Memoirs by Trans and Nonbinary Immigrants/Children of Immigrants

5 books by immigrants and children of immigrants living in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S.

Horse Barbie

Released in 2023, Horse Barbie is the memoir of model and director Geena Rocero. She was born in the Philippines, where she found community and fame as a trans pageant queen in her teens. At the height of Rocero’s career, Rocero’s mother, who had migrated to the U.S., asked Rocero to join her. Rocero was initially reluctant to leave the Philippines, but her mother persuaded her to come to the U.S. with the prospect of obtaining identity documents that matched her name and gender. Rocero started a new life in the U.S., and faced, for the first time, the need to enter the closet to protect both her career and her physical safety…

Beautiful Monster

Actor and yoga teacher Miles Borrero shares his story in his 2023 memoir Beautiful Monster. Borrero is a Colombian immigrant who had lived half his life the U.S. He was close to middle age when he learned that his father might soon pass away. Now Borrero had the face the fact that he had been delaying his gender transition out of fear of upsetting his family, but he also needed to be recognized as his father’s son before it was too late…

Life as a Unicorn

Nonbinary writer/director Amrou Al-Kadhi was born in London to Iraqi parents. The family lived in Dubai and Bahrain before returning to U.K. where Al-Kadhi eventually graduated from Cambridge. Caught between parents who met Al-Kadhi’s childhood queerness with denial, and Eaton schoolmates who exotified and stereotyped them, Al-Kadhi spent subsequent years unlearning internalized racism and Islamophobia, developing their drag persona Glamrou from an imitation of white womanhood to a celebration of strong Arab women. Their memoir “Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything In Between” won the Polari Prize in 2020.

I’m Afraid of Men

Vivek Shraya is a Canadian Screen Award winner and Polaris Music Prize nominee. In her memoir, I’m Afraid of Men, she talks about growing up as a transfeminine child with an accepting mother. Unfortunately, Canadian society was not as tolerant as her Indian immigrant mother. Shraya faced aggression in public spaces for her gender non-conforming presentation. In 2014, Arsenal Pulp Press published her YA short story collection “God Loves Hair”, about a genderqueer child of Indian immigrants growing up in Canada. “I’m Afraid of Men” was a finalist for Lambda Literary Awards in the Transgender Non-fiction category.

Fairest

Born in the Philippines, Meredith Talusan moved to the United States in her teens, passing for white as an albino Filipinx. In her 2020 memoir, she shares her perspective as someone who has lived on different sides of gender lines and racial lines. Talusan acknowledges the internalized white supremacy that helped her visualize a future at Harvard even though she was “a poor kid who’d gone to a mediocre public school in Chino, California”: “I relied on that perception to bolster my belief that I could do well in America, that I was better than the brown rural peasants I left behind.” As a gay male university student, she began exploring her femininity through drag, experiencing in the loss of safety conferred by male privilege when she passed as a woman on the street and was followed by strange men. Nevertheless, Talusan continued to move towards her authentic expression as a transwoman, even if it meant losing her gay male partner. “I would always wonder what it was like on the other side of gender and that wandering would be even worse than staying where I was for this man I loved.”