In October 1954, the U.S. post office in Los Angeles seized copies of a gay-themed magazine and accused its editors of violating the federal law that barred sending “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” materials through the mail. The confiscated edition featured a short story about lesbian lovers and a poem satirizing the arrest of gay men on morals charges.
I’ve been thinking about this history during the campaign to censor a new book by the Los Angeles journalist Abigail Shrier, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters.” I’m sure that people trying to quash the book believe they’re fighting the good fight on behalf of sexual minorities. But they’re actually repeating the same ugly patterns that have harmed oppressed peoples — of every kind — across our past. When censorship wins, minorities lose.
Noting the rapid rise of gender surgeries on young women in recent years, “Irreversible Damage” attributes the trend to “social contagion” — that is, to the messages these women are receiving — rather than to their inherent identities. It also questions whether physicians might be performing these surgeries too quickly, endangering the long-term health of patients.
In print and in interviews, Shrier has stressed that adults should have the freedom to choose medical transition. But her suggestion that teenagers might not be in the best position to make that call has earned her the scarlet letter sobriquet of “transphobic” on social media, which exploded with vitriol against Shrier this fall. Almost none of the reaction took issue with specific claims or arguments in her book. It simply declared that the book was hateful, and that no decent human being should sell, buy or read it.
In response, Amazon refused to allow Shrier’s publisher to run a sponsored advertisement for the book. Most major newspapers and trade magazines declined to review it. And when podcaster Joe Rogan hosted Shrier to discuss the book, employees at Spotify demanded that it take the interview off its platform.
That’s different from the government banning its distribution, which is what happened to gay literature in the 1950s. But the effect is the same: to remove the material from the public sphere, and to make it harder for people to read and discuss it.
To be clear, critics have every right to condemn Shrier’s book. Yet they shouldn’t prevent others from obtaining it and from coming to their own conclusions about it.
That’s the fear of the censor, in all times and places: that someone, somewhere will think the wrong thing. Upholding the seizure of the gay magazine in 1954, a federal appeals court singled out the short story in which a young woman “gives up her chance for a normal married life” to live with a female lover. “This article is nothing more than cheap pornography calculated to promote lesbianism,” the court concluded.
Four years later, the Supreme Court overruled that decision and allowed the gay magazine back into circulation. But gay-themed materials are still censored in other ways, especially by schools and libraries. Eight of the 10 books on the American Library Association’s “most challenged” list last year included LGBT-related content. As an ALA official explained, campaigns against these books “are based on the belief that some people can dictate what everyone should read.”
The effort to censor Shrier’s book reflects the same dictatorial belief. But it will eventually blow up against trans people and other minorities, as it always does. Once you establish that some ideas are simply too harmful to be aired, you clear the way for other people to make the same claim. And one day, they’ll come after you.
That’s why every great warrior for social justice in our history — including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. — was also a champion of free speech. Without that right, people at the bottom of our society can’t critique the wrongs they have suffered.
Besides, censoring people never persuades them; it might bring them to heel, but it won’t change their minds. That’s why prominent economist Deirdre McCloskey — a trans woman — recently defended the speech rights of J.K. Rowling, who has made comments about trans people that McCloskey called false and prejudiced. But McCloskey also denounced efforts to silence her, which won’t sway Rowling or anybody else.
“I do not want to ban her from conferences or stop people from reading her childish books,” McCloskey wrote. “I want to correct what I believe are her mistakes, as she can then correct mine.” Imagine that.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author (with cartoonist Signe Wilkinson) of “Free Speech: And Why You Should Give a Damn,” which will be published next spring by City of Light Press.
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