Chimamanda Breaks Her Silence

How abusive, envious bullies use gender ideology to harass, by Genevieve Gluck

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published an essay titled “It Is Obscene” to her website in part to respond to accusations of transphobia launched at her by novelist Akwaeke Emezi in November 2020. In a blistering Twitter thread, Emezi linked to a Pink News article condemning Adichie for supporting J.K. Rowling’s essay “Terf Wars”, which Adichie described as “a perfectly reasonable piece” in an interview with The Guardian published November 14. “J.K. Rowling is a woman who is progressive, who clearly stands for and believes in diversity. The orthodoxy, the idea that you are supposed to mouth the words, it is so boring. In general, human beings are emotionally intelligent enough to know when something is coming from a bad place,” Adichie said.

A slew of articles were written slandering Adichie for supporting Rowling. The Pink News article ran under the headline, “Acclaimed feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie thinks JK Rowling’s explosive anti-trans essay was ‘a perfectly reasonable piece’”; Blavity published an article titled, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Slammed For Defending JK Rowling’s Anti-Trans Essay”; Bitch magazine published a list of book recommendations called “4 Nigerian Authors to Read Who Haven’t Been Proudly Transphobic”.

Emezi, known for her debut novel Freshwater (2018), had attended a writing workshop of Adichie’s in 2015. In an attempt to support a “Bright Young Nigerian Feminist”, Adichie welcomed her into her home and her life, saying she acted as a “support-giver, counsellor, and comforter”. In her open letter, Adichie released email exchanges and details of the public slander she endured from Emezi for years, originating after a 2017 interview with BBC Channel 4.

During the interview, Adichie responded to a question about ‘trans women’ by saying: “When people talk about ‘trans women are women,’ my feeling is that trans women are trans women.” For this, Emezi publicly insulted Adichie and went so far as to label her a “murderer”. Adichie subsequently began to distance herself from the young writer. Emezi reached out to Adichie, who “hoped never to hear from her again” on account of her manipulative tactics of lying and abusing her trust.

“Innuendo without fact is immoral… It is a simple story – you got close to a famous person, you publicly insulted the famous person to aggrandize yourself, the famous person cut you off, you sent emails and texts that were ignored, and you then decided to go on social media to peddle falsehoods. It is obscene to tell the world that you refused to kiss a ring when in fact there isn’t any ring at all.”

Nevertheless, Emezi did not relent. In response to Adichie’s neutral statement of support for Rowling’s essay, Emezi doubled down on her attacks. Among the accusations and statements about Adichie that Emezi listed in her 2020 Twitter thread:

- she gives no fucks about trans people or about harming us

- it still hurts that she’s transphobic

- so many people tried to educate her

- we are talking about a woman who aligns with war criminals

- I trust there are other people who will pick up machetes to protect us from the harm transphobes like Adichie and Rowling seek to perpetuate

Emezi also made headlines in 2020 for denouncing the UK Women’s Prize for Fiction, an award she was nominated for in 2019, because she was asked for information about her sex in accordance with the law. Emezi, who identifies as “non-binary transgender”, said that even the longlisting of her novel by the Women’s Prize was “transphobic”, and declared that “sex as defined by law” is “a weapon used against trans women.” Notably, a woman who denied her own sex bullied the Women’s Prize out of centering other members of her sex. And since that time, the Women’s Prize has altered their qualification process. In spring of 2021, a trans-identified male author who has written extensively about forced feminization pornography was longlisted for the award.

In her open letter, Adichie manages to deliver eloquently damning diction without wading into the murky waters of what Rowling called the “terf wars”. With a dignified ferocity, she defends herself from the deception and abuse Emezi subjected her to:

“You will convince yourself that your hypocritical, self-regarding, compassion-free behavior is in fact principled feminism. It isn’t. You will wrap your mediocre malice in the false gauziness of ideological purity. But it’s still malice. You will tell yourself that being able to parrot the latest American Feminist orthodoxy justifies your hacking at the spirit of a person who had shown you only kindness. You can call your opportunism by any name, but it doesn’t make it any less of the ugly opportunism that it is.”

But perhaps more importantly, Adichie teaches us all a lesson in humility when she shines a light on the ways social media can corrupt. Without using the words ‘cancel culture’, Adichie nevertheless references it, and a trend towards disavowing and trampling on others to elevate one’s own social clout that is today rampant on social media, and particularly on Twitter.

“People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence.

And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene.”

Indeed, it is obscene, yet what Adichie has gracefully avoided pointing out is how the toxic nature of discussions around “gender identity” have created an all-out war. Those who align themselves with gender ideologues tend to gain their own elevated status by making demands and insulting, then claiming a victimhood status when rebuked. They are massively rewarded for doing so. Gender ideology is an open declaration of antagonism against the female sex, against women’s boundaries, and against the bodies of women and children. It has led to the rationalization of irreversible harm done to otherwise healthy bodies. It has fractured the women’s movement in ways that will take decades to repair, as is evidenced by the growing divide between women as a direct result of either adherence to or rejection of its dogma.

Gender ideology is a socially imposed and enforced dissociation that demands women disavow ownership of their bodies and condemn those who refuse. Its followers insist that women surrender their very selfhood for the sake of those men who seek to remove women from the physical, to place the female sex into the metaphysical, where they can retain their authority over what women can say, think and do, and what rights they believe should be granted to females. It is not a coincidence that the war is largely conducted online, on social media, in a space already dissociated from reality and where voices of opposition are silenced regularly for asserting that sex does indeed matter for women’s rights; that women do, in fact, exist independently of men, and not in their minds.

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My thanks to Genevieve Gluck for this brilliant piece. Her blog is well worth a sign up.