(Delwyn Verasamy)
When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie made her controversial statement about trans women, I felt mixed emotions. I admire her immensely but when I heard what the trans community were saying, I started seeing her words in a negative light because she defined womanhood in terms of experience. What she essentially said was that transgender women do not count as women.
She defined gender as a societal construct, which is true. She said, essentially, that when cisgendered women grow up as women, they face discrimination from birth. And that the gender of trans women, who were born or perceived as male, was constructed around the privileges males are usually accorded. So it kind of made sense, her saying trans women have an identity separate from a “womanhood experience”.
But I also found it really offensive because we are at this critical stage where transgender women are highly marginalised and face high levels of violence. So any insensitive comment that denigrates trans women — or discounts their experiences and their attachment to womanhood — justifies such violence.
I define myself as a woman with a transgender experience and I don’t think Chimamanda has the right to speak for me and my experience growing up, which was neither typically “male” nor “female”. I didn’t know how I identified. I was raised male but never fulfilled those societal expectations.
Yes, I have had male privilege to some extent. But not the full male privilege she speaks of. The way she speaks is as though everyone has had the same experience and that is not true.
If anything, people should speak of their own experiences and not on behalf of others. Before, people never really had the choice to define their gender, but now we do. And I would like to make that choice. Because only I can define my gender. — Thabiso Ratalane (25) as told to Carl Collison, the Other Foundation’s Rainbow Fellow at the Mail & Guardian