Abigail Shrier’s new book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was bound to be controversial.
The book was banned from Target (allegedly after a Twitter complaint), but then reinstated.
But the outcry against the book continues. One of the most shocking (to the extent that anything shocks these days) comments comes from an ACLU officer, who demands that the book be banned. Shrier writes about this in today’s Wall Street Journal:
“Abigail Shrier’s book is a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans,” Chase Strangio, the American Civil Liberties Union’s deputy director for transgender justice, tweeted Friday. “I think of all the times & ways I was told my transness wasn’t real & the daily toll it takes. We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again.” Then: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”
You read that right: Some in today’s ACLU favor book banning. Grace Lavery, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, went further, tweeting: “I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier’s book and burn it on a pyre.”
This is where leftist extremism, encouraged by cowardly corporations, leads. The market—that is, readers—should determine what booksellers carry. My book was consistently No. 1 in several categories on Amazon based on sales. But the online giant, under pressure from extremists, refused to allow my publisher to advertise “Irreversible Damage” on the site.
At a time when independent bookstores are nearly extinct, chain bookstores are endangered, and Americans’ movement outside their homes is constrained by a pandemic, a handful of online retailers have outsize influence over the ideas to which we have access. And those ideas are being winnowed in one direction.
As Shrier notes, Robin DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility, is (as it should be) on sale at Target, and those who are offended by the book have made no attempt to ban it.
It is especially sad that some in the ACLU advocate book banning.
The ACLU is an old-line liberal organization, admired, even if sometimes grudgingly, among conservatives, until recent years, because it stood up for freedom of speech.
If it still stood for freedom of speech, it would put out a statement disavowing Chase Strangio’s statement.
Don’t hold your breath.