LGB Alliance and LGBT foundation have disagreed over the context of an essay written by novelist, Chimamanda Adichie.
Adichie in her detailed essay dived into the conduct of young people on social media “who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion”, who she says are part of a generation “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow”.
The essay titled ‘It is Obscene’ was published on her website on Tuesday night. It attracted so much attention that her website temporarily crashed.
The essay goes into her interactions with two unnamed writers who attended Adichie’s Lagos writing workshop. Both later criticised her on social media for her comments about transgender people and feminism in a 2017 Channel 4 interview, saying “a trans woman is a trans woman”.
At the time, Adichie rejected the claim that she did not believe trans women were women, saying: “Of course they are women but in talking about feminism and gender and all of that, it’s important for us to acknowledge the differences in experience of gender.”
Adichie was subsequently named in the author biography of the first novel by one of the writers. Quoting from emails sent at the time, Adichie’s essay recounts how she asked for her name to be removed from the book, detailing further attacks on social media and how “this person began a narrative that I had sabotaged their career”.
Last year, the non-binary transgender author Akwaeke Emezi tweeted that two days after their novel, Freshwater, was published, “[Adichie] asked that her name be removed from my bio everywhere because of my tweets online. Most were about her transphobia.”
Adichie wrote in her essay that she was “very supportive of this writer”, because she believed that “we need a diverse range of African stories”.
“Asking that my name be removed from your biography is not sabotaging your career. It is about protecting my boundaries of what I consider acceptable in civil human behaviour,” writes the author of Half of a Yellow Sun.
On Wednesday, Emezi posted a video on Instagram which partially responded to Adichie’s essay. “I am not going to read what home girl wrote and do like a blow-by-blow rebuttal of it, because I am not even going to read it. Because it doesn’t affect my life,” they said. “I am just going to poke my head in, remind us that we matter, that we are important, that our worlds are fucking bigger than anything that these people can ever imagine and that we don’t ever have to be legible to them. We don’t have to be validated by them.”
The other writer mentioned by Adichie was “welcomed” into the novelist’s life, Adichie writes in her essay, but after the criticism of Adichie’s comments, she “publicly insulted” Adichie on social media.
“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,” Adichie wrote.
However, the LGBT foundation in a statement on its website said it was disappointed in the essay written by the celebrated novelist.
The statement reads
We are deeply disappointed to see Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s transphobic essay about non-binary writer Akwaeke Emezi and other Nigerian trans writers.
Misgendering trans and non-binary people is always transphobic and always unacceptable.
So rarely do trans and non-binary people get to tell our own stories. It is saddening to see a well-established writer use her influence and power to try to silence the voices of trans communities.
We know that many in our community once took strength from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words. We acknowledge that it is painful to see someone who once wrote so powerfully about the dangers of the single story now join with anti-trans campaigners in perpetuating a single, false narrative about trans people.
We are also clear that this false narrative causes real harm and contributes to a hostile living environment for trans and non-binary people globally. We are especially aware that global trans and non-binary voices of colour, particularly Black voices, are at a particularly vulnerable intersection of racism and transphobia, and this situation is inevitably going to add further pain and hostility coming from such an influential Black writer.
Today, we stand in solidarity with our Nigerian trans and non-binary siblings. We want our trans and non-binary communities to know that we are with you in the fight against transphobia in all its forms.
But reacting to the LGBT Foundation’s statement, LGB Alliance said;
We recommend everyone read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay and form their own opinion about it. At LGB Alliance we consider it a beautiful, nuanced essay, full of important insights & not at all “transphobic”, a word that in our view has been drained of significance by overuse.
