News
Featured Image

May 6, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Employees of online retail giant Amazon are taking umbrage to the company’s decision to continue selling a book detailing the harm that gender confusion inflicts on children.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by the Wall Street Journal’s Abigail Shrier, explores the phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a term coined in 2018 by Brown University behavioral scientist Lisa Littman. She found that a significant percentage of gender dysphoria among minors came not from innate feelings of discontent with one’s true sex but from outside influence.

For her book, Shrier “dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to ‘detransitioners’ — young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves,” according to the product description. “Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier found, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back.”

Amazon suspended advertising for the book last June, and this April employees filed an internal complaint alleging that it violates Amazon’s policy against selling books “that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” On April 23, Amazon announced that “after examining the content of the book in detail and calibrating with senior leadership, we have confirmed that it does not violate our content policy,” NBC News reports.

“As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to written speech and a variety of viewpoints is one of the most important things we do — even when those viewpoints differ from our own or Amazon’s stated positions,” a spokesperson said in a follow-up statement, but internal company discussions reveal a very different belief among Amazon’s workforce.

The Seattle Times reviewed “dozens” of internal comments from employees who wanted the book removed and were outraged when it wasn’t. “As a proud Amazonian and a queer person, I invite Amazon to do the right thing and remove this book from our offerings globally,” one wrote before the decision. “We’ve been fighting this for months. We were consulted. We told them it’s transphobic and needs to be removed,” another lamented afterward.

Many of the complaints came from Glamazon, Amazon’s “affinity group” for “LGBTQ+” employees. Among the group’s previous efforts was “support[ing] the creation of a Transgender Toolkit for managers and employees to use when going through a gender transition in the workplace.”

On Thursday, Shrier addressed the latest coverage of the situation as well as the double-standards at work among journalists and activists alike in a Substack article.

“To see just how far things have shifted in this regard, consider a book published in 2008, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, shameless conspiracy theorists who accused Jews of warping American foreign policy for selfish gain injurious to American interests,” she wrote. “The panic that book set off in the American Jewish community was real and pitched. And yet, I cannot remember — nor could I now discover — a single call for it to be banned. No one in public life seems to have had the temerity to demand its removal — nor did a single journalist report on booksellers’ ‘refusal’ to ban it.”

“The amazing thing about my conversation with the Seattle Times reporter,” Shrier noted, “was not only her ironclad assumption that the burden was on me to prove my book shouldn’t be banned, but that it never struck her that of all the ‘experts’ she had consulted about my book, every last one had a pecuniary interest in medically transitioning youth. (So much for a reporter’s gimlet eye for conflicts of interest.)”

Amazon’s decision is something of a departure for the left-wing company, which has typically followed the whims of “social justice” activists. Amazon allows the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to identify groups to exclude from the company’s Amazon Smile charity program, has banned the sale of books that promote reparative therapy for overcoming unwanted homosexual attraction, tried to block a booklet dissenting from the conventional narrative on COVID-19, and has lobbied against state laws protecting religious adoption agencies and keeping men out of women’s sports.