(ETH) – Retail giant Target has just pulled a book from its shelves that is critical of the medicalized gender-transitioning of teenaged girls only to shortly add it back following outraged customer complaints. The reason they pulled it from the shelves was following tweets from two customers, that complained about the book.
Shortly after the complaint, the retail giant stated they would no longer sell books from author and journalist Abigail Shrier, and especially “Irreversible Damage”: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. “I think the trans community deserves a response from @AskTarget @Target as to why they are selling this book about the ‘transgender epidemic sweeping the country.’
Trigger warning: Transphobia,” one Twitter user wrote, according to The Federalist. Another Twitter user said: “In 2016, @Target, you released a statement affirming your support for transgender customers. @AskTarget why you’re selling a book notorious for its harmful rhetoric against us. Historically, harmful products have been pulled from this shelf, and this should be, too.” Target didn’t waste any time responding to the tweet explaining that the company would remove the book.
Then came the backlash from those who were outraged that the book was removed and accused Target of censorship. “We removed a book from Target.com based on feedback we received,” the retail giant told The Federalist in a statement Friday. “We want to offer a broad assortment for our guests and are adding this book back to Target.com.
We apologize for any confusion.” The Christian Post reported that a prominent attorney within the American Civil Liberties Union, Chase Strangio — who has spearheaded the outfit’s transgender legal efforts — was quick to accused Shrier in a tweet of having the “goal of making people not trans.” He accused her book of being a “dangerous polemic.” “I think of all the times & ways I was told my transness wasn’t real & the daily toll it takes.
We have to fight these ideas which are leading to the criminalization of trans life again,” Strangio expressed in a now-deleted tweet. The ACLU attorney added: “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” Shrier responded after penning a Sunday Wall Street Journal editorial, noting that when “when independent bookstores are nearly extinct, chain bookstores are endangered, and Americans’ movement outside their homes is constrained by a pandemic, a handful of online retailers have outsize influence over the ideas to which we have access.”
“And those ideas are being winnowed in one direction,” she argued. Shrier stated that although Target has reversed course in response to customer complaints, other books will be quietly suppressed. “In an America where the left has achieved dominance of cultural institutions and adopted a tyrannical opposition to other ideas, where social media extends its reach, and where books are distributed by a handful of retailers — a book burning doesn’t even require a populist uprising,” Shrier stated. “It takes only one online extremist or two to make a book disappear. And when that happens, don’t look to the ACLU to defend you.”