In late February, readers alerted the writer and President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Ryan T. Anderson, that his 2018 book on transgenderism When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment had been pulled from Amazon’s virtual shelves.
Sure enough, when Anderson checked the store-page for the book, it had been removed and sales halted. He took to Twitter to point out the fact:
In the days following the removal of Anderson’s book, which touches on transgenderism as a medical, political and philosophical phenomenon, the company (which has monopsony control over the bookselling industry) hadn’t given any clear indication as to why the book was suddenly removed.
Amazon has, however, recently provided an explanation for the sudden banning. The Wall Street Journal broke the story on March 12 that, in testimony to Congress, an Amazon representative had explained that the company was refusing to sell books that characterized LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness. Anderson’s book does do this, as did the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, up until 2013 when the term was reclassified from “gender identity disorder” to “gender dysphoria.” Anderson uses both terms in the book.
As of the writing of this article, Amazon hasn’t reinstated the book or signaled it intends to do so. Meanwhile, Amazon continues to sell Mein Kampf and Anderson’s other books, including Truth Overruled, a book arguing against same-sex marriage. The goings-on are prompting questions about an unaccountable, behind-closed-doors process of censorship at the tech giant which exercises 70-80% market dominance in the online bookselling industry.
But, I’m willing to grant that maybe Amazon has a point. Maybe Anderson said something so egregious within the pages of When Harry Became Sally that no sane person of good conscience could allow people to continue to purchase it. So I picked up a copy of this dangerous tome from the indubitable Paul Meek Library to see for myself.
I will say this about When Harry Became Sally: it is, as far as I can tell, a well-researched book, it is compassionate and not hateful towards transpeople and/or those who have gender dysphoria and denies, in no uncertain terms, extremely novel notions that many people take for granted about sex, gender and gender identity. If all of those claims can be true simultaneously, and I think they can, Amazon has no business cancelling this book. What’s more, we as a society need to be more vigilant about activists running roughshod over the discourse because they claim the mantle of civil rights and the massive tech companies that are willing to back them up with a new Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
The main thrust of Anderson’s argument is, essentially, that activists for transgenderism (who he takes pains to distinguish from transgender people in the main) are perpetuating claims about human beings that cause real psychological and physical harm while also not being supported by medical science. It’s a controversial thesis, no doubt, but defendable.
While I don’t have the time to lay out the whole book, and I do encourage readers to read it either at the library or by purchasing it directly from the publisher or through Barnes & Noble. I will touch on a few points that make the book politically and culturally significant.
It examines the claims of LGBT activists about biological sex and gender that, given a preponderance of the evidence, do not seem accurate, like the idea that gender identity is determinant of sex—expressed by influential medical leaders like Dr. Deanna Adkins of the Duke University School of Medicine, and director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care. It points out how oftentimes the discourse around transgender issues, especially in regard to children, traffic in gender stereotyping as a way to identify children with discordant gender identity—e.g., a young boy plays with dolls and likes the color pink, he may be suspected of having a female gender identity. Fundamental epistemic assumptions like what it would feel like to be a person of the opposite gender trapped in the wrong body are critically examined. Finally, the book spends much of its time talking about the science, or the lack thereof, on transgender issues.
The most damning criticism that social conservatives like Anderson can level against trans activists is that fundamental supporting pillars of the medicalized approach to gender dysphoria are lacking in experimental validation. The studies either suffer from poor methodologies, low sample sizes, experimental bias or other problems. To give one example, he cites a clinical practice guideline from the Endocrine Society (which advocates hormone treatment for adolescents to block puberty) which itself admitted that the quality of the research supporting their guidelines was “low or very low.”
Anderson makes some pretty big claims about the medical profession that I can’t possibly verify, so take my analysis with a grain of salt, but taking a look at some of his detractors makes it hard to argue that the book is based purely on junk science. One of the major critics of the book when it came out was ThinkProgress, which was cited in newspapers that characterized the book as “anti-trans” like the UK’s Independent.
The progressive social advocacy outlet, in its review of the book, just asserted that Anderson’s book is hateful towards transpeople because it doesn’t affirm progressive notions on gender identity. Specifically, they criticize “dead-naming” and Anderson’s insistence that transpeople are people biologically of one sex but identifying as another (as used to be the common parlance). While those practices are widely thought of as harmful now, especially by activist types, they are precisely the sort of thing that is under contention in the context of the book. In other words, ThinkProgress is mad that a book advocating against transgender identity doesn’t define transgender identity on progressive terms, which already have their assumptions (which are under question) baked into the cake.
Although I will say, to detract from Anderson a little bit, one should take transpeople at their word that calling them by a name they no longer go by can be psychologically harmful and there are ways to avoid this without kowtowing to the ideology he purports to be attacking. In this one respect, I would say, he could have done better (even though he only does this two or three times in the book).
In talking about the “junk science” Anderson employs, ThinkProgress links to their own articles criticizing a New Atlantis report by Paul McHugh and Lawrence Mayer on sexual and gender identity, which accepts most of the analysis of the report but quibbles about the details and framing, as well as one challenging the so-called “desistence myth” by, in my opinion, peddling a no-true-Scotsman fallacy wherein if a child desists from their gender dysphoria they weren’t really gender dysphoric in the first place.
The sticky question about the last part is that both Anderson and advocates for transgenderism have plausible mechanisms to explain why most children who experience gender incongruity with their biological sex will desist unless they begin undergoing hormone treatment, in which case the vast majority will maintain their transgender identity. Anderson is aware of the phenomenon and, plausibly I think, suggests that neuroplasticity and social affirmation can account for this, perhaps better than just defining desisting children out of a gender discordant identity.
There is also a large section of the book dedicated to so-called “detransitioners,” people who had a transgender identity, in some cases having sex reassignment surgery, and then decided to reverse course. It’s true that such individuals don’t get a great amount of attention in the national press, and rather than hamfistedly using them as bludgeons to beat his ideological opponents, I found it communicative of a character of respect on Anderson’s part for mostly allowing these people to use their own words to describe their experiences, however, valid criticisms can be made of this approach. For one, many of the people featured had abuse or other psychological issues in their background that could be confounding factors for Anderson’s analysis.
I’ll leave off a pure analysis of this book with the qualification that I think Anderson truly hits a respectable, even-handed tone between, on the one hand, criticizing the science and ideology behind transgenderism as a phenomenon and, on the other hand, not vilifying, attacking, or excusing violence towards transgender people. It’s as universally palatable as a book that fundamentally denies progressive orthodoxy on sex and gender can be.
There are tens of millions of people in this country—religious and social conservatives as well as socially liberal individuals—that believe what Anderson espouses in this book. While nobody can or should compel Amazon to sell books like it, its de facto monopoly power over the bookselling industry means that fewer books like this, representing one side of a controversial issue, will be published. When a company large and prosperous enough to be a country in its own right puts its massive thumb on the scale of ongoing public discourse, it creates a chilling effect in the wider culture that can’t be ignored.
You don’t have to agree with Anderson, his book or any other of his positions to see that, or to see that (whatever its faults) When Harry Became Sally is not a hateful book and does not deserve to be banned. Likewise, the time for a broad bipartisan coalition to stand up to large corporations is now. Even if you think Ryan T. Anderson is a deplorable, transphobic bigot, banning his ideas will only deepen culture-war rifts and embitter those who feel like even their best, most reasonable, most nuanced takes on controversial issues are verboten.
Image Credit / EncounterBooks.com
