4 Nigerian Authors to Read Who Haven’t Been Proudly Transphobic
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the famed Nigerian author behind Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Americanah (2013), and other works has once again expressed her support for transphobia. In a November 14 Guardian interview on the occasion of winning a Women’s Prize for Fiction award (a book prize regarded as transphobic after asking nonbinary shortlist nominee, Akwaeke Emezi, for information on their sex as “defined by law”), Adichie defended J.K. Rowling’s notoriously transphobic June 2020 essay as “a perfectly reasonable piece.” It’s perhaps unsurprising that Adichie had no quarrel with Rowling’s stance: She herself once answered an interviewer’s question about whether trans women are women by saying “trans women are trans women.” In the recent Guardian interview, Adichie brushed off the backlash to her previous transphobic comments as evidence of “the American liberal orthodoxy,” suggesting that both she and Rowling are victims of a “cruel and sad” cancel culture.
Adichie has been heralded as groundbreaking and revolutionary by the likes of Beyoncé, but going to bat for Rowling serves to further highlight that her work, when compared to the inclusive feminist canon she aims to be a part of, is often itself trans-exclusionary. Take, for instance, Adichie’s epistolary 2017 book, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, which uses letters to a friend to articulate her thoughts on feminist politics, raising daughters, and teaching independence. The book’s goal is ultimately undermined by the static, violent way in which she regards trans women. In the book, Adichie’s call to consider and question your own and others’ language (“Teach her to question language…. But to teach her that, you will have to question your own language”) comes across as ironic given her unwillingness to even engage in critique of her own words; instead, in response to criticism, she uses the tired argument of being martyred by “cancel culture,” sentiments shared by problematic people everywhere.
Furthermore, Adichie’s suggestion to “question our culture’s selective use of biology as ‘reasons’ for social norms” feels willfully ignorant when considered alongside her transphobia. She asserts that men are often considered innately superior based on biological features of strength and size— why wouldn’t this argument apply to trans folks being able to self-identify? Adichie’s argument that gender is socially defined via biological sex is a reinforcement of exclusionary social norms of who gets to be a woman. Trans women aren’t “real” women as justified by our society’s narrow application of biology, Adichie argues via historical distinctions between “women born female” versus “women born male.” And despite trans women who have shown exceptional grace in educating Adichie and and “calling her in,” when speaking about trans women, the author continues to subjectively apply biology (“A trans woman is a person born male and a person who…experienced the privileges that the world accords men”) over the lived testimony of trans women like Laverne Cox who are forced to constantly defend their identity and testify about their suffering in the face of this violence.
