Nigerian-American feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is being bashed for having the audacity to say that women and transgender women live different lives and they shouldn’t be conflated.
“When people talk about, ‘are trans women women?’ My feeling is trans women are trans women,” said Adichie, who argued that women who were assigned as female at birth did not have the same experiences growing up as transgender women who were assigned male and only transitioned to becoming women later in life.
“I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences,” Adichie, the author of Americanah, told UK’s Channel 4.
“It’s not about how we wear our hair or how we have a vagina or a penis,” continued Adichie. “It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men have.”
Adichie said she acknowledged the struggles transgender people go through, and that like anyone else, they should be “allowed to be,” but asserted that their experiences—regardless of the discrimination and struggles they face—were different from experiences that belonged uniquely to women, and should not be “conflated.”
“I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don’t think that’s true,” she said.
Outraged social justice warriors took to Twitter to express their disgust and dismay at her opinions, calling on her to “fix her politics” for speaking what many women are thinking.
Transgender activists like Raquel Willis wrote extended diatribes rebutting Adichie, garnering thousands of retweets and likes. Transgender actress and star of the ill-fated 2017 TV series Doubt Laverne Cox expressed similar complaints, stating that she never experienced any of the privileges of growing up male as a “feminine child.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is sticking to her guns. In a new post on Facebook, the author defended her previous statements and added that the differences in trans women’s experiences do not make them any less valid.
“To say this is not to exclude trans women from feminism or to suggest that trans issues are not feminist issues or to diminish the violence they experience—a violence that is pure misogyny,” she wrote.
“But simply to say that acknowledging differences and being supportive are not mutually exclusive. And that there is space in feminism for different experiences.”
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
