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.

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