Lol Aja Romano.
Imagine being Chimamanda, a Nigerian women who grew up in poverty during a civil war, became a star student, got degrees from Johns Hopkins and Yale, and won a dozen or so top literary prizes only to be called out on your privilege by a “they/them” cargo freighter:
I did not know of this writer before, and looked at her Twitter bio. Apparently she is qualified to write about the subject because she uses she/they pronouns, which of course makes her just as trans as anyone else and not just a straight woman trying to be interesting. After seeing her online presence, I think the Vox editors handed her this piece rather than any of their more prominent writers because they knew any backlash would be tempered by pity.
Adichie’s point that trans women have very different experiences than cisgender women is well-made and very important. Trans women experience higher rates of
sexual assault and domestic violence,
homelessness,
suicide, and suicide attempts than cisgender women, and they’re more likely to be
re-victimized when they seek support.
And (assuming those statistics are actually true) transgender women worldwide don't have to worry about not being able to access emergency birth control after being raped, or about being forcibly married off at 13 to a 30 year old, or about suffering a uterine prolapse because they could not access sufficient medical care while giving birth to their sixth child, or about missing schooling because they can't afford sanitary products and have to stay home whenever they are on their period, or being thrown out onto the street by their husband because they can't give him children, or having to deal with old perverts harassing them on the street as soon as they start developing breasts when they are 12, or....
See how that works? She only mentions one side of the 'different experiences,' and ignores the other. In a piece that is supposed to reassure us that feminism is not only compatible with trans ideology, but that it is not real feminism without it, she ignores biological women in favor of trans women.
You are not giving women much confidence, Aja.
But Adichie’s response also felt alarmingly aligned with the rhetoric of TERFism. People who buy into TERFism
explicitly paint trans women as manipulative straight cisgender men, sexual predators just using a fake identity as “trans women” to get close to cisgender women in order to assault them.
Millions of people subscribe to strains of this dangerous belief, including prominent public figures like Harry Potter creator
J.K. Rowling.
This part is carefully and dishonestly worded so that all 'strains' of terfism are lumped into the worst form of terfism that she can imagine, the belief that every single trans woman is a sexual predators and a faker. She
knows that Rowling does not believe that, but she chose to write that she "subscribes to
strains of this dangerous belief" in the hope that readers will assume the worst and will not check.
In reality, probably even the majority of people who call themselves terfs don't believe that all trans people are faking just to assault women. Most just think the 'trans women are women!' fiction makes it impossible to weed those people out.
Her depiction of trans women as being born with substantial amounts of male privilege also hewed uncomfortably close to the TERF argument that trans women don’t lose male privilege if they transition.
These are two different points. One is saying trans women come from male privilege and one is saying they do not lose it. One belief does not necessarily lead to another. How on earth do they 'hew close'?
Most especially, Adichie’s refusal to say the oft-uttered words,
“trans women are women,” and instead insist that “trans women are
trans women” is a phrase that can easily stand in for a denial of trans identity.
There is definitely nothing at all creepy about castigating someone for refusing to repeat an ideological slogan. Nothing creepy at all.
It is the dishonesty and cowardice of this writing that irritates me more than anything else. Aja must have realized during the editing phase that it comes off as strange and authoritarian to criticize someone for not repeating that they love big brother, so she fudged the phrasing and changed it to 'oft-uttered words,' as if those words are unconnected to any belief system or powerful political force, as if it is just something people say a lot. Then, she keeps right on weaseling in the next sentence with 'can easily stand in for.'
She is terrified of Adichie, whom she knows is a real adult and a real writer, and terrified of setting a foot wrong while she tries to keep up with the demands of
trans women are women and right about everything all the time how dare you, even though those demands do not match up with the reality of what happened. So you end up with this jumble of timid, flakey phrases like 'seems like' and 'oft-uttered' and 'can easily stand in for.' I am too tired of it to read the rest of it.
