Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Praised for Essay Criticizing Twitter's 'Angels'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been praised on social media for speaking out against some Twitter users' "unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others" as she recounted the fallout from her past comments on transgender women in a new essay.

The Nigerian feminist author faced backlash in 2017, after she said in an interview with the U.K.'s Channel 4 News that she saw "trans women as trans women"—leading some critics to take it as an implication that she didn't see them as real women.

And in her essay "It is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts," published on Tuesday, Adichie has looked back on the criticism she faced at the time on social media—most notably from someone with whom she had previously enjoyed a close relationship.

After recounting the betrayal she felt at the hands of the person in question, Adichie shared a scorching assessment of the "angels jostling to out-angel one another" on social media as they take down those who put a proverbial foot wrong.

She wrote, in part: "I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

"People who wield the words 'violence' and 'weaponize' like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra.

"Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. (How ironic, speaking of violence, that it is one of these two who encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me.)

"And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

"I have spoken to young people who tell me they are terrified to tweet anything, that they read and re-read their tweets because they fear they will be attacked by their own. The assumption of good faith is dead."

"What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness," she concluded. "We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us. It is obscene."

The essay won an outpouring of support on Twitter, with @Diaryofa9jachef writing: "Chimamanda has said what most of us have been thinking about Twitter..."

"Chimamanda got tired of the performative nonsense on Twitter," said @OgbeniDipo. "People trashing their friends and people they have benefited from on all for RTs, attention and winning badges while throwing others under a bus. Great. We are making progress."

"I read the Chimamanda piece and she read Nigerian Twitter 'moralists' for filth," tweeted @JoeyAkan. "The worst of them are the writers, who cannot depend on their craft to make a way for them. So they lump activism to their emptiness, and become callous unthinking monsters on social media."

"Some people are waiting for their thought leaders to tell them how they feel about Chimamanda's piece before they react," wrote @Nugwa.

"I wish I could be 1/10 as eloquent and clear as Chimamanda," said @Jollz, while Australian journalist Claire Lehmann shared a link to the essay alongside the words: "Wow. From the Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie."

Following her Channel 4 News interview, Adichie sought to clarify her stance on trans women in a Facebook post, shared on March 13, 2017.

She wrote, in part: "I said, in an interview, that trans women are trans women, that they are people who, having been born male, benefited from the privileges that the world affords men, and that we should not say that the experience of women born female is the same as the experience of trans women.

"This upset many people, and I consider their concerns to be valid. I realize that I occupy this strange position of being a 'voice' for gender rights and so there is an automatic import to my words.

"I think the impulse to say that trans women are women just like women born female are women comes from a need to make trans issues mainstream. Because by making them mainstream, we might reduce the many oppressions they experience.

"But it feels disingenuous to me. The intent is a good one but the strategy feels untrue. Diversity does not have to mean division.

"Because we can oppose violence against trans women while also acknowledging differences. Because we should be able to acknowledge differences while also being supportive. Because we do not have to insist, in the name of being supportive, that everything is the same. Because we run the risk of reducing gender to a single, essentialist thing."

"To acknowledge different experiences is to start to move towards more fluid—and therefore more honest and true to the real world—conceptions of gender," Adichie, a vocal supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, added.

Newsweek has contacted the National Center for Transgender Equality for comment.