Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie interview with Zoe Williams

*already

For anyone who's interested and/or hasn't alreday read them (that incldus me, to my slight shame), there's a a three-book collection comprising Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah and Purple Hibiscus on Amazon for £11.49. I've just bought it.

Ah, my edit didn't make it. Must have failed to save it after reading the preview.

The Reith Lecture was amazing. Really grateful to her for articulating her concerns about free speech. Totally agree with everything she says.

Is there more to come? Irritated by Bonham Carter and her dismissing the legal system in Uk, on Depp. The vilification of Heard has been disgusting. Depp may be a lovely bloke when he's straight, but like many abusers, when out of it, capable of violence. It's never simple is it?

Yes, obsessing over my child's right to a physically healthy future not fucked up by taking the wrong hormones, my child's right to have children not fucked up by removal of their sex and repro organs, my child keeping their right to experience orgasm, my child keeping their right to pee without pain... that is fucking depressing.

Arwa Mahdawi and Zoe Williams can take my word for that. And so can all the other "useful idiots".

It's a bloody tragedy that Zoe Williams is the best writer the Guardian could put up to interview CNA. She is so.........average.

I was just going to post a similar comment. The exact quote:

"While I admit spending 60% of my life on Twitter isn’t healthy, it’s not as unhealthy as spending 99.99% of your waking hours obsessing over trans people’s right to exist, which is what a depressing number of people seem to do."

As with Williams, the stupidity is depressing. No one is obsessing over trans people's right to exist - I have never once heard anyone say that trans people don't have a right to exist. Once again, these people find that the only way to boost their argument is to misrepresent what their opponents are saying.

And I don't know about anyone else, but I feel so weary with all this. I've generally found that in other contentious topics where people argue bitterly (Brexit, Israel/Palestine, immigration) there is usually a nugget of rationality there somewhere that you can get hold of and debate. With the trans stuff, everything they say is totally detached from reality: "you are creepily obsessed with people's genitals"; "you are literally guilty of genocide"; "half of trans people commit suicide" and so on. How can you possibly debate with people whose only style of argument is to make totally lunatic assertions?

Yeah.

Isn’t it amazing how she just swept the issue of a misogynistic and almost sexually threatening tweet aside to focus on how unfair it was not to focus on biological males when discussing a product for the very biologically female process of menstruation.

I think she should consider not spending 60% of her life on twitter and try some
actual journalism.

And she’s absolutely storming it.

Was interesting to see Arwa Mahdawi go for Tampax in her column this week. Started off well enough but then descended into an inexplicable rant about people who "don't want trans people to exist". I stopped reading her a long time ago and was sorry I bothered today. If Mahdawi and Williams are the best they've got now it's not looking good.

CNA lecture is s on radio 4 now...
👑

*up out of the ground.

By jove. That's exactly what she's doing in advance! And advancing it as an approach we should all follow.

FFS, all male sex offenders have relatives. They don't spring up out of the crowd after someone sows a mythical beast's teeth.

Yes potniatheron. Not before they'd got women to donate money though. Which they (that woman called Patsy something?) then delighted in telling us would be spent on causes committed to dismantling women's boundaries.

It's one of the reasons that, despite being very left myself politically, I sometimes find talking to right wing misogynists easier than left wing misogynists. Right wing misogynists may deny your experience of trauma at the hands of men, or say it was your fault; Left wing misogynists are happy to use your traumatic experience for their own ends right up untill the point it threatens one of their sacred beliefs. I find the first position more honest. The second position can feel like being used and betrayed all over again.

Yes, and in adult terms, how many times have you heard people make excuses for male relatives or friends who've been caught/convicted for crimes against women?

This is such a good point. I remember after the murder of Sarah Everard seeing a number of grifters prominent female pundits all attention seeking talking about the times they had been approached or made to feel unsafe by strange men. These people had only a few days before been ridiculing feminists for not wanting to share bathrooms with strange men. The volte face gave me whiplash.

You’d think she could stay within her own wheelhouse of writing slice of upper-middle class London life pieces for the lifestyle section though.

Clearly even celebrity interviewing is beyond her.

Whereas Zoe and others think pointing out actual absurd cases, or even suggesting that they're possible, is somehow offensive.

Great post, Necessary. Again, you'd expect an Oxford-educated journalist to understand the philosophical test of reductio ad absurdum.

But she comes across as affable, maybe she's nice to have as a colleague and that's partly why she keeps her job? Don't quote me, but I think she refrained from signing witch hunt lettersb against colleagues.

If that's the case, I'm amazed that in 20-odd years working alongside Hadley Freeman and Suzanne Moore, she never sat down with either of them and had a chat about the trans issue (which going by this interview she's very interested in).

She could have learned so much from them.

Zoe Williams is probably the best journalist they have left after they hounded out all the good ones.

To be fair to Zoë, it's not just women's rights she doesn't research properly. It's anything beyond her immediate experience of being her, living her posh woman life in London. But she comes across as affable, maybe she's nice to have as a colleague and that's partly why she keeps her job? Don't quote me, but I think she refrained from signing witch hunt lettersb against colleagues.

I used to assume that Zoe by virtue of the fact that she wrote for the Guardian was working class but then a few years ago I saw her on telly and was amazed to see an incredibly posh and incredibly patronising woman. So, yeah. Havne't been able to take her seriously since then tbh.

It's interesting that she explicitly uses the phrase "reducing it to the absurd",

Good point @NecessaryScene And maybe Williams was getting confused between the people who are doing the reducing to permit the absurdities to happen, and the people like Adichie who are calling out the reduction and the absurdities that are already happening as a result.

I am baffled as to why Zoe seems so ignorant about stuff that she must, surely, be aware of, if she's paying attention. Surely she must know there are lots of men identifying as trans who don't even bother to try to pass?

It's interesting that she explicitly uses the phrase "reducing it to the absurd", which Helen Joyce as a mathematician uses in Latin as "reductio ad absurdem".

It's a means of proof of a theorem - you assume something is true, then demonstrate that if that is true, then you inevitably reach an absurd deduction (more accurately paradoxical or axiomatically impossible). Which shows that it cannot be true.

So some people look at the "absurd" cases and think they demonstrate why a rule doesn't work.

Whereas Zoe and others think pointing out actual absurd cases, or even suggesting that they're possible, is somehow offensive.

The very concept of "reductio ad absurdem" is kind of rude. Why would you do that to a perfectly innocent theorem? Just leave it alone, let it "live it's truth".

I’m not having that. “You couldn’t objectively say, ‘All women are threatened by trans women.’ I’m also a woman. That doesn’t reflect my experience.”

It would be dangerous to put a lit match anywhere near that argument.

I'm not threatened by transness but, in some situations, I find maleness quite intimidating. This is why language is so important.