Lepidoptery

Sigh. I really wanted to spend the night writing pseudo-intellectual nonsense about authorship tied to the HBO Max release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League cut.

Instead, as I write this, I am in the unenviable position of defending a book called When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. I’d comment on the content of the book, but, per The Wall Street Journal, it’s no longer available on Amazon, which is the point. Amazon won’t sell it, or any books which, in WSJ‘s awkward wording, “frame transgender and other sexual identities as mental illnesses.”

The book’s description, which I found on the Barnes & Noble website, makes it seem like an absolute nightmare. It says “policies allow biological men into women’s restrooms”, a classic transphobic canard, emphasizes negative transition stories, and turns kids into tools of a political agenda that seeks to deny people the freedom to live transgender lives.

But I can’t get the book on Amazon anymore, along with who knows what other books in the same line of thought (assuming the people in charge of delisting the books accurately understood their content). I can’t read it and argue against it, which is a shame. It could have been my Sandy Stone “The Empire Strikes Back” moment, and I wouldn’t be having to actually semi-agree with a group of Republicans that includes Josh fucking Hawley who complained to Amazon about the book’s lack of availability.

Here’s the thing: I’ve read The Transsexual Empire, at least parts of it (I’m a masochist, but even I have my limits); Janice Raymond’s book is an invaluable piece of transgender history and while I find the work’s opinions vile, it’s not my place to argue it shouldn’t be allowed to be written or sold.

And while this is a decision of a private company, it’s troubling not so much because it proves conservatives’ phony culture war victimization narrative but because it gives that phony narrative more ammunition. In truth, this is a story of capitalism run amok: companies like Amazon want things both ways, to completely dominate industry but remain free of the responsibility that comes from being tantamount to public utilities. We shouldn’t accept Amazon’s selective sales platform just because we might dislike the books that happen to be targeted (again, assuming whoever made these decisions accurately assessed the material in question).

In the Amazon letter to the lawmakers inquiring about the book’s pulling, Brian Huseman says, “we have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.” Like many types of politically correct dogma — “born this way”, “it gets better”, “love is love” — I find this line of thought does more harm than good.

Let’s set aside for a moment the way the disavowal of mental illness further stigmatizes the mentally ill. Liberal strictures are by nature a tightening of the way we live our lives in the guise of acceptance. Rather than allow people to fly free, liberalism pins down marginalized groups like butterflies.

In other words, I was not fucking born this way, I made choices to become the human I am today and I’m proud of those choices. It doesn’t always get better. And love has nothing do with whether people should be able to fuck or enter archaic legal contracts that ought not exist anyway.

I’m transgender and I’m mentally ill, or mad, or neurodivergent, take your pick. The two are not necessarily the same, but I’d like the freedom to explore that space: my gender has always felt related to the unique way my brain processes the world. My mental illness is not something to be cured or crushed. It’s a part of me I live with, like my gender, and the two are irrevocably intertwined. Instead of insisting that queerness is not a mental illness, let’s ask why we assume mental illness is an inherent negative. Let’s ask why it matters. Let’s interrogate the entire mental health framework. Most importantly, let’s let all the ideas flow freely.