Meredith Talusan

Meredith Talusan (born June 26, 1975) is a Filipino-American author and journalist. SheEfn|Talusan uses she/her and they/them pronouns. Talusan has written for a variety of publications including The New York Times, VICE Magazine, The Guardian, and The Atlantic.

Early life Talusan was born and raised in the town of San Rafael, Bulacan a municipality in the Philippines. She was assigned male at birth and privileged in her home country for her light skin and blond hair due to her condition, albinism. At age 7, Talusan moved to Manila and began acting. Talusan reflects on her childhood fame: "My brush with fame has taught me to value the simple pleasure of moving through the world undisturbed. It also made me keenly aware not just that celebrities can never live up to people’s fantasies, but that the pressure to do so burdens those whom I admire and adore." She lived as a gay man until she transitioned in 2002. She earned a Master of Arts in Comparative Literature and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Cornell University. She was the first trans staff writer at BuzzFeed and the first trans person to hold an executive position at Condé Nast. Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, and Nasty Women.

Talusan's Mic feature "Unerased: Counting Transgender Lives" won a GLAAD award, The Al Neuharth Award for Innovation in Investigative Journalism, and a Deadline Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in 2017.

Fairest Talusan's first memoir Fairest was released on May 26, 2020, by Viking Press under Penguin Random House. The memoir details Talusan's journey from life in the Philippines as a boy with albinism to embodying her trans self as a woman in America. The Boston Globe says: "Talusan breathes new life into the well-worn body of the transgender life story." The Library Journal notes Talusan's "rare, frank vulnerability" in describing Fairest as a "debut [that stands] out from the crowd."

Other writing In 2025, Talusan wrote the essay "Trick" for Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color, edited by Denne Michele Norris and Electric Literature. The collection became a finalist for the 2026 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.

Personal life Talusan describes herself as a "queer albino first-generation Filipino immigrant" and is nonbinary, bisexual, and transgender.