Well, they missed the target again — and painted one on their own backs … again. Department store chain Target, infamous for instituting an unpopular “transgender” bathroom policy, again raised ire and eyebrows, this time by banning a book critical of the child abuse euphemistically known as “gender transitioning.” The move was inspired by Made-up Sexual Status (MUSS, or “transgender”) complaints. Demonstrating the market power of the majority, however, the book was reinstated after an impressive backlash on Twitter.
As Life Site News reports:
Target temporarily removed a book detailing the harm gender confusion poses to children from online sale this week in response to left-wing pressure on social media, only to reverse itself when conservatives pushed back.
Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by The Wall Street Journal’s Abigail Shrier, explores the phenomenon of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), a term coined in 2018 by Brown University behavioral scientist Lisa Littman. She found that a significant percentage of gender dysphoria among minors came not from innate feelings of discontent with one’s true sex but from outside influence.
For her book, Shrier “dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to ‘detransitioners’ — young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves,” according to the product description. “Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier found, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back.”
That the bursting of the MUSS-lie bubble didn’t sit well with the agenda’s activists was evidenced by the below viral tweet.
Quick to respond, Target tweeted the very next day:
None too happy, author Shrier issued her own response:
Yet after a backlash and perhaps realizing that it had been kowtowing to an unhappy, disordered one percent of the population, Target reversed course the day after the ban.
“‘Yesterday, we removed a book from Target.com based on feedback we received,’ Target announced on Twitter,” the Daily Wire informs. “‘We want to offer a broad assortment for our guests and are adding this book back to Target.com. We apologize for any confusion.’”
But as to what perhaps cleared up Target’s confusion, consider the following tweets:
Yet aside from being Stalinist thought, it’s also unscientific and uncompassionate thought. As the Amazon description of Shrier’s book correctly points out:
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.
I’ve reported on this for many years as well. A good example, one concerning a boy victim, is my story about “Nathaniel” (last name withheld for privacy reasons). After falling prey to MUSS propaganda and having “sex-change surgery” as a teen — including, of course, his genitalia’s removal — he now calls it a “Frankenstein” transition that has “ruined” his life.
Other examples of MUSS-mutilation regret are found here and here.
Deepening the shame of a society allowing such child abuse is that, while Democrats (who enable this craze) claim “party of science” status, the MUSS agenda is wholly unscientific. While I won’t rehash the explanation of why here (my regular readers have heard it enough!), it can be found in my comprehensive work, “The Transgender Con: Rending Bodies and Twisting Minds.”
Tragically, the imposition of the relatively new MUSS agenda has occurred despite it being opposed by the vast majority of the population. A sane person would think that, as with COVID-19, something so new should be the subject of robust debate. Yet the powers-that-be — our culture-shaping media, academia, entertainment, and big business; along with the government — censor important discussions in deference to “fashionable” left-wing agendas.
Many view this as a First Amendment battle. In reality, of course, the Constitution only protects us from government trampling of speech, and Target is part of the private sector. But it’s understandable that critics often conflate such corporate actions with constitutional trespass.
After all, what happens when there are so few businesses dominating the market (e.g., Amazon, Google) — and when the nexus between big government and big business becomes so great — that the latter’s agenda becomes indistinguishable from the former’s?
In this case, the distinction between big government and big business censorship can become, in terms of practical effect, a distinction without a difference.
