What Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie could learn from transgender women | Mic

Laverne Cox, Raquel Willis and others artfully explain why the novelist needs a listening session with transgender women.

Read more: mic.com/articles/170944/what-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-could-learn-from-transgender-women

Why I’m posting this link: I’ve been hesitating to reblog or post anything about this incident the way I always hesitate about reblogging or posting something about gender identity – I’m still scared that someone might react negatively to my personal experience. But I liked the tone of this MIC article, so I think it’s worth sharing it.

What struck me about Adichie’s original reply was that she couldn’t say “trans women are women” before moving on to the problem of different experiences of privilege and discrimination. It seems such a simple thing to me, and so sad that someone as involved in the current conversations about feminism can’t or won’t do that.

For me another passage stood out: “I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis.”

I’ve had to go through a gruelling personal crisis before coming to terms with my identity as an agender person and I’ve been suffering from intense physical dysphoria since I was a teenager. To me Adichie sounds like she has never doubted or questioned or even contemplated her gender identity – the word “identity” doesn’t even appear in the context. I can only speak to my personal experience, but for me “gender” is so much more than experiences. It’s gender identity. Who I am, how I think of myself. Gender identity informs my experiences, not the other way around. Also, to be clear: dysphoria is not a required symptom for anyone’s identity as non-binary or trans. But many trans and non-binary people do suffer from dysphoria, and especially physical dysphoria – the visceral feeling that your body is wrong, is not the body you ought to have – can be torture.

Anatomy does not inform gender identity, but anatomy matters. Personally, in terms of dysphoria and identity, and publicly, too, in terms of bathroom laws and TSA pat-downs and screenings at airports. Equating sexual anatomy with hair styles seems awfully dismissive.

That said, I’m not sure if the way some people on the internet have torn into Adichie is helpful. Of course she won’t see most of it, and I think she’s resilient enough to withstand what she does see. I also hope and believe that she’s willing to learn and to listen in spite of the clamour. Her clarification was maybe not an apology but at least it shows that she’s engaging with the topic. What I’m more worried about is the average uninformed and unaware cis person who sees such shitstorms and who ends up feeling attacked and defensive. When I was told as a child to shut up and listen, that usually didn’t make me more willing to try and understand…