
had anything to drink, but even so, I was afraid of tripping because of the
brick, my heels, the tiredness of my feet. I also realized it had been a mistake
not to bring a jacket. It was an unusually warm fall night, but the temperature
had turned chilly over the last several hours, and I had to hug myself for
warmth. I was about a block away from my dorm entrance when I became aware of a
rumbling sound, unusually close to the sidewalk, then the honk of a horn.
I kept
walking, figuring the noise had nothing to do with me. But as I got closer to
my house and the street got quieter, I began to hear yelling from several young
men.
“Turn
around!” I heard one of the voices say.
I paused
and swiveled my head in their direction, where I saw figures so dimly lit they
looked like shadows, crawling by in a giant, early‑model American
car.
“Hey,
beautiful!” someone from inside yelled.
“Come
ride with us!” another said. I smiled and shook my head as I rested a hand on
my cheek.
“Not
tonight,” I replied, my voice suddenly breathy and high. I observed my
thickened eyelashes bat before I turned around.
It was
only when I started walking again that I felt the sting of fear. I consciously
pieced together what my instinct had already computed, that these young men had
mistaken me for a woman, and I played my part to appease them. I also became
aware that if one of these men had decided to get out of the car and examine me
more closely, they would realize the mistake they’d made, and that this would
make them angry, maybe angry enough to use their fists, and that it would be my
body and not just my heels against the bricks. A deep part of me knew that
running might incite them to chase me, and the safest choice was to walk at an
even pace.
I was
just half a block away now, and instead of their shouts, my mind tuned in to
the outlines of my world, the rectangles on the ground that were barely red in
the darkness of that hour, the thick white lines of a crosswalk in the
distance. Lucy had lent me a black beaded clutch, and when I finally got to my
dorm entrance, I fumbled for the clasp before I was able to fish out my keys,
the ones I had a hard time getting in the keyhole because of my weak eyes. I
had learned to unlock the door by feel rather than sight.
I
brushed the hole with a trembling finger then tried to fit my key into the slot
for seconds when each gust of wind felt like a man’s breath, every failed
jiggle like a trap I couldn’t get out of. I turned myself into a ghost like I
did as a child, without a body and free of fear, when my mother beat me or left
me locked in my room overnight. The voices of those men, so loud only a few
seconds before, sounded as if they came from the other end of a long tunnel,
slippery as I tried to crawl out. Finally, my key found the hole and I clicked
the latch above the handle with my thumb, then opened the heavy door as fast as
I could.
I ran
into a wall of fluorescent light and was suddenly afraid my broad shoulders
would give me away. I hurried down the hallway and out of sight, started the
climb up to my room as my heels made an almost clanging sound when they
reverberated on the circular stairway. I only felt safe once I closed the door
to my suite, as physical sensation returned to my limbs and I realized how much
my feet hurt. I went to my bedroom to take off my shoes, relieved that my
roommates weren’t there to see me. I felt ashamed somehow, to have attracted
attention and then gotten so scared. I would turn the incident into a good
story at brunch the next day, how some straight guys followed me home because
they thought I was a hot girl. But that night, I just wanted to live with the
fear and shame on my own, without the need to transform my experience into a
witty anecdote.
I sat on
the bed and took off my heels, rubbed my feet as I reflected on how tired they
were, how nervous I still was, as my palm gripped my chest and I felt my
heartbeat slow to a normal pace before my fingers relaxed. Yet as I recalled my
fear, there also grew in me a surprising, pleasant sensation, and I smiled
despite myself, fascinated at the sudden feeling that the experience had been
worth it. Those men were convinced I was a woman, and I became curious about
what they saw.
I left
my bed and crossed our empty common room to look at myself in the bathroom
mirror. But my face was too hard, the fluorescent light too harsh up close. So
I took a step back, and then another, and then a few more, until I only saw my
face as a sketch whose details my imagination could fill. The colors were more
pronounced than I was used to, my eyes and lips outlined in smoke and red. I
noticed the pleasant semicircle of my dress’s neckline against my chest and
imagined graceful clavicles I couldn’t see. Though I did see that my neck was
thin and long, something I’d never paid attention to before. All evening,
people had told me I looked like a real girl, and those anonymous men had given
me proof, but it was only then, in that bathroom mirror, that I perceived a
glimmer of what they saw.
From
afar, I felt like a girl to myself, even a beautiful girl. I gazed at that
reflection and imagined my face as a woman’s face, holding features in my mind
that others had told me were feminine—my high cheekbones, pouty lips, small
nose. I grinned to myself at the thought of my nose, which I’d pulled on since
childhood, hoping it would grow, since Filipinos preferred sharp, protruding
noses. But I realized that my nose was dainty on a white woman’s face, as I
also became conscious that of course it was a white woman’s face I imagined in
that reflection, one of those vivacious ballerinas who thrilled audiences night
after night, or the heroine of a 19th‑century novel.
Though
as I began to walk toward my reflection, more and more of my masculine features
came into focus, my broad shoulders and strong jaw, my prominent brow and high
hairline, receding slightly at the corners. By the time my hands touched the
sink’s cold porcelain again, I couldn’t help but perceive myself as a man
dressed as a woman, a fool who would have been laughed at and beaten up had
those men looked at me close in the light and found out the truth. I felt the
immediate urge to rub off the makeup, but something stopped me, and instead, I
leaned even closer toward my reflection. I suddenly remembered that I didn’t
always think of my face as a white person’s face, how it took years to convince
myself that I was not the aberration other people wanted me to be, but was
instead practically the same as the Americans I watched on TV. I also recalled
how this was not the first time I’d seen a reflection and imagined myself as a
white woman with golden hair.
Excerpt
from Fairest by Meredith Talusan, published
on May 26, 2020 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.
My First
Night Out as a Woman : Meredith Talusan on Race, Drag, and Transitions. By
Meredith Talusan. LitHub , May 26, 2020.
May
2014, a month after I published my first article about being trans, I woke up
at dawn between two naked men, on the top floor of a townhouse in Park Slope.
I’d followed the rules of straight womanhood for over a decade, and it hadn’t
made me happy, so I wanted to test my boundaries, push myself to be with people
in ways I hadn’t before. That was when Barrett and Jason came along, a bisexual
couple I met online who were interested in dating a woman.
I turned
on my side to face Barrett, the one with whom I felt a stronger romantic
attachment; Jason felt more like a friend I enjoyed having sex with. Bald and a
decade older than me, Barrett had left his own rural upbringing in Alabama to
become a modern dancer and interactive artist in New York, which led to a
career as a digital consultant and allowed him to unexpectedly come into
wealth. He and Jason didn’t know I was trans when we first met, but I sent them
one of my articles and, as I had hoped, they treated my gender as a nonissue.
Barrett
opened his eyes and smiled. I could tell they were hazel but not much else,
though I’d examined plenty of close‑up eye pictures before, and filled
in details with my mind — dark rings
around his irises, dilated pupils because of the dim dawn light and, maybe a
little bit, his attraction to me. He tilted his head to indicate that we should
leave the room together, and I followed him down a set of wooden stairs with
steel pipes for rails, part of this couple’s industrial aesthetic in a house
they designed and renovated themselves.
“I’ll
get us some coffee,” he whispered as he proceeded to the kitchen on the ground
floor while I stayed on the second, an open area lined with bookshelves, a
peacock-green velvet couch on one side and a mid-century dining table on the
other. Off that big room was a smaller room they used for guests. I noticed
that the door was open, so I went inside.
Barrett
and Jason also used the room as a walk‑in closet; I noticed a shelf of
stylish shoes on one side and suits on wooden hangers. On another end of the
room was a giant mirror, framed in ornate gold leaf, leaning against the wall.
I stood in front of it and looked at myself, as morning light illuminated my
body, and recalled how comfortable I’d been walking around nude in Barrett’s presence.
It was a relief to feel safe without clothes in front of some one else, after
years of asking men to turn lights off, for fear they would find something
overly masculine about my body, my too-slim hips, my muscular shoulders and
back from years of lifting weights, a fear that did not go away even when men
admired that body for being powerful and athletic.
“Admiring
yourself again?” Barrett asked as he poked his head into the room, then went in
to stand behind me. “I’m sure it feels great to be almost forty and have the
breasts of a teenager.” I laughed, not just at the joke but at the openness of
our relationship. The past decade when I decided to be private about my
transition except to those I was closest to, the men I’d been involved with had
accepted my history as fact but had also been all too willing to deny its
reality, something never to be discussed again once revealed. Though really, I
was more responsible for this than they were, because their reticence was an
echo of my own shame, my silence like trying to suffocate my history by
refusing to breathe. It was such a relief to exhale. “It’s funny,” Barrett
continued as he stared at my reflection. “I know you’re trans, but I can’t
really tell. It’s a lot harder to see you were an Asian man when I can’t see
you as Asian to begin with. To me you’re just a woman with a dancer’s body.” I
nodded. I knew by “woman” he meant “white woman.” I wanted to be pleased but
was surprised at myself that I wasn’t.
We left
the room and had coffee at the dining table, but Barrett’s words kept playing
in my head, “I don’t see you as trans,” coupled with “I can’t tell you’re
Asian.” The way he looked at me was exactly what I’d honed over many years,
this trick of perception, and it puzzled me that I was dissatisfied over having
accomplished it, a state of being so many trans women sacrifice so much to
achieve. Maybe I didn’t feel the satisfaction because I hadn’t sacrificed
enough, only had reassignment surgery, hadn’t touched my face or gotten
implants. Though remaining undisclosed for a decade was burden enough, so it
wasn’t that. It was something about how my gender and race reflected on each
other like a dizzying hall of distorted mirrors.
When
people looked at me and only saw a white person, I understood that being white
wasn’t actually better, that I only coveted whiteness because of what I
associated it with — wealth, education, and beauty. But for someone like me,
whose whiteness was literally skin deep, who did not have any meaningful
European ancestry, to be perceived as white could only mean that whiteness is
nothing more than illusion. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t need to go through so
much effort, make so many sacrifices to gain the privileges of whiteness, and
other brown people who are not albino would have just as much access to those
privileges if they wanted it.
I
flinched when Barrett told me he only saw me as a woman, because my experience
with race forced me to understand that womanhood wasn’t real either. I wanted
to be a woman because I wanted other people to perceive my qualities through
the lens of that gender, but having molded myself to their expectations, I now
understood how much of an illusion gender was too. To become a woman in the
world’s eyes, I made what felt like a huge sacrifice at the time, reassignment
surgery, but in hindsight was really a cosmetic change not unlike a nose job, a
shift in a body part’s aesthetic appearance while keeping its function intact —
the only difference was the meaning our society invested in one body part
versus the other.
Had I
lived in a world where men were allowed to dress and behave like women without
being scorned or punished, I wouldn’t have needed to be a woman at all. Over
the following months, I grew alienated from Barrett and eventually stopped
dating him, not because he did anything terrible but I just didn’t want to see
myself through his eyes. I came to understand that what I wanted was to be seen
as my complete self — my gender, my race, my history — without being judged
because of it. I wanted people close to me to see an albino person who had
learned how to look and act white so the world would more readily accept her,
and understand how that had been a key part of her survival. I wanted people to
see how that albino person was also transgender, and that she transitioned to
be able to express her femininity and had surgery so she would be perceived as
being like any other woman, her qualities appreciated on those terms. And if
she ever hid who she actually was, it was only so that she could be granted
entrance into worlds she couldn’t otherwise reach, worlds that should
rightfully belong to everyone, not just those who happen to uphold the
prevailing standards of whiteness and womanhood.
Excerpt
from Fairest by Meredith Talusan, published
on May 26, 2020 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.
I Hid My
Transition For Years. I Regret It Now. By Meredith Talusan. BuzzFeed News, May 23, 2020.
Author
Meredith Talusan talks to NPR's Scott Simon about her new memoir, Fairest. NPR,
May 23, 2020
Though I
have never met Meredith Talusan in person, she seemed, one Tuesday in late
April over Zoom, familiar to me, like we’d been in conversation already for a
long time. Perhaps it’s because I’d just recently finished reading Fairest, her
memoir. Perhaps it’s because Fairest is written with that kind of wrenching
honesty and unflinching self-evaluation—often just embryonic or gestural in
most other memoirs—that engenders a feeling of quiet intimacy with the writer.
Perhaps it’s because her account of queer desire and trans longing felt
adjacent to my own, as I am, like Talusan, a trans person who medically
transitioned after graduating from Harvard. Her description of walking home,
after a party, to her dorm down Mt. Auburn Street—wearing a dress in public for
the first time—was a vertiginous aide-mémoire, returning me to the first time I
wore boxers and a binder and a horrible pleather jacket, walking down Mt.
Auburn Street, heading home by the same streets, a little more than a decade
after Meredith did.
Fairest
tracks transitions that aren’t visually perceptible, but are narratively
indelible: transitioning from a boy to a nonbinary trans-feminine person;
moving from a small village in the Philippines to Harvard; being mistakenly
perceived as white because she is albino; unlearning overvaluations of
whiteness and the desire to be perceived as white.
Over a
quiet afternoon, we spoke about the tropes of trans memoir, recursive fantasy,
the ethics of autobiographical representation, shame and narrative revision,
and queer cruising.
INTERVIEWER
Your
memoir felt radically different from any other trans memoir I’ve encountered.
Why did you choose the Proust epigraph about being imprisoned in the wrong
body, which is a longstanding trope of these memoirs?
TALUSAN
I was
primarily interested in thinking about precedents, windows of existence around
work that I’ve read before, with the understanding that different eras have had
really different conceptions of gender. I was actually much more influenced, in
certain ways, by James Baldwin, so I was looking for a Baldwin epigraph from
Giovanni’s Room, but his work is even worse when it comes to portraying trans
people. I felt that contextualizing the work of the present within the
understanding of how people have seen gender in the past was important.
Especially in Sodom and Gomorrah, how tortured that relationship to gender is,
how during that period of time there was a much greater overlap in peoples’
conceptions of gender and sexuality. Where I come from, the Philippines, gender
is contextualized in certain similar, though significantly less, phobic ways.
INTERVIEWER
As soon
as I asked that question I thought, well, you’re also working with familiar
language, there’s rhetorical continuity in your work with mid- and late-century
American trans-feminine memoir. I’m thinking of books like Christine
Jorgensen’s A Personal Autobiography and Reneé Richards’s Second Serve, where
language like “no longer a son,” or “the man I used to be” was used. I don’t
see that anywhere now in contemporary memoir, other than in your book. What’s
at stake for you in that move?
TALUSAN
I have
always been open about how my own trans experience was not one of
assigned-gender denial. It dovetails into my specific cultural upbringing. I
don’t perceive myself as never having been a boy, or never having been a man.
But I recognize that the rhetoric of “born a man” or “used to be a man” has
been deployed by people, by anti-trans people, for a really long time. And the
idea of the gender “one is meant to be” since birth has been such a vital
element of medical gatekeeping around trans health care. There are reasons why,
politically, it’s been important for the trans community to adopt that
language, and for people to believe that about themselves, whether consciously
or unconsciously. One of my major goals writing the memoir—especially having
spent a lot of time on political writing, writing op-eds about trans issues—was
to situate it as me explaining myself to myself. Because so much trans memoir
has been about explaining ourselves to cisgender audiences and justifying our
existence. And I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted to give myself the
opportunity to be able to understand and situate my experience during those
periods of my life with the person I am now. So the reader is positioned not as
a person that I’m explaining myself to, but as an observer in my
self-exploration.
INTERVIEWER
Another
trope I’m always fascinated by are mirror scenes. There’s a scene where you are
at a Harvard reunion in 2017 and you’re looking at the mirror, and after a
moment you say, “the mirror was just a mirror now.” And my first question was,
when is that ever true? When is a mirror just a mirror? The mirror, not unlike
the madeleine, allows you to explore narrative fantasy—by which I don’t mean
fantasy narratives, but the fantasy of a kind of narrative. What kinds of
narratives did the mirror help you to access, in a phantasmic sense?
TALUSAN
I am
somebody who is consistently perceived, as I move through the world, as a
person with a history that I don’t actually have. The mirror was a really good
foil to describe that experience. I’m perceived as cisgender, which I’m not,
native born, which I’m not, able-bodied, which I’m not, white, which I’m not.
There’s a way in which the mirror is a vehicle through which I’m able to face
those two realities—the realities of perception, and the reality … not even of
truth, because the fact of the matter is perception creates its own truth. So
whatever you want to call that … antiperception. I was brought, really
unwillingly, into my white-passing identity and into an identity that’s not
being perceived as Filipino, but often albino. I see mirrors everywhere.
Whenever I see any person I often have to situate myself in relationship to
them and the image that they’re projecting because I am so many people at once.
I am both white and not white, cis and trans, a woman with a male past that
she’s not disavowing, who now lives in a more indeterminately gendered space. I
don’t know where nonbinary gender exists, but it’s not on one side or the
other.
INTERVIEWER
I was
struck by the scene in which you’re arriving at Harvard for the first time and
you take a cab from Logan Airport. When the driver asks where you’re from, you
describe a life that is not yours, but is your then fantasy—Santa Monica, a
beach house, private school friends you’ll meet at Harvard, a white mom and
dad—a fantasy that you describe yourself creating for the cab driver’s benefit
as well as yours. Fairest deals a lot with regressions and declensions of
fantasy, like what R.D. Laing does in Knots. I see you see my fantasy, I
fantasize about your fantasization of me.
TALUSAN
There
are a number of moments in the book where that happens. The one that I had the
hardest time coming to terms with was the scene where I hire a Filipino sex
worker to have sex with and then, in the middle, get lost in the fantasy of us
both being Filipino boys together, then opening my eyes and realizing that the
reality of my body would lead someone else to have a very different fantasy
than the one I was having. Those moments were challenging to write, it was hard
to be vulnerable enough to write that that is what I did. As a memoirist, to
accept whatever you want to call them … mistakes in judgement, ways in which
I’ve behaved that I wouldn’t behave now, I hope, if I were put in similar
situations. But in some ways, it wasn’t particularly challenging to write about
that regression of fantasy because it’s such an enormous part of my life. All
of my close relatives, including my grandmother, whom I was closest to,
informed me, from my earliest memories, that I was going to grow up to be a
white American person. My life now is in many ways a living projection of their
fantasies.
INTERVIEWER
TALUSAN
In part,
the project of writing the book was to be able to situate it as a narrative
that defies a lot of those Western categories. And a lot of people are doing
that work, not just me. I’m thinking of Cyrus Dunham, in addition to Akwaeke
Emezi, or the work of Alok Vaid-Menon. When I call myself trans and when I
identify as trans in a Western context, the fact is that I am trans, and a
person who experienced medical transition. But I did not experience an
antagonistic relationship with my body in ways that a lot of people describe.
Or I’ve moved to a category where I don’t feel comfortable identifying
exclusively with a binary gender. Those challenges of categorization hopefully
expand what trans means. Expanding how we conceive people’s transitions.
Hopefully the book can offer a sort of understanding of how transness can take
on this incredible array of forms. What’s really interesting is those limitations
exist in the Philippines, too, but in different ways. In the Philippines, trans
women who undergo surgery and are no longer discernible as third gender are, in
certain ways, more marginalized and more oppressed than bakla, especially on
the street, because they’re perceived to be deceptive in ways that bakla are
not. Also, it’s still very challenging for trans women in the Philippines to be
attracted to other women. The idea of a trans lesbian, for a Filipino
constellation of gender and sexuality, is challenging.
You came
into your sexuality during the height of the AIDS crisis, and you write about
walking down Eighth Avenue and seeing porn theaters. When so much of the book
felt familiar to me, this moment felt rooted in a queer history I never
experienced, remembering urban and public queer intimacies that once existed
before the Disneyfication of Times Square. This is something Samuel Delany
writes beautifully about, but something I rarely encounter from a trans
perspective. Could you speak about this world of queer sexualities that has
been lost?
TALUSAN
I do
feel like, for me, the set of definitive texts around cruising in Times Square
is Times Square Red Times Square Blue. I think it allowed me to situate my own
fascination with whiteness during that period of my life as a fetish. I was
culturally raised to believe in the superiority of European people, and so from
that perspective, cruising culture was really important for me, having had sex
with older men during that period and having had, in certain ways, a real form
of queer mentorship that isn’t as prevalent in the heterosexual world. But it
was also important for me to own up to the fact that I didn’t have sex with any
people of color until after I transitioned. And I had opportunities to. Oh,
yes! The fact that I just said I didn’t have sex with any people who were not
white, and yet I had sex with that sex worker … that fault of memory indicates
something about my consciousness, how in certain ways I viewed that experience
as a manifestation of the person I would have become had I stayed in the
Philippines rather than the person that I was.
INTERVIEWER
When you
talk about this book do you say I, or the speaker, or the character? How do you
refer to this figure?
TALUSAN
Something
in between something else, which has no—a term that doesn’t exist. I want to be
able to own those experiences and I want people understand that I experienced
them, which is why the book is a memoir. Because it was written really
novelistically, but I want the narrative to be evaluated as a personal
narrative. You might disagree but I’m really antipathetic to Andrea Long Chu’s
review method for Jill Soloway’s memoir, which evaluated the person’s actions
rather than evaluating the way that the person was situated in the narrative of
their actions. We’re not writing antipathetic reviews of Tess from Tess of the
d’Urbervilles and her cluelessness, or Maggie Tulliver from Mill on the Floss
and her fickleness. In the context of this narrative I was very careful to
situate myself within the frame of mind that I was in during those moments, as
I was experiencing them. Which necessarily means that in a lot of cases I feel
differently about those experiences now and probably would have done something
else today. So that’s part of why I resist both me as a character and me as a
person, because I feel like I’m in between. And also, while I’ve already dug
myself into a hole by mentioning the Chu review, I also really deeply object to
this notion that a memoir’s flaw is the author telling on themselves. Because
the memoirist’s entire job is to expose inconvenient, difficult, tortured
truths about themselves—otherwise one would just be left with a simple
narrative in which the memoirist emerges as a character of virtue, and what
does the reader get from that?
INTERVIEWER
How did
you come up with the title? As you say in the book, there is “no such thing as
a single fairest life.”
TALUSAN
I am one
of those people who needs a title in order to understand a piece of writing. I
think I understood that the title had to coalesce as many of the elements of
the book as possible, and I knew that it would be equally about being trans and
about race. That was very important to me, even though I felt a lot of ambient
pressure like, Oh, there’s a lot of interest in trans stuff, just make it a
trans memoir. I think that was how the idea of Fairest came to be. Oh, yes,
there is this term in our culture that equates feminine beauty with whiteness
and then, in the aftermath, realizing it is also about justice, about fairness,
both in the interpersonal sense and in the broader sense.
INTERVIEWER
I know
that I’m the first trans interviewer to interview you about this book. Is there
a question that you want a trans interviewer to ask you?
TALUSAN
Maybe
I’d want you to ask me how I hope the book will affect trans people. Maybe I
want you to ask me that.
INTERVIEWER
I do
want to know how you think it will affect trans people. I also want to know
what you hope trans people will do with it.
TALUSAN
I’ve
long perceived myself as not being quite of my time. I transitioned in 2002. I
was transitioning in an environment where it was assumed that if you could be
perceived as cis, you would go into stealth after you transitioned. I’m really
curious about what young people, younger people, significantly younger—people
who are post-transition and twenty years younger than me—how they would
perceive this, because it’s not necessarily a projection of their life, it’s
more of a projection of their life from a past generation. In terms of what
people do with it, the thing that I find difficult to articulate, and is very
difficult to articulate in general, in an American environment with such a
strong ideology of individualism, is the simultaneous fact that one should be
able to respect any person’s self-conception while at the same time all of us
need to be a lot more cognizant of the ways in which our environment shapes us.
Which is something that I feel viscerally as somebody who comes from two very
different cultural worlds. What’s really interesting about being a writer is
you get to spend time thinking to yourself, this is the story of my life, this
is the story of how this happened. Then, you need to ask, is this how I really
felt, is this how I really and truly conceive of myself? Whenever I’m writing a
scene, the first way I usually write it is the way that corresponds to existing
tropes of how such scenes are written. Its only in excavating the specific
memories of what actually happened and the interaction between those factual
elements of the story and the constellation of feelings that I’m having that I
come to a more specific truth. And I feel like—I don’t know if concerned is the
right word, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I believe that a lot of
trans people … well, no, I can’t believe that because I don’t know thousands
and thousands of trans people. I can only say that I can imagine, given that I
had to write a whole book in order to figure out really specific aspects of my identity,
I could imagine there are trans people out there who rely on existing tropes to
describe their identities and experiences, when, upon self-examination, those
tropes don’t actually hold up. Their conceptions of themselves are more
specific, idiosyncratic, and perhaps unique, than they themselves allow for at
this moment.
Unflinching
Honesty: An Interview with Meredith Talusan. By RL Goldberg. The Paris Review,
May 26, 2020.
Meredith
Talusan knows a thing or two about journeys. When I called her up in March to
discuss her debut book, Fairest (out this week from Viking), she had only been
back home in the U.S. for about a day. Prior to our conversation, she had been
in Guatemala on an individual writer’s retreat, already at work on her next
book: a novel. After receiving an alarming email from the State Department
regarding COVID-19, she had to make a mad dash to secure a flight back to the
U.S.
Luckily,
Talusan is well-acquainted with abrupt and dramatic changes to her scenery. Her
luminous memoir follows Talusan’s childhood as a boy with albinism, known as a
“sun child,” growing up in a rural village in the Philippines. Talusan’s
gorgeous, vulnerable prose explores her pre–gender transition adolescence in
that village and later, Manila, as well as her family’s journey immigrating to
Southern California. In addition to being her personal immigrant story, a
narrative of gender transition, and a queer bildungsroman of a
literature-obsessed Harvard undergrad, Fairest also takes readers through a few
of Talusan’s continent-crossing sexual and romantic relationships.
In this
interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, Talusan unpacks the
role of the mirror in trans women’s lives, how she went about tackling the
challenge of writing sex scenes about herself, and how Fairest allowed her to
honor her messy twentysomething self.
Madeline
Ducharme: Mirrors play a huge role in your book. The title obviously evokes the
fairy tale rhyme of “mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them
all?” but there’s also a dual meaning in “fairest” with the question of equity:
What is fairest for all of us? Can you tell me more about that?
Meredith
Talusan: I’m really fascinated by the mirror because of the fact that it’s such
a long-running sort of, like, cliché in terms of trans writing, you know?
There’s been so much criticism around the fact that trans women are obsessed
with the way that we look and, you know, every trans-related movie has a scene
with a trans woman putting on makeup in the mirror. So for me, I wanted to say:
Yes, it is the case that one of the ways in which trans women filter our
experiences is by looking at ourselves, but, that action, which is so
associated—not just for trans women but for women in general—with vanity, with
superficiality, is actually also an opportunity for us to introspect. It’s
actually time that many men don’t take to do.
In the
process of putting on what we need to put on in order to move in the world,
we’re also simultaneously thinking about what it’s like to be there, what it’s
like to be observed, how it is that we interact and relate to others. As
somebody who has such a huge gulf between my internal perception and my
external reality, that action is really important to me. The very weird thing
about me is that in a lot of ways, I transitioned in order to allow for my
internal perception of my femininity and my womanhood to match external reality
better, but in fact, I am extremely, extremely internally Filipino. You know, I
grew up in a rural environment in the Philippines, I only spoke Tagalog for the
first six or seven years of my life, and so there’s this way in which I have to
look in the mirror to constantly remind myself, no, other people aren’t
perceiving me the way I perceive myself. And I constantly have to
negotiate those two perceptions.
MD : You
also seem to have this fearlessness around being seen and being observed. That
theme seems to be important throughout your book and throughout your life,
whether it be at Harvard as the Dancing Deviant (your theater show that got so
much attention and acclaim) or being a child television star in the
Philippines. Can you talk about the way that visibility in this way has kind of
shaped your life and your writing?
MT : There’s
this interesting way that as a very young child, there were people who tried to
reinforce this idea that I was abnormal, that I was freakish, that I belonged
to a category of people that is not worth paying attention to. And I do think
that in a lot of ways, I developed this coping mechanism of: “Oh, you think
that I’m a freak? Well … look at this!” You know? “Just see what I can do! And
see what you think after that!”
MD : It
also seems there’s a power that’s granted to you throughout your life by way of
perceived whiteness. What was it like to interrogate that experience?
MT : I
mean the book has been immensely personally beneficial to me because of the
fact that one’s life moves—especially during those periods that I write about
in the book—at such a dizzying pace that it becomes very difficult to take
stock of your life at the time. And I do think engaging in that interrogation
has been super helpful just in terms of becoming much more aware and much more
precise about that quality of my life: that this really random genetic
occurrence that is supposed to disable me and render me freakish is actually a
quality that has, on aggregate, hugely advantaged me. And that isn’t true for a
lot of albino people for various reasons.
And it
is something that I think about a lot and it’s something that, now that I’ve
written the book, I have a much clearer understanding of and a much greater
appreciation for people who hold me accountable for being white-passing but
also for, you know, being kind to my own self. Being kind to the fact that I am
in many ways alienated from my own people because Filipinos can’t recognize me
as Filipino, and even when they do, there is a gulf between me and a lot of
Filipinos that I interact with just because we have such different experiences,
and none of that is our fault. You know, we didn’t create these societal
structures. But at the same time, the realities of both are much clearer to me
now. That I can simultaneously say, without question, that looking white and by
extension, looking cisgender because of the fact that I look white, has been
really advantageous for me but also has been really psychologically difficult
and damaging in a lot of ways, and both of those things can be true.
MD : Something
your book does so beautifully is talk about elements of transition in our lives
that are unrelated to gender. There’s, like, your transition from being a rural
to an urban resident, from being poor to well-off in a relationship with
somebody who has a lot of inherited wealth, being the center of attention to
being anonymous. It’s so powerful to read about those versions of transition in
tandem with your story of gender transition.
MT :
Yeah,
that was definitely deliberate. When I was conceiving and proposing this book,
I felt a lot of pressure, whether explicit or implicit, from the publishing
industry like, “Oh, people are interested in trans stuff right now so this book
has to be—whatever it is, it has to be primarily like a trans-related book.”
And for me, I was not interested in that, because of the fact that it just
oversimplifies my experience. Also, what’s really interesting is that memoir
itself is a craft. In this genre, your memoir needs to be about one main theme
and one main topic, and I realized that the genre evolved out of writers who
had one thing in their lives and could do that. Like, [these writers] could
parcel out one thing of their experience and say like, OK, this is what I’m
exploring in this book. And for me, I said to myself, “No! Like, I can’t—first
of all, my experiences of race and gender are so intertwined that it’s just
impossible, there’s no way.” And I think that over time, the book really
developed, I call it a kind of prismatic lens. You can’t just see the world
from this singular perspective, right? It has to be kaleidoscopic, it has to be
prismatic.
MD : Now
for a fun question: The sex in your memoir is extremely hot. You write about
sex with a beautiful and moving ferocity. Can you tell us about what it was
like to mine those experiences and write something so erotic and so personal?
MT :
Thank
you, that’s such a huge compliment—because at the time, it was like, ugh, this
is so awkward.
One of
the things that I discovered is that in order to write those scenes, it
actually took me getting to a place where I’m so fully comfortable in my
current identity, so fully comfortable in my own sense of my own womanhood,
which is like a form of womanhood that is just not the same as a lot of cis
people’s.
And one
of the forms that that womanhood takes is that I am a woman who used to really
enjoy having sex as a man. And being able to understand that about myself
allowed me to then really open up that space, psychologically. In Fairest, I
also expressed the ways in which I felt alienated from sex as a gay man, and I
think it’s good to be in a psychological space where both of those
possibilities were open, where it’s not just like, “Oh my God, I hated my body,
I hated my penis, therefore, everything was bad!” I was in a psychological
space where I could also think, “No actually, there were things that you really
liked about it!” I really liked enjoying sex without having to feel like people
were socially punishing me. I really liked being able to say things that were
sexually explicit without people judging me.
MD :
I’m
curious about how writing this book compared with writing really personal
journalism for outlets like the New York Times and Them.
MT :
One of
the early decisions that I made writing this book is to create a space for
myself and also for trans writers in general to write about our own
experiences, on our own terms, outside of how we can harness that experience in
order to make a political or social point. That was really important to me. So
if you notice, the book has only a couple of necessary moments, but on the
whole, it does not talk about external politics. It doesn’t talk about the Time
magazine “Trans Tipping Point” …
MD :
Right!
It’s like, can someone please write one book, one piece on trans life and
culture that doesn’t mention Laverne Cox appearing on the cover of Time
magazine?
MT :
Right!
Exactly. I do think that in a way one of the most political things that the
book does is to not politicize itself. Instead, it says these are all of the
things that have happened to me, this is how I experienced them at the time,
and some of those experiences people now will find difficult to handle, and
problematic. They’ll find that they do not conform to their political
standards, and all I can say to that is that is how I experienced those things.
I am a person that is very different in 2020 than I was back in the early 2000s
when I transitioned, and I want to honor that difference. [And I think] the
best way for me to honor the person that I was, with all of my faults, with all
of my misguided thinking at the time, is to actually represent that person
honestly. And to actually represent her without sort of doing this larger
political point, larger political rationalization or apology. I feel like
that’s for other people to do
“It Has
to Be Prismatic” : Meredith Talusan discusses mirrors, transitions, and the
craft of memoir upon the release of her critically acclaimed new book, Fairest. By Madeleine Ducharme. Slate ,
May 26,
2020.
The
journalist Meredith Talusan was a young teenager in a small town in the
Philippines when, in 1989, the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw proposed the
concept of intersectionality to describe the ways in which race and gender and
sexuality overlap to either amplify or ease discrimination. Decades later, as
social media has catapulted academic jargon into everyday vocabulary, the term
has become warped to signify a restructuring of society, with minorities at the
top. But still this theory — that identity categories are not mutually
exclusive, but integrated components of a single, multidimensional experience —
remains immensely relevant today. Talusan’s debut memoir, “Fairest,” embodies
both Crenshaw’s original framework as well as its contemporary misunderstanding,
rendering an intellectual debate intimate.
Recounting
her coming-of-age as a transgender Filipino-American person with albinism,
Talusan sails past the conventions of trans and immigrant memoirs. Rather than
flaying her identities one by one, she examines the links between them to
illustrate that it is here, in the messy overlap, that a person is made. “I was
an outcast among outcasts,” she writes of her earliest years in America, “but I
didn’t feel despair because I’d come to accept the blessing of my unique
experience.”
From her
boyhood in the Philippines, to her years as a gay Harvard undergraduate, to
becoming gender nonbinary and then a trans woman, Talusan’s account is informed
by the social, historical and political contexts of each environment she has
called home. American cultural hegemony looms over her childhood in the
province of Bulacan, north of Manila, where she tries to emulate the Western
inflection of the English she hears on TV and in pop music. In college, she
liberates herself on the dance floor and through the women protagonists of her
literature syllabuses. Later on, she seizes on art and personal relationships
to continue that exploration.
Reclaiming
the right to self-identify is often portrayed as the archetypal journey of the
marginalized, but no identity occurs in a vacuum. Far from making her a pariah,
Talusan’s fair skin and blond hair offer her both a steppingstone and a
protective barrier that too frequently elude immigrants with darker features:
“I quickly confirmed that it was to my benefit to seem white.”
The
phenomenon of passing is complicated, and rightly thorny. Of course no one
should have to hide her transness, or her Asianness, to be safe on a dark
street, or to achieve her personal or professional goals. And yet her
darker-skinned brother experiences life in a harsher America. Talusan navigates
these complex dynamics graciously, acknowledging both her privileges and their
cost: the constant threat of being exposed as herself.
Bounding
between place and time, “Fairest”’s shaky structure and inelegant sentences can
sometimes threaten its momentum. But Talusan also toggles between emotional
planes as well — between the soft edges of her grandmother’s affection and the
angled resentment of her young, negligent parents, who move her to California
when she is 14. She is afraid to leave her home behind for the prospect of
perpetual outsiderness, but “my grandmother forced me to admit that the right
direction, no matter how painful, was toward that infinite horizon.” That horizon
turns out to be self-knowledge, and self-acceptance.
Although
her account can grow tedious with anecdotal detail, there’s enough material in
Talusan’s life story to fill several memoirs. She returns as an adult to
Harvard and to the Philippines, re-examining the physical and emotional spaces
that have formed her. In telling this story, Talusan finds something like
resolution: She gives voice to a self that somehow always existed, she just
couldn’t yet see it.
From the
Philippines to Harvard, Boyhood to Womanhood, a Coming-of-Age Across Borders.
By Rawiya Kameir. The New York Times, May
26 2020
As a
young child, Marc Talusan was enthralled with the music of Lea Salonga upon
first listen, connecting with Salonga's lyric "I am the girl with golden
hair."
Writes
Talusan: "But by the time she sang, "What a joy! What a life! What a
chance!" a few moments later, I had already returned to my own body, the
body of a boy in the Philippines who just happened to have her hair. My future
may hold riches, but I would not live it as a beautiful woman."
What
Talusan did receive, throughout a childhood in the Philippines, was positive
affirmation based upon the white skin-tone and blonde hair that came with
Talusan's albinism. Talusan's grandmother would always say: '"Those other
kids aren't white like you,"' writes Talusan. "And when she said
white, puti, I could tell she also meant beautiful, intelligent, better, more
special."
Everywhere
the young Talusan went, from grocery shopping to a bus ride to visit family,
Talusan was met with positive affirmation because of this whiteness. This
deification of whiteness in a culture in which whiteness is alien speaks to the
immense power of the narrative of white supremacy that anchored Western
colonization.
Yet, the
same white body that makes Talusan so desirable at home — the same body, when
migrated to the United States, the land of whiteness — is faced with the lack
of desirability based on race; indeed, a meditation on this forms much of the
opening section of the memoir, itself anchored in a reunion event for Harvard's
queer alumni. Here, Talusan interrogates "how our looks determined our
place in the gay pecking order and how our lack of attractiveness had so much
to do with our race and femininity," before noting that Talusan and the
other person of color at the reunion, Kit Clark, a queer black man, "both
occupied liminal spaces in our white-dominated Harvard gay society" due to
race.
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, predominantly white spaces of privilege.
At times, this solidarity is in simply seeing each other—in un-erasing the
erasure whiteness creates. Writes Talusan movingly of the importance of Kit
Clark's queer POC presence in that elite, white LGBTQ space:
"He
recognized me as an albino Asian when everyone else thought I was white; he
could tell my workout regimen was cover for a femininity I obscured because it
was not attractive."
And yet
Talusan, despite constant positive affirmation because of "fair" skin
and hair, while still known as Marc Talusan, always felt something was missing.
Although Talusan had had a lifelong understanding of queerness, it would not be
until years later and a chance meeting with a student's trans friend that
Talusan would realize life could be lived as Meredith Talusan instead:
"Me, a child from a Philippine province, descendant of peasant farmers,
son of derelict immigrants."
But
before this moment is the journey: We see Talusan's move from childhood
sanctuary with grandmother Nanay Coro in the Filipino countryside to freshman
year at Harvard learning queer theory in the classroom and the easy cruelty and
cool disposability of dating and sex in American culture outside of the
classroom; we see Talusan study abroad in London; we see Talusan having found a
fulfilling relationship with a mature and loving partner, faced with this
horrific impasse: As Talusan transitions to living as a woman, Talusan's
partner "didn't see the person he fell in love with when he looked at
me."
This
nuance, this careful attention to looking and attempting to understand this
journey not just from her own perspective, but also from those affected by it,
gives a welcome maturity, depth and resonance to Talusan's memoir. One of the
most touching scenes in the book is in the beginning of Talusan's transition to
womanhood. Talusan's partner, Ralph, just wants her to look "normal,"
as he calls it and asks Talusan to dress like a man, without make-up, for a
friend's important event at Carnegie Hall. Talusan promises — but when she goes
to the bathroom to scrub her face free of make-up, she cannot, eventually
collapsing crying on the floor. To erase her make-up, to erase her
femininity—to make herself look like a man when she is a woman — is destroying
her in that moment. And Ralph, hearing her pain, comes into the bathroom and
hugs her. He tells Talusan that he will never ask her to take off her make-up
again.
The
make-up, a stand-in for true selfhood and identity, functions in conversation
with the usage of the mirror, a central grounding conceit for Talusan's flights
into astute analysis of race, gender and sexuality not just here, but elsewhere
in the book. While an argument can be made that the vehicle of a mirror as a
tool for self-reflection is a bit on-point, a bit overused, it does hold a
productive presence both narratively and structurally in this gorgeous and
lyrical debut.
It is
worth noting how Talusan begins to unpack the uneasy conversation between
herself and the figure of the white, golden-blonde female as the ideal woman
still proliferated by post-colonial white supremacy. Writes Talusan toward the
end of Fairest: :
"Barrett's
words kept playing in my head, 'I don't see you as trans,' coupled with 'I
can't tell you're Asian.' The way he looked at me was exactly what I'd honed
over many years, this trick of perception, and it puzzled me that I was
dissatisfied over having accomplished it, a state of being so many trans women
sacrifice so much to achieve."
Here,
Talusan points to the problematic trans and racial double erasure endemic to
the cis white gaze. Later, Talusan again pushes back against this erasure of
her trans identity: "I couldn't bring myself to wish I had never been a
man, because my life as a man was part of the complexity of my being, this
unusual person I had become, someone whose insights I cherished."
In the
time in which Talusan was coming into adulthood after immigrating to the United
States, there was less space for duality and gender fluidity. Now, however,
that Talusan is more centered in her own culture rather than global white
supremacy, she is more aware of gender fluidity in her own cultural history:
"among my own indigenous ancestors, select male-bodied people who lived
their lives as women were held in high esteem and found themselves husbands, in
domestic life treated identically as other women."
Now,
too, that we are living in a time with more acceptance of nonbinary gender
expression, Talusan questions if she even needs the language of identifying as
a "woman" anymore. Indeed, at the university reunion in 2018 that
structurally grounds the narrative, Talusan wonders: "why becoming a woman
had seemed so urgent then, when it felt so mundane now, as I realized that
being a woman was less important to me than having experienced being a woman,
that I'd grown much less precious about how people gendered me, even though I
still felt alienated from the toxic parts of manhood."
The
language we have now, the spaces and community support to exist firmly within a
gender fluid and/or nonbinary gender identity are developments made mostly
within the last 50 years. They have been made, in large part, because of the
work of inspiring trans activists like Talusan. Because of them, people are no
longer faced with erasure or binary opposition as the only realities.
Just as
there are multiple feminisms, there are multiple genders and multiple
sexualities along a spectrum. And Talusan, like everyone else, is no longer
forced into a binary at either end of this spectrum to exist in this world, but
can now exist at various points on this spectrum, engaging with masculinity and
femininity in a happy balance that most aligns with her authentic self.
A Memoir
Reflects On What Happens To The 'Fairest' Of Them All. By Hope Wabuke. NPR ,
May 27, 2020
