Withering
It’s a fierce competition for who can shout the loudest.
The American Booksellers Association is facing withering criticism from booksellers after walking back its promotion of an anti-trans title to member bookstores. Among the promotional items included in the ABA July “white box” mailing sent to 750 bookstores, the organization included a copy of Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, as well as a sell sheet.
So Publishers Weekly poisons the well in the first sentence (and the title) by calling the book “anti-trans.” What does “anti-trans” mean? It implies, and I think is generally taken to mean, hostile to trans people, but usually the subject is the truth claims about what “trans” means and how anyone knows any of them are true. It’s not necessarily hostility to trans people (to people who consider themselves trans) to question the truth claims about what “trans” means.
Meanwhile, the ABA issued a groveling apology, as we know, accusing itself of “violence.”
But booksellers said the statement fell short, calling out the organization’s use of the passive voice in the opening sentence. They also demanded greater transparency about how the decision to include the book was initially made, and called for demonstrable steps to restore trust with trans book workers and authors. Some called on the ABA to offer promotions for trans authors’ books at no cost.
Why stop there? Why not send trans authors on a luxury multi-week tour of Europe at no cost?
ABA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee member Luis Correa, who works as a bookseller at Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., was first made aware of the issue when fellow booksellers emailed him Morrissey’s tweet. Correa identifies as a queer, Latino, and fat-bodied person, and said he thought the apology was flawed.
Of course it’s flawed, it didn’t address the queer Latino fat-bodied community. Where’s that free trip to Europe?! (Also what happened to Latinx? Uh oh, better cancel Correa; no free trip to Europe for him.)
Regnery, the publisher of Irreversible Damage, sent the copies to booksellers to promote the book’s forthcoming paperback release. First published in hardcover in 2020, the critical reception to the book varied widely and the book has become the subject of fierce debate. Psychology Today criticized the author’s reliance on a controversial gender dysphoria theory and her rejection of basic science.
What rejection of basic science is that, exactly? What does the trans ideology have to do with any kind of science, basic or advanced?
The publisher defended the book, but Publishers Weekly knows better.
Among booksellers, however, there was little disagreement about the content of the book. “As longtime @ABAbook members with beloved staff across the gender spectrum, we’re extremely disappointed and angered to see the ABA promoting dangerous, widely discredited anti-trans propaganda, and we’re calling for accountability,” the Harvard Book Store wrote on Twitter.
But what does “anti-trans” mean?
DEI committee member Correa said he is cautiously optimistic that the ABA will take steps that demonstrate a commitment to doing right by booksellers, and believes that the decision to take the coming weeks to outline steps was more prudent than rushing. In the past, he said ABA has been responsive on issues that are important to trans booksellers, including adding functionality to the Indie Commerce websites that many member bookstores use so that they can remove anti-trans titles from the ordering database. Still, he is wary.
“We’re dealing with a historically white, cis organization in a white supremacist society. So there are going to be a lot of missteps,” he told PW.
Is it historically male at all? Or is that something that just doesn’t matter these days.
How does one identify as a fat-bodied person? Is one required to be a fat-bodied person in order to identify as one?
Given the abjectness and self- loathing of their apology, you’d think they’d been caught sending out boxes full of Anthrax, plutonium dust, plague bacilli, nails, broken glass and raw sewage from a leper colony, rigged to explode in the face of whomever had the misfortune of opening it.
Books certainly can be dangerous, but not in the way they imagine.
GRAB HER, SHE”S GOT A BOOK!!! IT”S A SHRIER .38 HARDCOVER!!! IT’S LOADED WITH INCORRECT PRONOUNS, AND HOLLOW-POINT “WOMEN AND GIRLS!!!” HURRY!! SHE MIGHT READ ALOUD FROM IT ANY SECOND!!!
The mere existence of this book causes trans activists untold pain and anguish in the same way cartoons of Muhammad, or destruction of a Koran causes untold pain and suffering amongst Islamists.
Who the hell talks about their employees like that? That’s kinda creepy. Beloved?! I’ll bet they’re all Stunning, Brave, Courageous and Brilliant, too. Except for their cis staff. they’re just there, taking up space until less boring, more Belovedable people can be found to replace them.
He must have missed the memo where they’re supposed to blame everything on Karens.
So they only identify as booksellers? Do they scream TBAB? Do they insist on inclusion in all booksellers events? Do they kill themselves if they are not recognized as booksellers?
Why should they be? One can identify as what they want, right? It’s what they feel like. I imagine every anorexic out there identifies as a fat-bodied person; I know I did when I was anorexic, but now that I am overweight, I identify as Twiggy. That means I am Twiggy, right?
I know, isn’t it?! What, they’re all beloved, every single one of them? Why? That doesn’t sound like any workplace I’ve ever been in.
It’s creepy and it’s fucking maudlin is what it is. The language about trans people is always maudlin. Why is that? What’s it about? They’re not elves or hobbits or cute little bunnies, what is with the bizarre emotive hyped-up language?
I really do like the Latinx construction, which is a rejection of the linguistic basis of the Latin community in favour of an utterly Anglo appendage -x. You can’t even say it naturally in Spanish.
Shouldn’t that be “Anglx” instead of “Anglo?”
@2 I saw a tweet screenshot in which someone literally wrote ‘someone has to act quickly; it only takes a few hours for someone to read that book and then trans people will die.’ Seriously. (If I find the link to that screenshot I’ll post it.)
If my employer ever calls me “beloved”, I’ll know I’m part of a cult.
“Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here today to discuss the projections for the 3rd quarter profits.”
Reading a book kills trans people? So someone speed reading produces trans deaths even faster? How does that even work? Like the evil TERF twin of clapping for Tinkerbell to keep her from dying,? Is there some kind of unholy spell woven into the book’s printed pages such that if someone’s eyes pass over it while reading, some untold number of trans people will die? If I read the blurb, does somebody get a headache? Hardcover or paperback? What about the Kindle edition? Different spell? What happens if I look at an edition printed in a language I cannot read; a maiming? Laryngitis? Or maybe the spell works on the reader, who then goes out and kills trans people themselves? There are so many possible ways this could go. What is the supposed mechanism? I would be curious as to the reasoning behind this claim.
Is the ABA now going to commit itself to sending out teams to locate and disarm all of these lethal volumes before all of these potential deaths occur? What is their course of action? Are these special strike teams fully inclusive? Will they have protection against any injury that might occur should they inadvertently catch a glimpse of a word or two that Shrier put to paper? Maybe they could use Perseus’s trick of using a mirror? It worked with Medusa.
I think J. K. Rowling takes care of putting the appropriate spells on each copy of the book.
‘Is the ABA now going to commit itself to sending out teams to locate and disarm all of these lethal volumes before all of these potential deaths occur?’ IIRC this is what the tweeter was recommending.
A post on Ovarit claims the book is now at #7 on the US Amazon site:
https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/36929/irreversible-damage-is-currently-7-on-amazon-best-sellers-list
If so, it looks like the “banned in Boston” effect on steroids (not just from the ABA but from all the other attacks on the book). Hyperventilating efforts to suppress information usually backfire.
It’s funny, because I’m a fat bodied person who identifies as a thin bodied person, but somehow my self ID doesn’t persuade either other people to perceive me as thin, nor the doctor’s scales to weigh me as thin. It’s almost as though reality trumps identity. Almost.
On the ‘anti-trans’ well poisoning, I’m seeing lots of examples of that cropping up. in NZ media the other day there was an article celebrating 10 years since one of the Harry Potter books came out. The writer was conflicted about celebrating their much loved childhood book, when it’s creator had turned out to be such an awful anti-trans bigot. Maya Forstater also came in for the ‘fired for being anti-trans’ lash, which as we know is dishonest because she was both not fired for being anti-trans and also has recently won her court case – so not anti-trans and protected speech to boot.
I’m going to run with the article writer being knowingly dishonest, because anyone educated enough to read, and motivated enough on an issue to write thousands of words, simply has to be aware of the facts on the ground, especially when the outcome of the Forstater case has been so widely reported and discussed. The STUFF website never even opened the article for comment, which has become their typical stance for any topic that might be controversial. Sadly it also means the only articles they ever open for comment are also of very little interest. Gutless. One of the reasons I’ll never give them money.
4 commenters on the article, none of them impressed with it.
That seems unlikely to happen to me. And not just because I’m self-employed; I know you’ll find this difficult to believe, but I seem to have done much to make myself disagreeable to former employers. A habit of doing whatever I thought needed to be done rather than what I was told to do, for the most part. I’m imagining them issuing a statement with a caveat that while most of their staff are beloved, I definitely am not.
Wait until the audiobook comes out. I have five devices capable of playing audiobooks just within reach and I can open multiple browsers on most of them and play several copies at the same time, at high speed. Trans people will be dropping like flies. It’ll be like the rapture; planes falling out of the skies, televisions falling silent, women feeling an unnerving sense of not constantly being told to betray their own sex…
I’m always being accused of “literal genocide”, perhaps this is what my accusers have in mind.
I’ve sometimes wondered about printing mantras around the edges of DVDs and CDs. During the days before digital downloads, they could have done the work of centuries worth of spinning Tibetan prayer wheels in short order. I suppose you could still have them inscribed on the wheels of cars, trucks and bicycles. Shades of Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Nine Billion Names of God.”
Ha!