The acclaimed writer and speaker also says she doesn't read all the feminist books.
Amidst the storm starting with the comments of actress and entrepreneur, Annie Idibia on feminism, feminists and the LGBT community are not at peace with Nigerian writer, Ngozi Chimamanda-Adichie for her comments at the Abantu Book Festival on Friday, December 7, 2018.
In 2017, while promoting her book Dear Ijeawele Or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestion on U.K.’s Channel 4, as recorded by the Huffington Post, she intimated that trans-women are not women. She says, “When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ my feeling is trans women are trans women. 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. It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”
While she supports transgender people and feels they should be allowed to live, she says, “I don’t think it’s a good thing to talk about women’s issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don’t think that’s true.”
ALSO READ: Annie Idibia objects to the idea of a woman playing the role of a man
While discussing the issue again in 2018, at the Abantu Book Festival, she says she felt attacked after those comments went public. She says, “Female-bodied people have different experiences to those who are not. People who are not female-bodied just have not shared those experiences. To acknowledge that does not mean to prioritize one experience over the other.
“They make the best argument that we cannot be limited by our bodies.”
The problem originates now from how she reiterated her stance and used the portmanteau to describe, ‘trans-noise’ to describe the outrage of her 2017 comments about trans-women. Read some tweets here;
The second reason she has copped anger, as recorded by The Daily Vox’s Twitter account, @thedailyvox is because she claims to not be a fan of feminist text, “I don’t care much for feminist academic texts, I care for the textured lives of feminist characters. Maybe that’s because I’m a storyteller.”
See some reactions here;
Some other tweets from the commentary;
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