Do we like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie?
Our score: 5 out of 10. A real record of speaking up for gay rights and women sits next to years of defending her trans comments, so it lands in the middle.
Adichie is the Nigerian novelist behind a shelf of books and a feminist manifesto, Dear Ijeawele. She went quiet on fiction for years, then came back in 2025 with Dream Count, her first novel since 2013. She has said “Writing fiction is the love of my life.”
The trans row started in March 2017. In a Channel 4 interview she said her feeling was that trans women are trans women, and argued that a trans woman raised with male privilege can't simply be equated with a woman who never had it. She later wrote that all are women, but she stood by the point and critics like Raquel Willis and Laverne Cox pushed back hard.
At a Washington event that month she refused to back down, saying “I didn't apologize because I don't think I have anything to apologize for.” She also took aim at the American left over policed language. That is the heart of the disagreement: she calls it honest talk about different life experiences, and many trans people hear it as being told they are less than women.
Things got uglier in 2021. In a long essay on her website she took aim at two former writing students, including the writer Akwaeke Emezi, who has accused her of transphobia on Twitter, and she called J.K. Rowling's essay “perfectly reasonable” in 2020, according to Open Country. Critics saw a famous author punching at younger writers over online criticism.
The harm check is genuinely split. In a 2022 Guardian interview she described herself as an ally and said she was “on your side”, but the same piece had her saying that fears about trans people and women's rights don't reflect many people's experience, which The Advocate called questionable. Against that, in 2014 she wrote that Nigeria's anti-gay law was unjust and would fuel violence, adding that adults do no harm to society in how they love.
The good-person side is mostly solid. She was accused of plagiarism by another author, Anne Giwa-Amu, over Half of a Yellow Sun, but the claim was struck out and Giwa-Amu was ordered to pay costs, according to Lit Hub. She has also picked up honorary degrees, including from Edinburgh in 2017, and spoke out against a hostile law in her own country when that was an unpopular thing to do.