Executives at Amazon apparently believe the world needs protection from certain ideas about transgenderism, so they’ve removed a book on the subject from its online store. It’s funny, considering that the debate over transgenderism isn’t nearly settled and, if anything, Amazon is probably in the minority view on the issue.
Conservative author Ryan Anderson said Sunday that his 2018 book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment was deleted from the Amazon marketplace, which almost certainly happened because some “social justice” person or group complained that the words in its pages were a form of “violence.” (A spokesperson for Amazon told me Monday that the company was declining to comment on Anderson’s book and directed me to a page listing the guidelines for selling books on the platform.)
In his book, Anderson offers a critique of the mainstream depiction of transgenderism as a matter of diversity and acceptance rather than what it is — an ideological and medical issue.
It’s also a political one. Transgender people aren’t just asking to be accepted. They’re asking to be accommodated. They want to use the public restrooms and locker room facilities that they choose. They want the legal right to compete in sports leagues they choose. They want to be recognized by the government as something that they biologically are not. And in some cases, they want taxpayers to foot the bill for their transitions.
Transgenderism isn’t a question of personal freedom. Every American is entitled to dress and act how they like, so long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. Transgenderism asks that everyone be involved. Women will have to accept that biological men will be in their restrooms and locker rooms. The taxpayer will have to accept that the military is funding hormone replacement therapy.
And the medical aspect of transgenderism is even more serious, particularly as it pertains to children who claim to experience gender dysphoria and seek hormone-blocking medications before they’ve even entered or completed puberty.
The psychological issues that transgender people encounter, made no less difficult by a culture that says everyone should ignore those very issues, turn their lives into hell. This is especially true of transgender people who physically alter their genitals through surgeries that can be described as nothing short of mutilation.
As described in my book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, to this date, there has been only one major scientific study on the long-term effects of sex-reassignment surgery. Over the course of 30 years, six Swedish doctors and scientists tracked the outcomes of 324 transgender people who had received reassignment surgeries —191 male-to-female subjects and 133 female-to-male subjects. Each subject was cross-examined with 10 random control subjects whose birth sex was matched up with the transgender subject’s after the subject had had their operations and hormone therapy. For example, a natural, biological woman was the control subject for a man who had had sexual reassignment surgery to become a “woman.”
The results were devastating.
Subjects who underwent surgery were more likely than the control subjects to receive inpatient care for a psychiatric disorder, to be convicted of a crime, and to develop cardiovascular disease. The mortality rate by suicide was most striking: Transgender subjects were almost 20 times more likely to have committed suicide within 10 years after their operations.
“This study found substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalisations in sex-reassigned transsexual individuals compared to a healthy control population,” the authors concluded. “This highlights that post surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up.” They note that surgery and hormone therapy may provide some relief for transgender people, but that such treatment is “apparently not sufficient to remedy the high rates of morbidity.”
These are the things we should be considering when talking about transgenderism. That’s what Anderson was trying to do. Amazon should allow people who are interested in learning about this to read more. But instead, they’re banning books.
