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No, transgender women like me did not grow up with 'male privilege'

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Nigerian feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – known for her book Americanah and her TED talk 'We Should All Be Feminists'  – has disappointed many fans this week who did not expect her feminism to be trans-exclusionary. Appearing in an interview for Channel Four, she addressed the topic of whether transgender women like me are, in fact, women. Her answer was this: "When people talk about, 'Are trans women women?', my feeling is trans women are trans women."

Adichie went on to explain her view that the "male privilege" trans women apparently receive fundamentally sets apart our experiences from those of cisgender women (those whose gender identity corresponds with their body parts).

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"It's about the way the world treats us," she said, "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."

As both a transgender woman as well as a longtime fan of Adichie and her work, it was heartbreaking to hear her comments.

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It hurt to know that someone I deeply admired for her writing and feminism held a definition of womanhood that boiled down to "not you".

Adichie's comments echo those made by broadcaster Jenni Murray last week, who, in an article for the Sunday Times, wrote "Can someone who has lived as a man, with all the privilege that entails, really lay claim to womanhood? It takes more than a sex change and makeup".

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This idea that transgender women hold the same privilege as someone who has "lived as a man" is one that clearly needs to be debunked. It is completely incongruous with our lived realities, and oversimplifies the ways being "socialised as male" affects our lives as transgender women. It also, worryingly, restricts "womanhood" to a fairly narrow range of experiences.

The claim that transgender women have the privileges of "living as men" in the way Adichie and Murray argue conflates the experiences of pre-transition transgender women with those of cisgender men. While there may be similar structural privileges given to both groups, they are by no means identical experiences, and it's misleading to claim they are.

Male privilege manifests in our society in complicated and multi-faceted way, not as a yes/no checkbox. It is worth noting that male socialisation and male privilege are different things. To say transgender women "have male privilege" is to frame our gender assignment at birth and subsequent socialisation – which can have harmful, lasting effects on our lives – merely in terms of the apparent "benefits" we receive from it.

Yes, being socially perceived as men grants certain privileges in our society, but those "privileges" exist within a transphobic system.

For the most part, male privilege is a concept invented by cisgender people to describe cisgender experience. It doesn't really work in the same way when trying to describe the experience of transgender people assigned male at birth and forced to adhere to strict, gendered social guidelines. Transgender women don't "live as men" before we transition – we live as women, coercively conditioned as men.

Receiving male privilege in our society is largely predicated on being willing and able to enact masculinity in a way that our patriarchal society deems appropriate. In my experience, it is difficult to enjoy the "perks" of male privilege being given to you when you are simultaneously dealing with the dysphoria of being perceived as a gender you know you are not.

Being perceived as male in my workplace, for instance, granted me the respect and authority we often subconsciously give to men. However, not knowing how to navigate those gendered privileges, coupled with the emotional distress of being viewed as male, made it a very different experience to that of a cisgender man. Cisgender men rarely experience personal distress at the advantages they receive for being perceived male (aside from a little guilt, perhaps).

A helpful way to think of gender transition is that it is not a linear process in which someone "was" one gender, then "becomes" another. Many transgender people feel they have been the one gender their entire life. They were assigned a different gender at birth, and perceived as that gender based on characteristics we tend to see as intrinsic to men or women.

If you were to put yourself in a transgender woman's shoes, rather than imagining yourself as a woman who "wants to be a man", it might be more accurate to imagine yourself as a woman whom everyone regards as male. Consider how distressing that might be – and how difficult it would be to engage with the "privileges" people were affording you.

The view of transgender women held by Adichie and Murray needs to be challenged vocally – the contention that trans women are not "real" women because of their experiences of male privilege can put us in danger. They are the kind of narratives that result in the denial of services like women's shelters to transgender women, often placing the most vulnerable in our community at direct risk of harm.

Even if male privilege were to affect all trans women the same way as cisgender men, very little of that could realistically carry over when we transition. Transgender women face the threat of sexual violence and suffer sexist discrimination just like all women do in an aggressively misogynist culture.

When transgender women come out, we give up any conditional "male privilege" we may have had, and also face the intersectional oppression of both misogyny and transphobia – this is transmisogny.

Ultimately, claiming that transgender women cannot be "real" women because our experience of womanhood is different to yours ignores a much broader truth – all women's experiences are vastly different to one another. There is no one, uniform experience. Transgender womanhood is different to cisgender womanhood, but that doesn't mean we aren't "real" women, and such a line of reasoning does a disservice to all women.

To be truly capable of radical change, our feminism must be intersectional and inclusive of all women's experiences – be they women of colour, queer, disabled or, yes, transgender women. Being outraged that we consider ourselves "real women" instead of challenging the oppression that we both endure under patriarchy does nothing but waste everybody's time.


Allison Gallagher is a writer currently based in Sydney. She is on Twitter at @allisongallghr
 

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