It’s not a process of metamorphosis where one acquires their felt sense of gender identity only post physical transitioning.
“Trans women are trans women,” Adichie had said in the interview, adding, “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 switch 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 in the world as a woman, and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”
Theirs were among the many African queer voices that critiqued Adichie’s for her trans exclusionary views in her 2017 interview and her essay double-downed against all of them. The instances cited by Adichie in her essay, to justify her own sense of persecution, are those of two Nigerian writers, one a nonbinary person and the other a queer feminist. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another.”ĭecontextualised, the essay reads like a cogent take-down of the performative ‘wokeness’ that plagues the social media age. In her widely shared essay, released in the Pride month of June 2021, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie bemoaned social media “sanctimony” and “puritanism” where “e are no longer human beings. The visibility paradox – about how the greater the trans visibility in everyday spaces, the more ruthless is the backlash – also explains why trans exclusionary radical feminism with all its reactionary violence and micro-aggressions has been more pronounced lately.
In a note on their 2020 Netflix documentary Disclosure, trans rights activist-actress Laverne Cox and director Sam Feder have cited the ‘visibility paradox’ as the inspiration behind their incisive take on trans representation in the media.
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