Chimamanda and refusing to talk about gender

As a 'cancelled woman', I understand why she's avoiding the topic

Yesterday a letter arrived for me that was carried by dog sled from British Columbia.

Well, obviously not ALL the way via dog sled. But it was sent via the Gold Rush Trail Sled Dog Mail Run, an annual event in which teams of huskies and mushers take sacks of mail down the Gold Rush Trail to Barkerville, BC, where letters then enter the standard post system and are delivered globally, including this one here to me in Somerset, UK. It was a 50th birthday card, from a woman I’ve never met, on the other side of the world. And it’s the second time she’s sent me something - the first was a series of prints of her art which are now hung in various corners of my home.

She is not alone. Last week a different woman sent me a care package of gorgeous face masks, lotions and potions. In the past I’ve had books, handwritten cards, and other thoughtful gifts, not to mention the dozens of emails I receive each week.

“Why mum?”, my daughter asks. “Why are you being sent these things?”

“Because women all over the world are really worried about what’s happening to women’s rights at the moment”, I try to explain. “We all respect that people can live and identify as they wish, but it’s been taken too far with allowing male people who say they are women to be in women’s sports, prisons, domestic violence shelters and changing rooms. When women speak out about this, they get attacked. But mum has been speaking out about it, and carrying on in spite of being attacked. So that’s why people send me stuff. Because they appreciate me for speaking out at a time when that’s difficult. They appreciate my courage.”

(It’s taken me fifty years to undo the conditioning and say that last sentence without adding in any self-deprecating clauses. They appreciate my courage. Not ‘I suppose they might appreciate my courage or something’, or ‘Maybe they think I’m sort of brave for some weird reason’. Just ‘They appreciate my courage’. Own it. Teach my daughters to own it. But I digress.)

The arrival of these two recent and thoughtful gifts bookended the weekend in which I read this interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in the Guardian.

Novelist, feminist and intellectual, Adichie first got into hot water in 2017 for daring to state the obvious. “A trans woman is a trans woman”, she said in an interview on Channel 4 News. She then clarified with a very beautiful explanation about the kind of socialisation that makes women like me find it difficult to speak clearly and in positive terms about themselves, for example with phrases like, “They appreciate my courage.”

“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.”

Makes perfect sense, of course, but predictably, it was followed by a ‘vitriolic backlash’, during which, also predictably, there was much pressure to apologise. Then she wrote a ‘clarifying’ facebook post (well worth a read) in which she committed the cardinal sin of sticking to her guns and explaining herself in further well-crafted sentences - always referred to by online bullies as ‘doubling down’ - they only want weeping and penitence and mercy-begging, at which point they most often stick the boot in and ‘cancel’ you anyway. Chimamanda did not give them this pleasure.

There were further incidents of heresy. She described J.K.Rowling’s June 2020 essay as ‘perfectly reasonable’, and then, in June 2021, she published the essay It Is Obscene, in which she faced her detractors head-on, specifically, two young writers who she had supported in their work, but who had then gone on to throw her under the bus because of her perceived ‘transphobia’. She describes how in young people today she notices something ‘troubling’:

“…a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.”

I thought of these words recently when a fellow writer whose non-fiction manuscript I had read (for free) and praised and encouraged, and then connected with my agent, who took her on and went on to get her a book deal with a Big 5 publisher, refused to read or endorse my forthcoming book Ultra Processed Women. Previously she had written of me:

“Milli’s confidence in (book title) resulted in a deal with a major publisher and the book ended up benefitting the lives of many, many more people thanks to her. Milli’s kindness, openness about her writing process and generous sharing of knowledge is priceless."

When asked to read / endorse UPW, she wrote:

“I’ll say no to endorsing the hyper processed book, not because I don't think it will be good, but because…it will be read as an endorsement of your beliefs around gender. I'm hugely grateful for the way you read the stuff I'd written and offered to introduce me to (agent) four years ago. It was such a beautiful feminist act and I will be forever grateful to that. It’s something I continue to pay forward (or is it backwards?) to women writers I encounter, so your generosity continues to be felt in the community.”

Pay it forward to women writers I encounter? But not to this woman writer - presumably only those who chant the mantras. It is indeed, obscene.

In ‘It is Obscene’, Adichie showed how well she understood the cult-like grip of this ideology, and then, later in 2020, she tackled the practical applications of self-ID in another Guardian interview at the time of her Reith lecture on freedom of speech. But in both the Reith lecture itself, which I was lucky enough to attend, and in this weekend’s Guardian interview, Adichie has been clear that she has grave concerns about cancel culture and self-censorship, but at the same time has appeared to be censoring herself, skirting the gender issue and refusing to be drawn into it. “I suggest the emotional toll (of cancellation) must have been enormous”, writes the interviewer. “Adichie will not talk about it. Did it hamper her creatively? She refuses to say. The closest she comes to the subject is later: “What do I want to say about cancel culture? Cancel culture is bad. We should stop it. End of story.””

Meeting Chimamanda at the Reith Lecture

It’s easy to feel frustrated, or even to speculate that, as my good friend

Anna Wharton

does in this post, she has been intimidated into silence. But as a fellow ‘cancelled woman’, I’d just like to share a little of why I feel she is avoiding the topic.

Once you have been labelled as transphobic, this is a situation that will never go away. As illustrated above by my interaction with the writer I helped, and in other substacks I’ve written about the ongoing fallout I experience from being openly gender critical, life becomes a series of sucker punches. Just when you least expect it, a friend or a colleague will thump you one in the guts. Just when you’re starting to relax, someone will send you a facebook discussion about how hateful you are, or tell you they’ve been told not to promote your books because of your bigotry.

Then there is the paranoia. You don’t know, and will never know, what conversations have taken place about you in publishing houses, bookshops, conference organising groups, literary festival committees, and so on. There might be none. Or it could have taken away The Big One, that great opportunity that might have changed your life completely. Most likely somewhere in between those two extremes, but nevertheless, a slow drip kind of damage.

There is also a deep sadness that you cannot ever reverse. Being ‘cancelled’, all of the unpleasant things people have written and said about you, they will never go away. They are part of your life story now. The experience is akin to a bereavement in the sense that it all takes place in just one single moment, but the ripples and the after-shocks from it keep coming back, like grief, and knocking you off your feet. You will never be the same. Your trust in other humans is forever damaged. Your kindness is jaded. You will not read any more manuscripts for free, or introduce people to your agent. You are hardened. For me, this feels like a loss - I mourn the person I once was who had faith in the innate goodness of others.

Also, the fight of it is tiring. Gender is a topic that people have a seemingly endless appetite for, and once you delve in, it’s easy for it to become an obsession. Added to this, there are many who feel they cannot talk about it or write about it, because they fear for their own livelihoods. You want to write about it? Great! Do more, please, they say. But sometimes you don’t want to write - or read - about male rapists in women’s prisons, or neo-vaginas, or children being talked into the idea they were born in the wrong body, and then medicalised. Yes it’s the great issue of our time, but ultimately, we all only get one life.

For Chimamanda, her incredible gift is as a novelist. She has been blindsided by motherhood and struggled to write, feeling she was, ‘cast out from her creative self’. Now, she has written a new novel, opening herself up to all the potential criticism that doing so entails. Already, she tells the Guardian, she is plagued by sleeping issues, when, at night, her mind, ‘invariably roams to terror’.

I can appreciate why she does not want to ‘go there’, right now. I’m not sure it’s a matter of being ‘silenced’, more a conscious decision to protect herself and to put her energy into her craft. For those of us who want to hear her incredibly articulate take on it, it’s frustrating. But I can see why she wishes to deflect. She has, after all, said more than most would ever dare to on the topic. Her views are pretty clear. And maybe she just wants to get this book out there, to prove to herself her writing powers have returned, and restore the confidence that the sideswipe of early motherhood - and perhaps the persistent attacks - seemingly dented.

Adichie is 48, and the fiery energy of menopause will soon remove some of the last layers of self-censorship that female conditioning builds into us all - even those women who are already fiery and bold. I think we will then see further courage from her on this issue, and from a woman who is already a phenomenon, wow, I’m looking forward to that. When I met her, and I told her I was a ‘cancelled woman’, she was very concerned if I was ‘alright’. I guess, as I’ve described above, in many ways, I’m not. I’m forever scarred. But on the other hand, I would not have met her at all had I not had the courage to speak. By my side at the Reith lecture was one of the many amazing new friends I have made because of that courage, the writer and fellow courageous woman, Onjali Rauf. I explained this to Chimamanda in my own clumsy, star-struck way, and told her about the huge feminist support I’d received. I hope she heard me and knows that for every obscene coward or bully, there is an entire army of women who support her and who are no doubt already sending her encouraging emails and thoughtful parcels to show their appreciation. If she’s really lucky, one day she may even get a birthday card via husky.

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