At least two Amazon employees have resigned in recent weeks to protest the company’s decision to continue selling a book which they claimed promoted anti-LGBTQ themes. The book explores spikes in transgenderism among teenage girls.
The employees resigned after a complaint was posted to the company’s internal message board in April and received support from more than 467 corporate employees, according to messages obtained by NBC News. They argued that Amazon reversed its decision in a March letter to Republican senators “not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”
A petition created by Amazon employees called for removal of the book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” from the company’s e-commerce platform, NBC News reported. The book, written by journalist Abigail Shrier, looks into a “trans epidemic” of young girls identifying as transgender.
Watch: Irreversible Damage author @AbigailShrier supports the rights of adults to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. But she thinks teenage girls are making irrevocable changes to their bodies that in coming years they might wish they could reverse. https://t.co/NMpsFNNBw9
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) July 13, 2021
The book is currently listed as the top three bestsellers — for paperback, hardcover and Kindle editions, respectively — in Amazon’s book category “LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies.” Amazon employees pointed to one passage in particular where Shrier writes that young girls identifying as transgender “seemed to be caught in a ‘craze,'” which she later defined as a “crowd mental illness.”
Selene Xenia, a transgender software engineer at Amazon who resigned in June, said she left after learning the e-commerce platform would continue selling the book, according to NBC News. She noted that Amazon stopped selling a similar book titled “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment” earlier in March. (RELATED: Amazon Exposes True Colors By Silencing ‘Dissent From A New Orthodoxy,’ Author Says)
“The book literally has [craze] in the title and considers being transgender a mental illness in many senses throughout the book,” Xenia said. “I found it extremely hypocritical for Amazon to say that it would stock this book and not another similar one.”
Shrier has denied accusations that her book suggests being transgender is similar to a “disease.”
In a statement to NBC News, she said the issue won’t disappear “just because some disgruntled Amazon employees wish it would,” adding that her book “never implies that the trans identity is a mental illness.”