It’s not about how you say it, or how rigorously you argue it, or how charitably you present it. It’s about whether you affirm or dissent from the new orthodoxy of gender ideology. Amazon never informed me or my publisher that it was removing my book. And Amazon’s representatives haven’t responded to our inquiries about it. Perhaps they’re citing a religious objection to selling my book? Or maybe they only sell books with which they agree? (If so, they have a lot of explaining to do about why they carry Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.) If there’s a religious or speech objection, let’s hear it. But if it’s just an attempt to skew the conversation in the public square with an attempt to discredit one of the Equality Act’s most prominent critics, that’s a different matter.

My book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment was released exactly three years ago. It was attacked twice on the New York Times op-ed page. The Washington Post ran a hit piece on it that was riddled with errors. It was obvious the critics hadn’t read the book. But they were threatened by it and wanted to discredit it lest anyone pick it up and learn from it.

Now, three years after publication, in the same week that the House of Representatives plans to ram through the Equality Act—a radical transgender bill amending the Civil Rights Act of 1964—Amazon has erased my book opposing gender ideology from its cyber shelves.

The people who did read the book discovered that it is an accurate and accessible presentation of the scientific, medical, philosophical, and legal debates surrounding the trans phenomenon. Yes, it advances an argument against transgender ideology from a viewpoint. But it doesn’t get any facts wrong, and it doesn’t engage in heated rhetoric.

Moreover, it was praised by experts: the former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a longtime psychology professor at NYU, a professor of medical ethics at Columbia Medical School, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, a distinguished professor at Harvard Law School, an eminent legal philosopher at Oxford, and a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton.

But for a heretic-hunting Left, none of that matters. It’s not about how you say it, or how rigorously you argue it, or how charitably you present it. It’s about whether you affirm or dissent from the new orthodoxy of gender ideology.

Amazon never informed me or my publisher that it was removing my book. And Amazon’s representatives haven’t responded to our inquiries about it. Perhaps they’re citing a religious objection to selling my book? Or maybe they only sell books with which they agree? (If so, they have a lot of explaining to do about why they carry Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.) If there’s a religious or speech objection, let’s hear it. But if it’s just an attempt to skew the conversation in the public square with an attempt to discredit one of the Equality Act’s most prominent critics, that’s a different matter.

So first, a caveat: If you fear what Big Tech can do if you dissent from gender ideology, just wait to see what Big Government will do if the so-called Equality Act becomes law. Second, a lesson: If you fear Big Government, don’t turn a blind eye to Big Tech. Conservatives need to get over the misguided belief that private businesses can do whatever they want. That isn’t true. And it’s never been the American law on the issue. Nor is it what the natural law supports.

From a natural law perspective, both the liberal and libertarian approaches to economics and property rights are inadequate. By now, conservatives know well the criticisms of left-liberal approaches. But too many conservative thinkers assume that the classical liberal and libertarian approaches are in fact the conservative approach. They aren’t. They contain important truths, but they omit others. The conservative approach comes out of the natural law tradition.

In the natural law tradition, there is no single correct economic system. There are, however, certain systems—such as radically individualist philosophical libertarianism and radically collectivist socialism—that are incompatible with the flourishing of human beings and their communities. But between these extremes lie many permissible regimes of property and market relations. Decent governments create and structure various systems of ownership rights and obligations with an eye to what will best serve the common good of their societies, with their particular histories, traditions, and circumstances. Thus, government regulation of the market isn’t inherently wrong. If a particular instance of regulation is wrong, it will be wrong for some other, more specific reason, which has to be identified on a case-by-case basis.

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[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]