Amazon has returned a book critical of the modern transgender movement to its shelves after banning it four years ago.
When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment was removed from the Amazon store in 2021 after the platform claimed that the book violated its guideline prohibiting books that promote hate speech.
Revealing its u-turn in a statement, Amazon said that “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”.
“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. 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. 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,” the statement said.
Author of the book, Ryan T. Anderson posted on social media to say “love to see it” in response to his book’s return.
He followed this up with a screenshot of a summary of the customer reviews of his book generated by Amazon’s own AI, which concluded that the book had a “charitable motive”.
“The AI-generated summary of the customer reviews may be my favorite part of all this. For just how starkly they contradict what Amazon claimed about the book when they banned it,” Anderson said.
President, CEO and General Counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) Kristen Waggoner hailed the development as “wonderful news,” adding that while she’s thankful for Amazon’s “change of heart,” “I’d love to know what the company is doing to ensure it won’t be swayed by the censorship demands of gender ideologues again”.
Author and journalist Abigail Shrier, whose book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was similarly delisted by American retailer Target, said that “the deletion of Ryan’s book from Amazon was one of the darker moments in the Left’s war of suppression in support of ‘social justice’.”
“Would be good to have Amazon Files released so that we can see the process by which Earth’s Biggest Bookstore made this indefensible blunder,” Shrier added.