Trans Women ARE Women: Womanhood through cis eyes

I am trying to keep in mind the above quote on feminist thinking as it is an acknowledgement that I fully agree with. Feminism is a challenging and constant learning process, and often times the greatest progress is achieved from hardest lessons along the way.  On being/becoming a feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said "the becoming continues. It's like endless becoming" so I hope she'll be true to that and will be open to understanding this failure and learn from it. Chimamanda was a feminist I admired, particularly because I had thought she was an intersectional one so I was very disappointed by her comments about women in the trans community during her Channel 4 news interview with Cathy Newman (who was just as ignorant in her line of questioning), you can watch the clip here along with the Twitter response from Raquel Willis. 

I was further disappointed with Chimamanda's clarification of her comments towards the end of her Southbank interview which appeared to justify that her remarks weren't transphobic because she has defended the trans community in Nigeria against hatred. I'm pretty sure she would be less than impressed if someone had made a similar statement of defending black people in the US against racism to justify and deflect from their own racism. The whole "I'm not trans exclusionary because I defend the trans community in a non western country" just like the  "I'm not racist because I have black friends" defense logic is not good enough. Click the image below to watch Chimamanda's interview at the Southbank 'Women of the World Festival 2017'.

The amount of support for her comments has been concerning. Part of me hoped, maybe naively, that living in the fourth wave of feminism and looking to the future of the fifth would mean that Trans-Exclusionary Feminists like Germaine Greer were being left behind in the third....sadly it seems not. Saying Chimamanda is entitled to her opinion is redundant, of course she is but as a feminist with a public platform who has advocated intersectionality; she should be held accountable, as we all should in our feminism so that we continue to be ever evolving with our world view. The Caitlyn Jenner argument has been constantly used to justify Chimanda's comments and it is a mistake to attribute one experience to all. Not all journeys and experiences in the trans community are the same.

Trans women are not monolithic and their experiences and voices deserve to be elevated and amplified. Chimamanda would benefit greatly from engaging with the experiences of trans women; Janet Mock's book 'Redefining Realness' is a good place to start. Cis and trans women can still have different experiences AND share the platform of being women AND still have shared intersectional experiences. Oppression is still oppression, and though it may be experienced differently the result that binds us is the misogyny in our patriarchal society. If cis women feel threatened by trans women, then it is totally misdirected and feeds into that system of oppression.

If CisHet people are saying to trans women that womanhood can only be defined through reproduction and menstruation then we are operating on behalf of the patriarchal system.  This not only seeks to exclude trans women, but also alienates cis women who might not feel their womanhood is solely defined by their ability to reproduce and menstruate. I am a cis woman and I am more than my vagina and my uterus! Cis women cannot speak on the experiences of trans women from the point of view of being women who have always identified with the gender assigned at birth and vice versa. It is not right for Chimanda to make comparable the experiences of cis men with the experiences of trans women in regards to male privilege. 

Intersectionality isn't about taking away from the struggles of individuals and communities by saying we are all have the same experiences, it is acknowledging and exploring our differences and shared experiences within systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism etc, and how they are connected.  As a storyteller, Chimamanda has said she has an interest in how we process the world as individuals and that she wants to push buttons so we can change how we process things, but she has to include herself in that process. The white CISHet ableist classist patriarchal system oppresses all women, it seeks to divide us through creating hierarchies within womanhood. We need to divest from these systems and dismantle them, we need to listen to each other and acknowledge our blind spots.

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