The problem is not that the books are banned by some book stores. That situation is fine, and we can live with it. The problem is that access to those books is now significantly reduced. When a single entity gets too big or an entire industry chooses to ban something we have a problem. I don't know the solution but I do know this goes beyond a private company's right to sell only what they want. That right is now in competition with societies access to published works. It is also restricting authors and publishers from selling works that are legal to sell. This is a problem.
> The problem is that access to those books is now significantly reduced.
This is entirely false. The books can still be put up as an .epub at a URL on any of thousands of servers that can be accessed by the entirety of the internet-connected Earth. Such hosting service can be obtained in 5 minutes for a pittance, and will easily serve tens of millions. For slightly less than a pittance you can serve the file to billions.
If Facebook starts censoring posts or private person-to-person DMs with your URL in it, we have another discussion to have, but until that time this is just the normal freedom-of-association choices associated with being unpopular. Amazon sucks for doing this, to be sure, but the TFA is committing a worse offense: claiming inaccurately to have been banned.
There has never been a time where it has been easier or cheaper to publish to literally billions-with-a-b.
And what about when HN disappears the post talking about how Amazon disappeared the book you wrote? This thread is no longer accessible from the first (or second, or third, or...) page.
I think it’s important context that this author recently had her book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters” blocked from sale at some outlets. You can decide whether that helps or hurts her argument.
I've always been absolutely opposed to banning books.
...then I got diagnosed with adult ADHD, which, boy howdy, explains a lot about my life, and I'm only somewhat resentful of my parents for pursuing an alternative medicine approach when I was diagnosed as a kid. But anyway, that's just setting the scene.
Then I went to my local library to get some books on adult ADHD, to help my wife understand it better, and they only had one book on adult ADHD (quite a few more on child ADHD, natch), but in the same section, had two books stating unequivocally that ADHD was a made-up condition.
And I guess, now that I had a strong personal stake, I felt rather offended by these books.
I don't want to ban them, but I'd very much prefer that the library filed them under "alternative medicine" rather than under "mental illness > ADHD". Not so much for myself, but for any kids who get diagnosed and have a parent or parents similar to mine looking for a reason to deny the diagnosis.
With psychiatric stuff it's always a bit of a philosophical question especially if one isn't hearing voices or anything similarly. The criteria for diagnosis is basically whether you are worse than average on some metrics and whether you feel like you have an attention problem - but this could just as well be framed as "the way your personality is".
I've been diagnosed with adhd several times as an adult and every time I scored average/slightly above average on the attention+working memory metrics but scored so high on the other metrics that the ADHD ones were considered out of place!
Personally I don't necessarily believe that ADHD "exists" but am willing to say that I do, in order to take advantage of a prescription for dexedrine which I enjoy. I would of course, in practice, attack anyone claiming it doesn't "exist" because it is counter to my own self interest in maintaining a convenient supply of speedy pills.
Here's the fun bit though - I don't get "speedy" from the medication I'm on. Looking back with hindsight, when I was a teenager and snorting Ritalin with my friends, they got all silly and giggly, while I felt calmer. Was a sign I should've taken seriously. At the time I just thought I'd gotten dud pills.
But yeah, I think a good metaphor is that people with ADHD are starting at -1, people without are starting at 0, and then the pills add a +1 to both.
It's definitely worth looking into. In hindsight, I think it severely hampered my life in that I never graduated high school, I failed hard at university, and I did poorly at all my jobs that involved doing routine tasks.
However, the ability to "hyperfocus" is how I taught myself to code - albeit at some cost, staying up until 4am coding has some costs when you have a day job.
And then I lucked into a coding company where there were lots of interesting challenges I could hyperfocus into, even though I was failing at the necessary routines, it was overlooked because I could make the big leaps that transformed things.
If I'd be hired by a "Write the CRUD app using JSF templates and Hibernate for a slightly different client" company, I would've failed hard.
But the biggest issue that the medication has resolved for me is my impulsiveness around drugs and alcohol. Now, I can have two beers and then say "Nah, I don't need another".
Previously, that wasn't possible. With the obvious life impacts that followed.
So if you think it might be present, definitely worth confirming if it is, or if it isn't.
A monopoly in book-selling (which Amazon absolutely does not have) still doesn't allow the monopolist to ban a book. As long as people can sell stuff and have access to shipping, publishers can still publish and readers can still buy and read. Popularity and discoverability is still an issue, but that is orthogonal to content or topics being banned.
And then, of course, there is the internet, where anyone can put an .epub up at a public URL.
The author of this piece tips her hand when she veers off into discussion of the content of the book Amazon dropped and engages with its position directly.
This is just another case of someone who believes in ideas that are becoming less popular and less acceptable complaining about nonexistent unfairness.
I become less and less surprised to find (seemingly undercover) right-wing talking points on Substack these days, especially after its founder decided to donate free content to a leading alt-right website/publication by appearing on their podcast. Seeing stuff published on subdomains of substack.com immediately has me default-hyper-critical, which is something that usually only happens to me on OANN, Gab, Parler, msnbc.com, et c.
This proves too much. By this argument, it’s fine to arbitrarily deny people access to payment services and banking, since anyone can still mail them precious metals or send them cryptocurrency.
There are many gradations between “all companies allow X” and “the government will send men with guns to your home if you do X”. If only the last threshold counts as censorship, then we need a word for when people want to read what you wrote, but every major company decides to block that transaction. I think “censorship” is fine for that, but if you have a better term I’m all ears.
> By this argument, it’s fine to arbitrarily deny people access to payment services and banking, since anyone can still mail them precious metals or send them cryptocurrency.
If anyone could open a bank and provide banking services, this would be true, but the ability to grant a customer access to banking is heavily regulated.
No such corresponding thing exists when it comes to "selling stuff on a website".
You'd have done better by pointing out the time Visa and Mastercard both started denying donations to a publisher (simply on request of the state) long before any criminal charges against that publisher were filed or made public.
(Note that the website of said publisher is still up and still publishing.)
Again, however, the issue is that not anyone can just start a bank on a whim. Websites and publishing are not similarly restricted.
> If only the last threshold counts as censorship, then we need a word for when people want to read what you wrote, but every major company decides to block that transaction. I think “censorship” is fine for that, but if you have a better term I’m all ears.
That is indeed censorship. The article is claiming "banned", though, which is inaccurate. I am extremely critical of private organizations engaging in censorship, and think we should engage in activism regarding it, because we actually can.
Once something is actually banned though, activism for it is explicit promotion of illegal activity, which is often itself illegal. It's like calling every protest or riot "terrorism": it begins to mean nothing.
> A monopoly in book-selling (which Amazon absolutely does not have)
Depends on your definition of monopoly. Monopolistic practices and effects can begin to appear long before 100% domination of a market. I think it's fair to say that Amazon is well within such a range since they have over 80% of the book selling market in the US.
> This is just another case of someone who believes in ideas that are becoming less popular and less acceptable complaining about nonexistent unfairness.
So you think Amazon does nothing unfair? It's good to hear such full throated support for all their decisions.
But perhaps standing up for free speech when seeing it eroded is actually an honourable and decent thing to do. Speech isn't curtailed in one dramatic swoop, it's thousands of little decisions where we fail to stand up and say, this isn't fair, and it isn't the way to treat people we disagree with. If nobody wants to read the book, it will fail of its own accord -- nobody is forced to order it or read it.
> This is just another case of someone who believes in ideas that are becoming less popular and less acceptable complaining about nonexistent unfairness.
I don't know, it's not a good look when you censor someone and say "oh, you're just unpopular".
You can still buy this book from the publisher if you really want to.
You shouldn't buy it though, not if you want a real look at the experiences of the majority of transgender people, the views of the majority of the medical community, or the science that disrupts traditional western views about gender and biology.
Nobody chooses to be a transgender person. It just happens sometimes, like being born with 6 fingers on your hands. It might be difficult to fit in, but it's not bad or harmful intrinsically. Some people are different, and sometimes other people treat those who are different as a threat to them, instead of a chance to question their assumptions about what it means to be human and the diversity of human experience.
Unlike a person being transgender, that type of judgment of others is a choice. And sometimes people who make that choice then choose to write books about transgender folks to promote a political agenda, finding anecdotal situations to to justify their views.
Instead of assessing the experiences or actions of the majority of a group, they treat something deeply personal and difficult and subject to discrimination as an intellectual debate and look for ways to justify harmful policies, ignoring the demonstrated psychological benefits of gender affirming treatment for transgender people¹, or the differences in the brains of transgender people².
Sometimes people make a choice not to carry those kind of books. Amazon being huge and the effects of that is an entirely separate issue from their choice not to carry a particular book.
More likely that they have multiple reasons to be unhappy, and transitioning was insufficient to solve it. They may have been misdiagnosed in the first place, or were correctly diagnosed but attribute their remaining difficulties to the transition. Or they found difficulties being accepted in their new gender.
This is a problem throughout medicine: some treatments work, some don't, and we don't always know why. The vast majority of people who transition are helped by it, in part because of the extensive screening. Despite the hysterical tone of books like this, it's not something people do on a whim.
That doesn't mean it will help everybody, and those are unfortunate. But it's irrational to withhold a treatment that helps most patients because of a tiny number of negative outcomes -- especially when those outcomes are artificially given outsized influence by ideologues who have entirely un-medical reasons for opposing them.
It does seem inherently distressful ("bad") because what trans people seem to want isn't an alternative concept of gender. They want to, in fact, switch sex. They are born in psychological tension with their own body.
It would be another matter if trans people simply have an alternative concept of gender.
Regarding gender, there is another thing that confuses me. I was told all this time that gender is a social construct, a set of behaviors for a particular gender that might differ between different cultures, ie. it's not real. But reading the Wikipedia article on gender dysphoria, it says that it's a mismatch between the biological sex and gender, which was supposed to be a social construct. Are children being diagnosed with gender dysphoria just based on the fact that they don't express themselves in a way that we traditionally associate with either males or females? Do I understand it correctly?
When people talk about things as constructs, they aren't saying that they are completely artificial or fake. They are saying that our understanding of gender is a construction, built on top of human bodies which are incredibly complex and different from each other.
Like if I had to pick a metaphor, as I understand things, for HN, think of it an imperfect binary classification for assigned gender at birth API, a leaky abstraction on top of society understandings that are themselves constructed the messy analog physicality of people's "biological sex" which is not as simple as two options male and female, not even just in terms of chromosomal sex. Add in hormones levels, hormone sensitivity, genetic differences, brain structures, body hair etc, and even what people think of as basic "biological sex" is actually multifaceted and variable.
So in talking about gender as a construct, rather than something innate and natural and binary, it becomes possible to talk about how the API was developed, and maybe say, hey this API is a little simplistic.
I don't really agree with the biological sex thing, as the rules of how reproduction works are generally pretty straightforward and pretty much the same across most of the mammal species. But it's beside the point.
My question is specifically how do we diagnose gender dysphoria. Is it just based on the fact that a person might express himself in a way that society associated with one gender or another?
That would make sense to me. For what it's worth, from my observations of this community it appears to me that at the very least a significant part of self-{identified,diagnosed} transgender population seems to have an unrealistic, hypersexualized portrayal of what being a woman means, most likely influenced by pornography.
But why obscure and attack the concept of biological sex then? Doesn't that only reaffirm that what we've been doing this entire time is a right thing to do? Imposing the correct gender role (or as you called it, assigning gender at birth), seems exactly like the way to go, as it lowers the chance of child developing gender dysphoria and having all the problems associated with it.
Anomalies and people born with defects do not disprove the overall rule. Just like people being born with 6 fingers do not change the fact that humans have 5 finders at each hand. I'm not sure if there is a name for this type of argument, but this is a fallacy. In science virtually nothing is true 100% of the time. This is not what science is about.
The second link basically confirms what I suspected.
It's dehumanizing and problematic to classify people's healthy bodies as anomalous or defective.
I don't see how your appeal to tradition is sufficient to justify your view.
Science generally accepts that the identities it discusses are nominalist and conditional. We humans create boundaries and classifications by grouping elements, but no such group or organization is objectively correct, some are just subjectively useful for particular purposes.
Simply recognizing that, let's say, a down syndrome is a genetic defect and something that's generally abnormal does not dehumanize people with down syndrome. Genetic and birth defects are a thing. It's a common scientific term.
I'm not appealing to tradition, I'm arguing for it based on what I've understood about gender dysphoria or the concept of gender in general so far. To reiterate, gender dysphoria comes with all sorts of potential problems, like medication, surgeries, depression, discrimination etc. And that makes me believe that the best way to go about it for parents is to make sure (to a reasonable degree) that the child will not develop gender dysphoria and that the biological sex of the child will match the gender (a social construct, so we can influence it by controlling the environment). Unless you want to argue that what we've been doing up to this point actually makes gender dysphoria more common and the 'new way' suppresses it, or that I'm missing something important, I don't see any gaps in my reasoning.
Not just “traditionally”, but there are so many differences in how society treats males vs how they treat females that most people don’t even see them any more. All the way from calling a baby in pink ‘pretty’ and a baby in blue ‘active‘ to looking to a male first when help is needed to lift something or to lead and to looking to a female first when help is needed to regulate someone’s emotions.
And those are not even mentioning the far more subtle things like disapproving looks when females do or say certain things.
