The online commerce behemoth Amazon has announced that it will be relisting “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement,” a bestselling and influential book critical of the transgender movement that had been delisted at the behest of LGBTQ+ activists.
The move comes as President Donald Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders related to gender ideology and males interloping in female sports.
“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,” Amazon said in a recent statement justifying its ban of the book even as it lifted it. The book took its name from the title of a 1989 romantic comedy film “When Harry Met Sally.”
Author Ryan Anderson strongly contested Amazon’s stance, then and now, on the book in a statement to The Daily Signal.
I’m glad that the company is able to admit they made a bad decision four years ago. However, the statement they put out attempting to explain away their mistake is pathetic. There is nothing remotely objectionable in my book and nothing remotely approaching ‘hate speech.’
For Amazon to continue to insist that the book is borderline ‘hate speech’ and that it is a tough call on whether or not to sell it is nothing short of ridiculous.
Getting banned from Amazon can matter significantly in the publishing industry, given that the company controls about 50% of all book distribution. Amazon had previously sold Anderson’s book, which was published in February 2018, but suddenly reversed itself at the onset of the Biden administration in February 2021.
In a letter dated Feb. 24, 2021, to Republican members of the Senate, the company had justified its decision to remove Anderson’s work by claiming that he had “frame[d] LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Anderson refuted the company’s characterization of the book at the time.
“The only problem here is that my book does no such thing. Nowhere have I ever said or framed LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness,” Anderson told The Daily Signal.
Critics of Amazon’s decision at the time pointed out that the company had no problem selling books widely deemed as promoting horrible ideas, including “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler and “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx, nor had it censored Anderson’s work for about three years.
Anderson described his reasons for writing the bestseller in a statement to The Daily Signal.
“There’s a certain type of conservative that writes an inflammatory book or gives an inflammatory talk on a college campus, so that they’ll then get canceled, and go on TV complaining about it. That’s not me,” he explained.
“‘When Harry Became Sally’ was the first major book to criticize transgender ideology, medicine, and public policy, and it was meant to persuade people who didn’t already agree with me, and to equip those already inclined to agree so they could then persuade others. There’s nothing at all about the book that should give Amazon pause, apart from the fact that it blew the whistle on what we will one day look back on as a giant medical and legal scandal,” Anderson said.
The Daily Signal asked Anderson whether the sudden reversal of the book ban was a result of political pressure from the second Trump administration.
“The decision itself strikes me as political. Just look at the timing. They sold the book for three years when Trump was president. They banned the book as ‘hate speech’ a month after [Joe] Biden became president. And now just mere weeks after Trump is inaugurated again, they bring the book back,” Anderson said. “I imagine that Trump’s [executive orders] on gender ideology and the posts on X from his newly appointed [chairman of the Federal Trade Commission] suggested to them that the political winds were shifting.”
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
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