This week, Abigail Shrier, author of the new book "Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters," found herself at the center of a firestorm. Her great crime: writing an assessment of the psychological phenomenon known as rapid onset gender dysphoria, where groups of psychologically vulnerable young girls begin to self-diagnose as transgender after one member of a peer group does so. The book is sober and evenhanded. Nonetheless, all hell broke loose after one person on Twitter -- one! -- tweeted at Target, prompting the retailer to pledge not to make Shrier's book available (a decision it later reversed).
This wasn't Shrier's first turn in the barrel. When the book first came out some months back, Amazon quickly moved to prevent her from advertising it, although books openly stumping for hormone treatment for minors suffering from gender dysphoria have met no such ban. This time, however, the publicity began to rage out of control. A transgender Berkeley professor called for burning the book, arguing, "all you're doing is removing a commodity from circulation -- much as one might destroy a contaminated crop." Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the American Civil Liberties Union, decided to abandon any pretense about defending civil liberties, tweeting, "stopping circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on."
Meanwhile, the email service Mailchimp, which handles mass emails on behalf of organizations, announced it would no longer work with the Northern Virginia Tea Party, stating that it was promoting "potential ... misinformation" by holding a rally calling for a vote recount. Similarly, Facebook has reportedly been suppressing all information related to the possibility of voter fraud; so has Twitter.
Such niceties aren't reserved for the political right. Matthew Yglesias, co-founder of Vox, left his own publication this week for Substack after explaining that there was a "damaging trend in the media" toward treating "disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety." That trend, Yglesias stated, made it "very challenging to do good work."
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https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2020/11/18/they-want-to-shut-you-up-n2580265
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