The book is said to promote the idea that transgender people suffer a mental illness.
At least two Amazon employees have resigned in recent weeks following a complaint posted to the company’s internal message board in April which drew the support of over 467 Amazon corporate employees.
The resignations were made to protest the company’s decision to continue selling a book they say frames young people who identify as transgender as mentally ill, NBC News reported
The employee-led petition calls for the removal of a book named ‘Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters’, authored by Abigail Shrier.
The title explores what it calls a “trans epidemic” and is registered as a bestseller on Amazon’s platform in the company’s category of “LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies.”
While Shrier denies that her book frames LGBTQ identities as a form of mental illness, it includes passages like:
“Many of the adolescent girls suddenly identifying as transgender seemed to be caught in a ‘craze’ — a cultural enthusiasm that spreads like a virus”, later going on to refer to the craze as a “crowd mental illness.”
Shrier also likens the trans experience to eating disorders by comparing therapists who affirm transgender patients to if one were to affirm a young person’s anorexia by agreeing that they are fat. “We wouldn’t think such a therapist was compassionate. We might think she was a monster,” Shrier writes.
Selene Xenia – previously a software engineer for the company for seven years – identifies as transgender and was one of the first employees to resign in June.
She told NBC News: “The book literally has [craze] in the title and considers being transgender a mental illness in many senses throughout the book”
In a statement to The Hill an Amazon spokesperson said the company strives to provide diverse viewpoints:
“As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to written speech and a variety of viewpoints is one of the most important things we do – even when those viewpoints differ from our own or Amazon’s stated positions.”
Notably Amazon have previously removed titles by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as books by George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party.
So we’re just left wondering at what point that line gets drawn and by whom. It’s not by 467 members of their own staff seemingly.