“Nigerian novelist and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has sought to clarify her position after sparking outrage with comments about transgender women that she made in an interview with Channel 4 News. The author of Half of a Yellow Sun came under attack after she failed to call transgender women “real women” in response to a question.”The paragraph above from a Guardian article made me think recently about the value we attribute to the word “real”.
As someone who was born a man, I’ll never understand what it’s
like to be a woman.
I can read all the books I want, watch TV shows written for
women and read articles written by women but all this will get me is possibly
an appreciation for what it’s like to be a woman; I’ll never actually know what
it’s like to be born one.
Which is why I agree with what Chimamanda Adichie said:
“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.”
It's clear someone who was born a man then became a woman
has experienced a different life to someone who was born a woman. However, I’d
go even further than that because the experience of being born a white woman is
different to being born a black woman, the experience of being a woman who is
six feet tall is different to one who is five feet tall.
All of our experiences are different, even if in some ways
they are similar.
The issue here is the use of the word “real” – claiming trans
women are or aren’t real women is about attributing a value to one experience
above the other.
Personally, I feel no experience is more authentic than the
other; they’re all just different.
A trans woman probably can’t ever understand what it’s like
to be born in a woman’s body, the same as someone born in a woman’s body can’t
understand what it’s like to feel like you were born in a body which doesn’t
correlate to your inner gender.
