“Whether I grow my hair or cut it short, wear makeup every day or none at all, it would be an expression of the specific woman I am at that point in time.” —The New York Times

“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?” —The Paris Review

During a protest at Harvard, Josh Oppenheimer’s kiss shook me into the awareness that I was not quite a man. —Vulture / New York

"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." —Fairest excerpt at BuzzFeed News

“it was more important for me to know what possibilities are out there for me as a woman than to stay in a relationship in which I would never know what those possibilities are.” —Weekend Edition on NPR

An essay about why I asked for my face not to appear on the cover of Fairest, for Guernica.

“Talusan is one of the most stellar essayists writing today, and one of the very best at examining the many different meanings of transition.”—Michelle Hart, O: The Oprah Magazine

“In this ‘journey across gender,’ Talusan communicates the captivating story of what it means to be true to one’s self.” —Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post