Target announced Friday evening that it will reverse its decision a day earlier to remove a book critical of the transgender movement from its online store.
The announcement came just a day after the retail chain said it would remove the book after someone on Twitter complained that it was transphobic.
“Yesterday, we removed a book from Target.com based on feedback we received,” Target announced on Twitter. “We want to offer a broad assortment for our guests and are adding this book back to Target.com. We apologize for any confusion.”
The book, called “Irreversible Damage” by Abigail Shrier, is about the sudden wave of children, particularly young girls, who now say they are transgender. The Amazon description of the book reads:
Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively.
But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as “transgender.” These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans “influencers.”
Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and “gender-affirming” educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility.
As The Daily Wire’s Amanda Prestigiacomo reported, Target announced it was removing the book after a single customer claimed the book was “transphobic.”
“Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. We have removed this book from our assortment,” Target tweeted in response to the customer.
The brief ban led to a spike in sales for the book on other platforms, Prestigiacomo reported. Shrier explained in a post at Quillette what she aimed to do with her book.
“I wrote specifically about the sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls,” Shrier wrote. “I fully support medical transition for mature adults. And I have no desire to be a provocateur. … Nor do I have any prurient interest in others’ social lives.”
“What I aim to do, as a journalist, is to investigate cultural phenomena, and here was one worth investigating: Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States,” she added. “Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries following the most cursory diagnostic processes. Schoolteachers, therapists, doctors, surgeons, and medical-accreditation organizations are all rubber-stamping these transitions, often out of fear that doing otherwise will be reported as a sign of ‘transphobia’ —despite growing evidence that most young people who present as trans will eventually desist, and so these interventions will do more harm than good.”