Amazon has returned a book about transgenderism to its cyber shelves after a four-year ban, citing customer feedback and the fact that other retailers never stopped selling the book, When Harry Became Sally: Answers for Our Transgender Moment.
Ethics and Public Policy president Ryan Anderson’s book is currently available for sale on the site for the first time in years, after it was banned during the Biden administration under the false pretense that it “frame[s] LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”
The book was for sale on Amazon during the Trump administration but was delisted after the Washington Post ran an article titled, “Ryan Anderson’s book calling transgender people mentally ill is creating an uproar.”
The article wrongly claimed: “In the 264-page book, ‘When Harry Became Sally,’ Anderson makes an inflammatory claim—that transgender people are mentally ill.”
“My book made no such claim,” Anderson wrote in an essay for the Wall Street Journal at the time. “I contacted the Post asking them to quote a single sentence from the book supporting their contention that I had called transgender people mentally ill. They couldn’t, because it doesn’t exist. Within a day, the newspaper had entirely rewritten the story, removing the falsehoods and changing the headline.”
Instead, Anderson explained at the time that his book merely continues the debate about how best to help patients who experience gender dysphoria.
Amazon said in a statement that it reexamined its decision in part because of customer feedback encouraging the major retailer to carry it — controversial or not.
“Balancing free speech and content that could be construed as hate speech is one of the most difficult adjudication decisions we make as a company,” the tech giant said in a statement. “A few years ago, we removed ‘When Harry Became Sally’ from our store after concluding that it violated our guideline prohibiting books that promote hate speech. This was not an easy decision and was hotly debated.”
It adds: “Since then, many other retailers (e.g. Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Powell’s, etc.) have continued to sell this book, and we’ve continued to receive feedback from customers that the ideas presented in this book, while controversial, should be available for those who want to read and understand the perspective of its author.”
“The combination of our peer retailers continuing to sell the book and the ongoing feedback made us re-examine our decision,” it concludes. “As was the case when we reviewed the book a few years ago, it was not an easy decision, but we concluded that we erred on the side of being too restrictive last time, and decided to return the book to our store.”
Anderson celebrated the decision in a statement to National Review.
“I’m happy to give credit where credit is due. Jeff Bezos and Amazon have done the right thing. I’m also grateful to my friends and allies who pushed for this to happen,” he said.
The reversal comes less than a month into the Trump administration and days after the new FTC chair questioned why the book had not been allowed on Amazon.
EPPC had campaigned in recent days to return the book to Amazon’s cyber shelves. “The Woke Fever Broke, So Why Is Bezos Still Banning Ryan Anderson’s Book On Transgenderism?” the group asked.
As Ed Whelan wrote for NR in recent days, Bezos and Amazon had “billions of reasons —billions of dollars in federal government contracts—to reverse course and to make recompense to Ryan.” Under Trump’s executive order declaring that there are two sexes, male and female, federal agencies in the executive branch were directed to impose “requirements on federally funded entities, including contractors, to achieve the policy of this order.”
Amazon contracts with the Department of Defense and other agencies that could “impose requirements that disqualify contractors who discriminate against individuals on the ground that the individuals recognize the biological reality of sex that Trump’s executive order proclaims,” Whelan noted.
Amazon’s decision comes as the tides appear to be turning on big tech censorship more broadly, first with Elon Musk’s acquisition of X and, more recently, with Meta’s steps to scrap its third-party fact-checking system that had long been accused of having a liberal slant. Facebook will now employ a community notes style of fact checking, like X.
Meta also replaced the liberal head of its global policy team, Nick Clegg, with the social media company’s most vocal Republican, Joel Kaplan.