Does It Make You Feel Better To Silence a Great Woman?

Photo credit: Jared Soares/The Guardian

I love Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so much so that when my dog had seven puppies last year I named one of them after her when I registered it with the Kennel Club.

I’ve pre-ordered her new novel, Dream Count, and I’ve sent her 2014 essay We Should All Be Feminists to many, many women in my life.

So I settled down to read her interview in The Guardian newspaper at the weekend with delight. Here is a woman, about the same age as me, who is an absolute queen. Not only that but a black woman whose truth we seek, whose wisdom we crave, thank goodness she is respected and revered as she should be, that her voice is so important to so many. And yet, as I read on through the interview I began to feel a great wave of sadness come over me.

The interviewer, of course, brought up the comments that Chimamanda made about trans women in 2017. What she said that was so controversial was this: “A trans woman is a trans woman.” And then she went on to say this: “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.”

She did not say this group of people do not or should not exist. She did not say that they should be harmed. But she pointed out the thing that we are not meant to, that if men would like to have the right to identify themselves into womanhood then we need to acknowledge there is a conflict of rights. She simply said ‘that’s difficult for me.’ That’s all. That’s all she said.

For this, as for most women who state this fact, there was an attempt to cancel her. As the Guardian journalist said: “There is no doubt her career was damaged. Interviews, prizes and talks were cancelled.¹”

And so, knowing what she had been through before, when this journalist asked her about these comments, when she poked a stick into the wasps’ nest, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refused to be stung again.

The interviewer writes: “I suggest the emotional toll must have been enormous. Adichie will not talk about it. Did it hamper her creatively? She refuses to say.”

No amount of prodding would make her open her mouth. She was silent. This brilliant woman, this intelligent woman, this great thinker of our time, this woman of colour, was silenced. She was self-censoring for the sake of her career, the success of her books and probably her peace of mind.

And she is not the only one of course. The only women who can speak up confident that they won’t be cancelled are those who accept men’s right to identify as women without question, those who are therefore perceived as ‘kind’. (Note the discussion is rarely about women who want to identify as men).

We are told over and over by people that we are unkind if we dare to acknowledge the conflict of rights that occurs with this ambition to ‘be kind’. As

Victoria Smith

, whose new book Unkind - How ‘Be Kind’ Entrenches Sexism was published last week, wrote in an essay recently²: “In asserting their own boundaries, and the right to describe the world as they perceive it, these women are violating the most fundamental gender norms. They are rejecting the status assigned to them at birth — that of human mirror/giver — in the most powerful way.”

For a movement that likes to move away from gender stereotypes and labels it certainly also keeps us entrenched in them.

And so, instead, women like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shut up, to still have a career, to still be able to earn a living, so as not to be described as unkind – the worst possible thing to be perceived as being as a woman.

And so if we are to believe that these men are indeed women – and I am open to whatever you want to believe (it’s your belief system after all) – what we must acknowledge is a new type of woman, a woman 2.0, a type of woman who has more rights than the old model, a type whose rights can silence a black woman into submission for expressing how she sees the world through her eyes and the difficulties she sees when it comes to practice not just theory.

Last week I liked an article here on Substack written by my friend

Milli Hill

. She is another intelligent woman, another woman who has not called for harm against men who choose to identify as women, but she — like Chimamanda, like others — has pointed out the conflict in rights and she has suffered because of it. One of my subscribers saw that I had liked this piece which was about a nurse who lost her job because a 6ft-tall man (a doctor) who wishes to identify as a woman was using the same female changing room as her late at night and it made her feel uncomfortable. I thought Milli raised some interesting points about what happens to these people when others fail to point out to them the obvious conflict of rights that they might face out there in the real world. I actually feel sorry for this person that his employer, the NHS, has forced him into a position where he has to defend his right to identify as a woman rather than simply providing him with his own changing area in the first place. But again, it was decided by NHS managers that women just needed to ‘be kind’ and crack on with it to spare his feelings.

One of my subscribers sent me a message and asked if I had realised that Milli is ‘anti-trans’, she asked if I had meant to like that post, she double checked that I had actually liked it and then told me yes I had, and she seemed to need some explanation from me because she didn’t think I was ‘like that’ (that’s me paraphrasing by the way). I didn’t know what to say and so (I’m sorry) I said nothing. I censored myself rather than explain why I had read a piece my kind and good friend had written and I had liked it because I thought it raised some interesting points.

I don’t like censoring myself. I wrote a piece last week in which I mentioned the family court system that has censored me, a patriarchal system that has made a decree that I must not tell you what happened to me there and how myself and my child suffered. I hate that. That is censorship, being unable to tell a part of your life, or at least how you see it. But what is the difference between that and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refusing to answer questions on the topic and instead only being willing to say that cancel culture is bad and must stop?

Are you still reading this? Have you reached for the unsubscribe button? Are you horrified that I might not agree with you on this subject even if we agree on many others? Have you reassessed your opinion of me now?

Perhaps I shouldn’t have written this, but then if I hadn’t, I’m just another woman who has been silenced and that goes against everything I stand for.

Will I lose you as a subscriber now? I’m sorry if that is the case, I don’t want you to go, but I also know I have no control over how you perceive me.

But even if you do unsubscribe, I am still me. I don’t stop existing because you don’t agree with me. In the space you might leave, others will come, those who do agree with me. And then I might talk about another topic and they might leave too because they disagree with me. But I will still be me and others will come and like that, life goes on.

To base your entire identity on what someone else thinks of you is a fool’s errand. As a mother, it is not something I would advise my 12-year-old daughter to do as she goes through her life because it is something you simply cannot control. You can only control how you feel about yourself.

Wanting to use a female changing room is not about safety, not really, it’s about validation. It’s about demanding that people around you shore up the idea you have created about yourself — and that, despite all the tribunal and court case rulings in the world is something you simply cannot control. Some people will see men who identify as women as women. And some will see them as trans women, or hell, even men dressing up as women.

We women are not really providing shelter and protection for those six foot tall biological males who change their clothes and grow their hair and start wearing make-up. Not really. We all know that. The people who are defending the rights of trans women to use female changing spaces know that too, especially since when those ‘unkind’ women complain about it they are the very people who say that attacks in loos are a nonsense that we shouldn’t be afraid of.

But I digress. I don’t wish to write about that. But I do wish to write about a black woman being silenced.

Writers are thinkers, if you’re lucky in your lifetime a few are great thinkers and I believe that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of them. She is also a Nigerian woman and, having written a book about FGM myself that was longlisted for The Orwell Prize, I know it is not as easy as identifying out of your sex in Africa where FGM is most commonly carried out. Perhaps Chimamanda knows that too, perhaps that influenced her opinion. I don’t know.

Anyway, back to that puppy I named after her. The person that puppy went to was actually my friend Milli Hill. I named each of those seven puppies after one brilliant female writer, there was Didion, Ernaux, Levy, Cusk etc but as Milli met this great woman it seemed only right that her puppy should be the one with the pedigree name of Adichie.

And so I leave you with a photo of that moment when Milli met Chimamanda. I don’t want either of these women to be silenced by this movement, but after reading that Guardian interview at the weekend, I’m sorry to come to the conclusion that one of them already has been, and I know there will be people reading this who will feel satisfied by this news. And that really does make me sad.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/feb/15/cancel-culture-we-should-stop-it-end-of-story-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-on-backlash-writers-block-and-her-two-new-babies

2. https://thecritic.co.uk/making-the-patriarchy-progressive/