About Chimamanda from a Black Woman of Trans Experience
This is about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s transphobia in the wake of her recent essay entitled “It Is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts.” I try to offer compassion, criticism, and hope from the point of view of a Black woman of trans experience* who, quiet as it is kept, has traveled on a very small piece of the literary road that Adichie has extensively traveled in her illustrious career.
First, bear with me while I ground my reflections historically.
The Longtime Case for Inclusive Feminism
On May 29, 1851, at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth, the indomitable women’s rights activist and abolitionist against the genocidal enslavement of Black people, rose before the mostly white conventioneers and reminded them that Black women are women too. Historians have arrived at the most competitive account of her words that fateful day in a speech that has come to be called “Ain’t I A Woman?”
Sojourner Truth’s wisdom that day underscores the fact that many type of women — especially Black women — have been left out of dominant definitions of womanhood and personhood in English-speaking worlds.
The brutal sting of this exclusion was felt when the United States Congress passed the 19th amendment, granting white women (and certainly not Black women) the right to vote on June 4, 1919, ratifying the decision on August 18, 1920.
Not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did Black women (and men) nominally gain the right to vote. But, this right is still under threat and continually eroded by white supremacist psychopaths within governments and businesses in Southern, Midwestern, and Southwestern states today.
Given this history, why would a feminist exclude any kind of woman from womanhood and all of the rights and experiences so dear and necessary to us?
Centering Black Women of Trans Experience
“My feeling is trans women are trans women,” Adichie said in 2017 in an interview on Britain’s Channel 4 News.
When asked about women of trans experience, she should have just said something like this:
“I can’t speak for them. Why don’t you ask that question to a woman of trans experience her self, and especially a Black woman of trans experience. Let’s center them as agents in the explanation of their own lives.”
In 2017, I sincerely believed that Adichie’s early denial of the full womanhood of women of transgender experience was an honest mistake borne of ignorance. It seemed that she spoke too soon and without clarity — without having deep and meaningful associations with the people who the interviewer was talking about, especially Black women of trans experience.
It appeared that she had, and may still not have, conversed with us extensively, befriended us, or discovered the variety and depth of our identifications, hurt, and achievements before speaking as an authority about us on any level.
I wonder if Adichie knows that, to my knowledge, I am the only Black woman of trans experience to have ever graduated from the same Master’s program in writing that she graduated from at Johns Hopkins University. She took her degree in 2003. I took my degree in 1994 in a far more oppressive, un-accepting climate at the university and in writing worlds.
Being honored as a Black woman writer (be we cis or trans) is so deeply important. As a fellow alumna, I sent her congratulatory cards through her publishers twice over the years, including when Hopkins rightly awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2016. I never expected my cards to reach her (publishing houses may not have the capacity to forward all mail) and I do not know whether she received them. However, it was important that I directly tried to convey my celebration of her achievement.
Recently, I began to detect a far more dishonest, transphobic malevolence in her actions when, in 2020, Adichie cosigned J. K. Rowling’s long record of transphobic bigotry. Adichie actually said that Rowling’s deeply hateful comments in a long screed against people of trans experience were “perfectly reasonable.” In fact, there is nothing reasonable about Rowling’s bigotry.
It was then that I began to believe that there was something implicitly bullying about Adichie’s statements and cosigning about people of trans experience, and we have a long way to go in being accountable for implicit bias.
Despite the fact that other people’s personal experience of womanhood has no direct relevance to their lives; despite the fact that no women of transgender experience have ever actually threatened their existence, wealth, power, privilege, or position; despite these things, highly paid women authors like Adichie and Rowling have gone out of their way to mischaracterize women of transgender experience.
Rowling goes far further than Adichie. Rowling has extensively-expressed false claims about women of transgender experience, espousing views that we are predators and liars.
But, while Adichie’s comments are not as brutally harmful as Rowling’s, Adichie’s statements are still deeply discriminatory and she has never made amends directly (to my knowledge) in open communication with Black women of trans experience — and especially Black women authors of trans experience — for her stances and for presuming to speak about us instead of elevating our own capacity to speak for and about ourselves.
Compassion and Critique
Many people have lauded Adichie’s rebuke (albeit without naming them directly) of OluTimehin Adegbeye and Akwaeke Emezi — two younger Nigerian authors, one a woman and the other a non-binary person respectively — in Adichie’s recent essay.
Adichie is right to feel betrayed. If I were a former student or mentee of an author, and the author made public statements that I felt were bigoted, then I would have directly and personally contacted the author to discuss the problem instead of posting about it on social media.
At the same time, I believe that Adichie’s tactic of calling out these two younger Nigerian authors, publicly sharing private emails and messages without the younger authors’ permission, and shaming them from a position of enormous power, wealth, and privilege was an extremely trifling maneuver and well beneath the blessings afforded her in her position.
Adichie remains deservedly well-loved, incredibly supported, and deeply protected. She, as the saying goes, “punched down” in a manner that misused her power for ill in a self-serving manner rather than using her outsize literary power to bring people together in positive, uplifting ways.
Moreover, it was a mistake not to respond to the young author when the author wrote to Adichie asking for forgiveness and to talk about the conflict. Someone with the most blessings loses nothing to talk through a problem directly.
Sometimes fame makes people think that they are far more important than others and, consequently, some famous authors are understandably wary of people approaching them. They expect intense loyalty from mentees and former students. They guard their privacy. They are sensitive to people potentially trying to use a personal association with them for their own fame and advancement.
The REAL Cancel Culture
I wonder what Adichie would think if she knew that I receive virulent, lurid, dangerous, hateful correspondence (by “snail mail,” by email, by phone, on social media, by text message, at my home, and at my jobs) every single week. Most of it is intensely transphobic. A few items of hate mail have actually come from former mentees, former students, and former editorial clients.
They send old photographs of me with my eyes digitally bloused out and knives drawn over my genitals. They try to send spoof donations to the nonprofit organization that I direct. They send screeds publicizing my former names, jobs, addresses, schools, and medical treatment. They send harassing DMs in which they conjoin transphobia with racism, calling me not just the n-word, but a “mutilated” n-word.
They spread incredibly false rumors about me as a predator. This has gone on since 1999 when I published my first essay under the byline of Cleis Abeni about being a Black woman of trans experience in a now-defunct small online literary magazine.
They send photo-shopped images of people defecating on pictures of my face to my Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages. Every week — and sometimes every day — I must “clean up” my social media pages because spammers and haters post pornographic, violent, traumatic, and toxic images and comments to almost all of my tweets and posts.
They threaten to rape me (especially, for some reason, with metal pipes or lit fire pokers); maim me; blind me; burn me alive; get me fired from jobs; and, of course, kill me in the most brutal of ways.
They are obsessed with my body, and especially my genitals. They somehow obtained my medical records despite HIPAA law, and publicized every single act of my healthcare before 2014. At the time, the nurses at my doctor’s were mistreating me with intense hostility when I visited the doctor’s clinic and I suspect that a staff member at that horrible place actually stole, misappropriated, and illegally disclosed my medical records. I took steps to suppress the disclosures and moved on with my life instead of suing.
The “cancel culture” that Adichie talked about in her essay is a complete and utter fantasy. No one is canceling her. Most people are, in fact, elevating her and her work continually — and deservedly so! — and she commands huge attention every time she writes and speaks publicly.
The real cancel culture is what I and so many marginalized Black women of trans experience endure every damn day of our lives. The harm and viciousness that we face is the essence and the ether of true cancel culture.
I know good and well that most people don’t care about me as I truly am. Many people would rather I not speak, make money, have housing, or even LIVE. I know this because they tell me so every week of my life in innumerable, violent ways that sometimes tax my very will to live.
When I was an openly gender-nonconforming child (and I have actually called myself “gender-nonconforming” with those exact words since 1978), I knew what true cancel culture was.
Members of own family continually canceled me, throwing me away into foster facilities, bullying me, beating me, burning me with hot iron hair pressing combs (I have one such scar on the left side of my face and on my hand), cheating me, and stealing from me.
Predators in and out of foster facilities gang-raped me leading to hospitalization and surgeries to repair my body at the age of 12 — and I have lifelong injuries as a result — and people have beat me on the street to the point of knocking out my teeth, scarring me, further injuring my spine, and more.
Yes, before God, I know what it means to be canceled, I’ll tell you that much, and it is an affront for such a blessed and privileged author like Adichie to claim anything about her fantasy of cancel culture is somehow “obscene.”
The obscenity of true cancel culture befalls my fellow Black women, men, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming people of trans experience — especially those of us who are older now, infirm, and disabled.
Only once did I speak out publicly about the vicious harassment that I have endured within literary worlds when the behavior of the person harassing me became potentially deadly. I spoke out in writing on one of my websites because I wanted to protect others from the individual’s predation.
I wonder if Adichie would realize that the experiences that I detail here are far more dangerous than she, with her well-earned blessings, could ever imagine enduring.
I wonder if, after learning what I go through every week, she would find it in her heart to perform transformative and restorative justice with OluTimehin Adegbeye and Akwaeke Emezi, two authors who, I believe, are not at all like the predators who attempt to undermine my existence every week of my life.
I feel that it is so important that we must never believe our own hype.
Famous authors must relish their unruly and quite flawed readers, fans, students, and mentees as critically important — and uniquely fallible — forces in the hyper-capitalist networks of writing worlds that only elevate a few authors to wealthy, award-winning status for ineffable reasons that defy easy explanation.
It is the height of narcissism to castigate younger writers who are seeking attention for their work through networking and gaining boosts from established authors when that, in part, is how most authors — including, no doubt, Adichie — gained at least part of their opportunities, power, wealth, and position in the writing world.
Every association, writerly friendship, blurb, phone or written reference, and strategically-voiced statement of praise helps authors magnify blessings. Gaining boosts from established authors is, well, the established way to get ahead as an author in this hyper-capitalist world.
Faulting OluTimehin Adegbeye and Akwaeke Emezi for doing this — and ratting out private communications — is just as harmful as them allegedly airing their grievances on social media.
The Myopia of Biological Determinism
At a certain point, transphobic people, including authors like Rowling and Adichie — no matter the degree of their transphobia — will often rationalize their hatred, fearmongering, or confusing statements by suggesting that they are standing up for the experiences of biologically determined womanhood.
Well, biological determinism is a very harmful approach and let me tell you why in plainspoken terms.
As a child I grew up partly in foster facilities. I learned in those places away from the care of my biological parents that biological determinism is myopic —meaning, it’s shortsighted and narrow-minded to the detriment of marginalized people like me.
We shouldn’t base parenting only on biological ties because if we do this, then millions of children that have been displaced from their biological parents would be denied the care offered by non-biological surrogates.
Nor should we base our definitions of any aspect of our personhood solely on biological determinations.
Many women don’t biologically sire children, have noticeable breasts, have menses, and on and on — yet, we are still women.
Women are diverse, and I wish authors like Adichie and Rowling would consistently elevate this truth.
Hatred and fear of trans people are violent acts. This hatred and fear fuels harassment, maiming, murder, job discrimination, housing inequities, and healthcare disparities against us.
When we are identified in ways that do not reflect our gender identity, these false, de-centered identifications are ground zero for the kinds of perspectives and statements that expose us to harm.
When we demonstratively love and accept people of trans experience, we build peace and safety within and around us.
I don’t give a damn about sudden performative condolences when we are maimed and killed unless people center us when we’re alive, elevate our voices, and speak out against bigotry towards us.
When I have spoken out against Adichie’s transphobia on my social media platforms, bigots fan out and call me “misogynistic.”
I am a Black woman. I’m not “misogynistic” against myself or any other women.
I accept women as diverse.
It is my hope that Adichie will one day accept women as truly diverse too with something akin to the following words and ideas:
(1) Black WOMEN of trans experience are BLACK WOMEN, full stop.
(2) WOMEN of trans experience are WOMEN, full stop.
(3) I, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, do not support J. K. Rowling’s bigoted, hateful, harmful, mean-spirited, unnecessarily, and frequently expressed transphobic views. Nothing that Rowling says about people of trans experience is “reasonable.”
(4) I, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, apologize without equivocation for my transphobic perspective and statements. I am learning to be caring, supportive, and accepting of all people, including women of trans experience.
(5) I, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, will use my clout, prestige, power, and privilege as a well-paid, wealthy author to speak out against transphobia in a way that is NOT self-serving or laced with gaslighting and equivocations.
(6) Before I, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, say another word about people of transgender experience, I will actually reach out to BLACK WOMEN of trans experience (especially Black women authors of trans experience) and get to know them and empathize with their hurt when words are used to dis-empower them or disregard their womanhood or personhood. I will then speak in alignment with Black women of trans experience’s agency.
(7) I, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, repudiate the conservative, white supremacist men and women who now celebrate and use my essay (entitled “It Is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts” published at Chimamanda.com on 15 JUNE, 2021) as a weapon to advance their outsize bigotry and hatred towards trans people and all marginalized and oppressed people standing up for justice and flourishing.
All my hopes,
Cleis Abeni
*I deliberately use the phrases “women of transgender experience” and “people of transgender experience” (with trans sometimes replacing transgender) to refer to women whose womanhood (and people whose personhood) is, among other identifications, trans. I do not say “transwomen,” “transgender women,” “transsexual women,” or “trans women” unless referring to a woman who identifies with those exact terms. My usage is an act of lexical empowerment that forcefully says WE ARE WOMEN loudly in the grammar and syntax of my sentences.
