Many trans-exclusionary feminists have dedicated themselves, in the years since the publication of The Transsexual Empire, to harassing trans women and attempting to eject us from women’s spaces, as well as from feminist movements as a whole. That exclusion is often justified with the claim that the male socialization we’re believed to have had — and the resulting privilege of that socialization — sets us too far apart from cis women. Because many of us are born with penises and do not menstruate, we are also cast all too often as a threat: something different and dangerous.

So, many trans women were neither surprised nor thrilled when acclaimed feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discussed how she felt about trans womanhood on Britain’s Channel 4 last Friday.

“When people talk about, ‘Are trans women women?’ My feeling is trans women are trans women,” Adichie said. “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 changed 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 in the world as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”

After Adichie’s comments stirred angry debates online, she released a statement in which she positioned herself as supportive of LGBTQ rights, but reiterated many of the same ideas. She wrote that while she opposes violence against trans women, she still thinks that considering trans women’s experiences as part of women’s experiences more broadly “feels disingenuous” to her.

The specter of male privilege has long since been a way to deny trans women’s womanhood and basic humanity. Invoking male privilege is often meant to imply that trans women don’t know what it is like to live as “real” women — that we have not suffered the way other women have suffered, that we have not been disenfranchised by patriarchy because of our genders, and that our early experiences allow us access to forms of social power which influence how we move through the world even after we transition. This argument, beyond hinging all of womanhood on a relatively singular experience of suffering, has often been used to flatten the vast array of different life experiences among trans women and other transfeminine-spectrum people. At worst, it contributes to a culture of violence, harassment, exclusion, and erasure that presents a real threat to the lives and physical safety of the most marginalized among us.