It was just a couple of weeks ago that the news broke: Ryan Anderson’s bestselling book When Harry Became Sally was back on the virtual shelves of Amazon’s online bookstore. As Catholics and conservatives applauded the news, it was a call and answer that occurred on the Twittersphere, or the X-sphere, Anderson pointed out. 

In recounting the tale to EWTN News, Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said that he found the decision “transparently political,” and he says despite the executive orders and the tide turning for those who believe in common sense, people’s guard should not come down on such issues.

In conversations with EWTN Pro-Life Weekly and EWTN Radio, Anderson maps out this big win that highlights the power of a tweet — but he says the fight is far from over. 

 

How did your book wind up back on Amazon? 

When I saw the picture of Jeff Bezos at Trump’s inauguration — and Trump famously said during the inauguration, “Now that I’m president, we’ll go back to there only being two sexes, male and female — it was one of the biggest applause lines; I thought: “Wait a minute, [Jeff] Bezos is there, getting in all these pictures with the president declaring there are only two sexes, and yet his company still bans my book.” So I just sarcastically tweeted out: “Does this mean my book will be for sale again?” And then some people saw it, and, actually, it was Henry Olsen [a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center] — he said, “You guys should really make a push to make this happen.” So one of our colleagues wrote a piece for The Federalist, because that’s an outlet that’s very influential within the Trump administration. So he just wrote a piece with the headline [paraphrased]: “The woke fever broke. So why is Amazon still banning Ryan Anderson’s book?” 

Then another one of our colleagues, Ed Whalen, had a post at Bench Memos on National Review saying, “Wait a minute: One of Trump's executive orders said that all of government should be defunding gender ideology. Amazon is like over a $1-billion-a-year federal contractor with the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense says, ‘We’re not going to be doing contracts with people who punish people who believe the truth about our embodiment as male and female’ — does Amazon really want to put that at risk?” 

So, anyway, so this is all in the Twittersphere, or the X-sphere, and then the newly appointed Trump chair of the FTC, he quote-tweets me, saying, “This is an interesting question. … I’d like to know the answer about whether or not Amazon will sell the book.” 

So he does that on like a Friday afternoon, and then the next week, I think it was Wednesday morning, I get a text message from a friend of mine who’s a former Senate staffer, and he’s the lobbyist from Amazon who always would come pay me a visit. He just texted me the link “to your book back on Amazon. It’s for sale again” — because apparently when the lobbyists would visit, Republican senators and Republican members of the House, one of the No. 1 questions they were asked was about conservative censorship and why Amazon is prohibiting a very popular conservative book. So they knew they had a problem. 

 

What was your reaction to the news? 

I’m happy it’s back for sale, but, look, it’s transparently political. They sold the book for three years when Trump was in the White House; they got rid of the book February of 2021, so a month after Joe Biden was inaugurated; they returned the book to sale February of 2025, right? A month after Trump’s inaugurated, the statement they put out is still kind of pathetic, because it says: “This is a tough judgment call, like we have to balance free speech and hate speech. And this book is right on the cusp, and we’re probably overprotective for you …” 

No, there’s nothing remotely in the book that is even borderline on hate speech anyway. 

 

So where do we go from here? 

It’s a great moment because people are waking up to the fact, yeah, that on the transgender front, this is not the right side of history. The subtitle of the book was Responding to the Transgender Moment because I argue in the book, and I wanted to signal to people, this is not the next wave of human rights. The Joe Biden line is not true. This will be a moment — we will look back on this in horror. And the only question is: How long does this moment last? And I want to encourage people to do what they can to make this moment shorter in time. Because they are real victims. They are real causes of getting human nature wrong. And you know, we now see this cohort of young people, the detransitioners, who have been, in Abigail Shrier’s phrase, “irreversibly damaged” by this medical scandal. 

 

What can we as Catholics do in this moment to move the needle to protect our children? 

We as Catholics, we should acknowledge some of this has infiltrated the Church. Some of this has infiltrated our schools. And so, it’ll be important for the bishops, for priests, for pastors, for school principals to realize this is still in the culture. This is still what the kids are hearing on social media, on TikTok, on Instagram. And so it’s not as if the war is over; mission accomplished. This is the beginning of the end. This is not the end of the end.

 

Watch Ryan Anderson on EWTN Pro-Life Weekly below and catch his longer interview on EWTN News here.