I Can’t Agree With Chimamanda’s Views About Nigerian Transgenders – Akwaeke Emezi

Popular Nigerian writer, Akwaeke Emezi has come out to blast Chimamanda Adichie, JK Rowling, and their supporters.

Emezi recently jumped on social media to accuse Adichie and Rowling of supporting the killing of transgender children, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to the writer, after experiencing what it is like to grow up as a transgender in Nigeria, she cannot agree with Chimamanda Adichie and JK Rowling’s views about transgenders.

She added that it is difficult for her to accept that then we can equate one experience with another experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.

Her words, “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.”

WOW.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [who] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”.

Adichie has written the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014). Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Adichie was born in the city of Enugu in Nigeria, and grew up as the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State. While she was growing up, her father James Nwoye Adichie was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria. Her mother Grace Ifeoma was the university’s first female registrar. The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers. Her family’s ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State.

In 2003, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University.