Reading Meredith Talusan’s Fairest: A Queer Decolonial Critique of the U.S. Empire

This essay examines Meredith Talusan’s Fairest, the first book-length memoir by and about a trans Asian woman. I argue that Talusan’s gender and sexual reconstruction is an ongoing process of accepting, negotiating, and rejecting ideas deeply rooted in the white heteropatriarchy that prevails throughout the U.S. transnational empire. I first investigate Talusan’s critique of the colonial mentality that is imposed on Filipinos, and their suggestion to resist such a sense of indigenous inferiority. Next, I explore how Talusan molded themself to blend into the masculinity-obsessed American gay culture that renders Asian men undesirable, but they ultimately realized that either passing as white or gay erased certain parts of who they really are. Last, I analyze how Talusan proposes a new direction of trans feminism that centers on woman-identification while rejecting the male privileges that they had enjoyed before gender transition. Inspired by nineteenth-century British women writers, Talusan revisits the colonial history of Filipino transgender people as victims of gender-based violence.