A number of employees at online retail giant Amazon have demanded the company stop selling books that could be harmful towards transgendered people on its platform.
The workers took part in Seattle’s pride parades that were held on Sunday, showing their disapproval of the company’s policies.
Many similar initiatives have taken place over the last few months, in an attempt to force Amazon to pull all books from its platform that contain language which equates trans identity issues to mental illnesses, something that has been debunked by medical specialists from around the world. One such book is called “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters“, which is one of the first to appear on the website when someone searches the term “transgender” on the company’s US website.
The book is written by Abigail Shrier and uses unpublished evidence to make the point that transgender identity issues are nothing but a passing fancy of teenagers as they move into adulthood. The book has received over 6,000 reviews on Amazon’s platform.
However, a high number of the company’s workers stress that books such as these could be highly problematic to young people who are trying to find themselves. “It’s pretty jarring to see books that are promoting that trans people should not transition in the LGBT book section,” said Lina Jodoin, a member of the trans community who transitioned two years ago. “It just hurts on a personal level.” Jodoin stopped working at Amazon last month to protest the sale of these books.
The online retailer has been known to struggle with such issues, as they usually allow anyone to openly sell whatever they want on their platform, only deciding to take action about a product when they receive a significant amount of heat about it. Over half the stuff that’s listed for sale on Amazon come from individuals, which makes it hard to keep track of what those items actually are. There’s been a wide array of things sold on the platform that could easily be identified as offensive, such as items from the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.
