Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement was published in 2018.
You’ll notice that there is no Amazon link to help you buy the book.
Amazon sold When Harry Became Sally, which reportedly was an excellent seller, until it abruptly vanished from Amazon last week. Ryan’s author profile on Amazon continued to list his other three books, but When Harry Became Sally is no longer on the list. It is a non-book, as far as Amazon is concerned.
The book’s disappearance from Amazon occurred on the very same day Anderson published an opinion piece in the New York Post that opposed the Biden administration’s Equality Act. Here is a snippet of what Anderson said about the act with the misleading name:
The act “updates” the law Congress passed primarily to combat racism, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and adds sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes akin to race. So if you have any reservations about gender ideology — as even many progressives do; just ask J.K. Rowling — you’d now be the legal equivalent of Bull Connor.
Rather than finding common-sense, narrowly tailored ways to shield LGBT-identifying Americans from truly unjust discrimination, the bill would act as a sword — to persecute those who don’t embrace newfangled gender ideologies. It would vitiate a sex binary that is quite literally written into our genetic code and is fundamental to many of our laws, not least laws protecting the equality, safety and privacy of women.
The Equality Act would sacrifice the hard-won rights of women, while privileging men who identify as women. If it becomes law, such men would have a right to spend the night in battered-women’s shelters, disrobe in women’s locker rooms and compete on women’s sports teams — even at K-12 schools.
Don’t believe me? Here’s the text: “An individual shall not be denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.” So you can keep separate facilities for men and women, but you have to redefine what men and women are. Likewise, you can reserve certain jobs only for men or women — think TSA agents doing pat-downs — but you have to let a man who identifies as a woman do strip searches on women.
IWF’s Inez Stepman had a terrific piece in the Wall Street Journal outlining the consequences of passage of the Equality Act. I urge you to read the whole article, but the last sentence deftly sums up what’s really at stake:
The Equality Act isn’t about protecting people from discrimination; it’s about compelling adherence to gender ideology. Don’t let its name fool you.
Author Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, has also been the target of a banning campaign. Shrier’s book is not polemics but reporting on a phenomenon. Furthermore, the idea that the book would offend mainstream readers was absurd. As Shrier noted in Quillette:
The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view. Indeed, outside of Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and college campuses, it is a view held by a majority of Americans. There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.
Silicon Valley and peer pressure from activists have become alarmingly effective in the battle against free expression.
Conservatives, to our credit, tend to argue about this suppression of speech and ideas in terms of principle rather than power. We don’t want to ban books, even ones that offend us. The book banners, it appears, have no such scruples.