Real heroes of the culture war

Amazon has once again put its finger to the wind and reversed course. For four years, the world’s largest bookseller banned Ryan Anderson’s popular work on transgenderism, When Harry Became Sally. The book, published in 2018, initially sold for two and a half years on Amazon’s marketplace but was conspicuously banned near the beginning of the Biden Administration. When pressed by four U.S. senators at the time, Amazon defended itself saying that Amazon has “chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Now, at the beginning of the second Trump administration, the book is once again available on Amazon.

Some might be inclined to applaud Amazon for its newfound political courage. After all, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and owner of the Washington Post, also intervened to stop his newspaper from endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. But these were likely acts of political expediency, not principle. Bezos saw the writing on the wall and acted shrewdly (though this is better than can be said of many of Wall Street’s wokest corporations). As G. K. Chesterton famously observed, “a dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

The real heroes of the gender ideology battle are people like J. K. Rowling, Riley Gaines, and Chloe Cole, women who have put their lives, relationships, and careers on the line to call out the transgender agenda. These women—a novelist, an athlete, and a detransitioner—spoke out about the real harm women have suffered as a result of our cultural and political elites’ refusal to recognize basic realities about sexual difference. And, unlike Bezos, they didn’t wait for a Republican victory to start speaking out. They pushed against the tide of Peak Woke.

Over the last four years we have witnessed liberal tears over so-called “book bannings” taking place across the country. In reality, some schools (though not nearly enough) made the correct assessment that it was not good for children to be exposed to pornographic material, and chose not to stock those titles in their libraries. But amid all the left-wing rhetoric, books really were being censored or shadow-banned for political purposes, just not ones that hypocritical progressives were willing to weep over. Instead, the “banned books” were those that raised reasonable concerns about transgenderism, such as Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage and Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally. As documented by James T. Fishback in an investigation published by The Free Press, school libraries’ book collections are overwhelmingly skewed in favor of progressive orthodoxy.

Rod Dreher explained how we got to this point in Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. “The social justice cultists... prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.” By controlling the bookstores and libraries, they “change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is.”

The only way out of this is to push through it. History’s great champions of freedom under Soviet communism—men like Aleksandr Solzhenitzsyn, Karol Wojtyla, and Vaclav Havel—“stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do,” writes Dreher. Women like Rowling, Gaines, and Cole are doing the same today.

Yes, the 2024 election proved that the American people overwhelmingly favor respecting reality and calling transgenderism to account. But the road to 2024 was anything but guaranteed. With corporations suddenly reorienting themselves after years of woke activism, social conservatives must seize the opportunity to engrain these electoral gains and preserve them for future generations.