This piece written by a BPD patient discusses how she would change her entire personality, and with it her wardrobe, with each new relationship or phase in her life: “In my ‘Premier League’ days, it’d be athletic and gym gear; when dating a hipster, I mimicked their use of rings and hats. My wardrobe was like the skin of a chameleon, physically embodying the changes in my personality.” This one talks about “waking up and trying to be a new person every day. Go vegan, go goth, go hipster, go glamour, cut your hair, change your makeup, gain weight, lose weight, and never feel quite there.” I think this helps make sense of a lot of what was going on with the subject of Adichie’s essay. That person had been a worshipper of Adichie’s: later, they considered Adichie a transphobe and a bigot. A neurotypical person might have been disappointed that their hero was using what they considered insensitive language about trans people, but for someone whose emotions are more easily blown around, it made their opinion swing from 180° from love to hate. The relationship is perfect and the person is wonderful; then, the person is terrible and the relationship is doomed. The identity aspect makes sense as well. In one Twitter post the author called for people to “pick up machetes to protect us from the harm transphobes like Adichie & Rowling seek to perpetuate”. Those machetes are presumably metaphorical, albeit an astonishingly vivid metaphor, but in other posts they abhor the “violence” of Adichie’s (to me mild-seeming) language towards trans women.