Background for those who may not know: The publishing world, much like academia, has been a huge testing ground for all of this shit. It's been going on for years and now nothing can get published without being cleared by "sensitivity readers."

See this NYT article on sensitivity readers: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/24/books/in-an-era-of-online-outrage-do-sensitivity-readers-result-in-better-books-or-censorship.html

Now, it seems like nothing can be published on a marginally controversial topic in the literary world without getting cancelled, which would seem contradictory with the very goal of art and the written word in the first place.

See this editor's note in one particularly egregious case of a story written by a trans author about the trans experience being retracted for "transphobia:" http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/

In this Reddit post, a new small publishing company details being attacked for releasing a dystopian novel that's eerily reminiscent of what's going on in Iran right now where people are transed so they won't be LGB. This is also done to remove women from this misogynistic dystopian society. Except the book is not anti-trans (despite the fact that it comes so close, yet so far, from getting why this movement is troubling in the first place), and the company utilized multiple trans "sensitivity readers." Of course, the attacks are coming from people who haven't even read the book (much like with the short story controversy linked above).

Who loses out here? Authors, small presses and magazines, the literary world as a whole, and society at large for being told that actually thinking outside the box amounts to a culturally criminal offense.

edit: grammar