Author Abigail Shrier launched the Hebrew edition of her best-selling book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” in Israel over the weekend. The Israeli Left mobilized everything it could to shut down the book as well as Shrier herself.
In the book, Shrier challenges some of the most dubious orthodoxies of the transgender craze currently sweeping the West. She is particularly interested in why child transitioners are now primarily young girls when historically they were young boys. Her common sense finding — that it is likely a result of social contagion brought about by a popular culture and medical establishment that glorifies transgenderism — predictably enraged the Left, which has sought to cancel the book since its U.S. release in 2020.
This type of “book banning” rarely makes headlines in the corporate press. However, Americans have become highly familiar with so-called conservative “book bans” in recent months.
While once the term evoked historical phenomena such as Stalinist purges or Nazi book burnings, the corporate press has added it back to the contemporary lexicon. Their purpose in doing so appears primarily to attack Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for his effort to take books on transgender ideology out of grade school classrooms. Despite being a wildly disingenuous attack — Florida is engaged in content curation, not censorship — it serves a political purpose.
The historical connotation of “book banning” associates the practice with evil regimes that generations of Americans defined themselves against. By accusing conservatives of the practice, the Left aims to draw a moral equivalence between its political enemies —anyone who does not conform to the latest fad in gender ideology — and those regimes.
R&I ~ MJM
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