Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on transgender row: 'I have nothing to apologise for'

[oberliner]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist and feminist, has condemned a “language orthodoxy” on the political left after she endured a vitriolic backlash over comments about transgender women.

The author of Half of a Yellow Sun plunged into a row about identity politics when she suggested in an interview last week that the experiences of transgender women, who she said are born with the privileges the world accords to men, are distinct from those of women born female. She was criticised for implying that trans women are not “real women”.

But Adichie defended her comments during a public appearance in Washington on Monday night. “This is fundamentally about language orthodoxy,” she told a sellout event organised by the bookshop Politics & Prose. “There’s a part of me that resists this sort of thing because I don’t think it’s helpful to insist that unless you want to use the exact language I want you to use, I will not listen to what you’re saying.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/21/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-nothing-to-apologise-for-transgender-women

Anyone been following this?

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Not with her, but I see it elsewhere...

Some people just love to fight. She's simply saying that a trans woman grew up as a boy for a while. And that would make a difference.

Wouldn't it?

What I don't see here, but suspect, is that while trying to deal with this "real woman" stuff she's sidestepping the trans woman's Y chromosome and inability to have children. Maybe it's just me, but seems like menstruation, pregnancy, and lactation have a lot more to do with "being" a woman than heels, hairstyles, and which bathroom to use. So far as I know, no trans woman has experienced childbirth, so the fundamental reason for their being two sexes is unavailable to them.

Aside from biology, gender is purely a social structure. There is absolutely no reason why men don't wear makeup and miniskirts, except that somehow we managed to evolve this way for reasons going back to prehistory. So, changing the social structure and recognizing new genders will be confusing for a while, but fighting over it doesn't help.

[dsc]

2. It is pretty hard to argue that people who are so effiminate that they are bullied for being that

are experiencing male privilege. Many, though not all, transgender people are so untypical of their gender before transition that they get bullied for that. I also think the notion that one has to have children or menestrate to be a real woman is absurd. Many real women have no functioning reproductive systems.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Well, the breadth of human experience includes a lot of things off the norm, but...

while we work it out that doesn't mean there is no norm.

Tough to get around the idea that the only reason for there being two sexes is reproduction, and one of them has the job of creating the egg and nurturing it when fertilized. And there's that chromosome thing.

Anyway, my primary point was that we have invented all these social constructs around gender, and they are evolving.

[ismnotwasm]

4. Germaine Greer has made some of the same arguments

And has been similarly criticized. And while compelling at first glance they don't wash. The arguments are based, really, on the perverse sexualization of girls and women. Trans women, embrace the trappings of what it means to be "feminine" because that's how our society rolls. That's what they have to use to show who they really are. To present as a particular gender, especially as a women--with all that requires and the inherent dangers requires incredible courage. It also requires being a change agent--there is incredible damage being done to people with outmoded and debunked gender roles.