Amazon.com, Inc., perhaps the most commanding force in American consumer culture, wants you to believe that the highly charged issue of transgenderism is resolved. It won’t allow its marketplace to entertain the conversation any longer.
The company has removed from its platform When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, written by Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson and published in 2018. The book challenges the central premises of the transgender movement.
“People say that we live in a postmodern age that has rejected metaphysics,” Anderson writes in his second chapter. “That’s not quite true. We live in a postmodern age that promotes an alternative metaphysics. At the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person — in particular, that people are what they claim to be, regardless of contrary evidence.”
It was ostensibly Anderson’s criticism of transgenderism which got his book deplatformed, but there is no way to know exactly what his transgression was. Amazon has offered no public explanation and did not respond to a request for comment sent earlier this morning. Even Anderson doesn’t know what happened.
“I discovered the book had vanished from Amazon, including Kindle and Audible and used booksellers, when someone looking to buy it alerted me,” Anderson told me in an email. “No one from Amazon notified me or my publisher. My publisher has reached out, but still no response.”
One has to assume, considering some quite illiberal social trends, that Anderson was struck down for suggesting that human nature and physiology have certain constancies, a notion that is anathema to progressivism.
“It’s not about how you say it, it’s not about how rigorously you argue it, it’s not about how charitably you present it,” Anderson told me. “It’s about whether you dissent from a new orthodoxy.”
Amazon is treading on dangerous ground, shutting off debate over an issue with very serious implications that have by no means been settled. Beyond its abstract commitments, the Biden administration itself has not shown the ability or the willingness to address with thoughtful moral clarity the problems arising from transgender people’s participation in athletics, for example.
In a Feb. 9 press briefing, a reporter asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether President Biden has guidance for school officials where the participation of transgender girls, or biological males, in girls’ sports raises concerns or even lawsuits over its compromising a “level playing field.”
“I would just say that the president’s belief is that trans rights are human rights and that’s why he signed that executive order. And in terms of the determinations by universities and colleges, I’d certainly defer to them,” Psaki responded, and that was all.
Amazon, apparently, is similarly trying to avoid the drama of a difficult political question, while it aims to be on the right side. Ironically, Amazon is a place where you can find anything you could ever want, including a rain jacket for your dog. But if you are interested in reading a serious critique of transgenderism, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
