Nigerian novelist and Beyoncé-endorsed feminist icon Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie posted a much-discussed essay, “It Is Obscene: A True Reflection in Three Parts,” to her website, Chimamanda.com, on June 15, 2021. Part passionate defense of free speech, part get-off-my-lawn screed, it won her new admirers in some circles but proved greatly disappointing to people in others. Among the disappointed was Vox writer Aja Romano. In an article for Vox posted three days later, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Cancel Culture Screed Is a Dangerous Distraction,” Romano didn’t just insinuate that Adichie was a bigot (for having said “trans women are trans women,” a statement that can be interpreted as a rejection of the view that trans women are women), but that there was something suspect about Adichie expressing any views on the subject during the month of June: “Many observers have questioned her motives in choosing to publish it during Pride Month. That timing,” Romano explained, “along with the letter’s tone, has made Adichie’s post come off as a direct attack against the individual students the essay refers to, even if she does not name them.”
Romano didn’t cite any of the “many observers” who had this response, leaving us to infer that “many observers” was a veiled royal we. (The Vox reporter did, however, identify the former students by name, a curious choice if the aim of the article was to protect the students from “direct attack.”) There was nothing mysterious about what prompted Adichie’s essay: Two of her former writing students had denounced her on social media as a transphobe, all the while attempting to profit by highlighting their connection with her. While there are arguably greater tragedies in the world than A-list novelists encountering sycophantic hypocrites and online haters, it is understandable that Adichie was annoyed, though quite a stretch to think she withheld her annoyance until Pride Month.
June, however, was not the only time of the year when Adichie became insufficiently sensitive, according to Romano, who wrote in the same Vox piece that “in November 2020—during Transgender Awareness Week—The Guardian published an interview with Adichie in which she articulated her dislike of cancel culture.” If pointing out the Pride Month connection was shaky, Romano comes close to conspiracy thinking in suggesting that The Guardian published the interview as a comment on Transgender Awareness Week or that Adichie or her interviewer even knew that such a week existed.