Comment by sva_ 7 days ago
I've been speculating on industrial pollutants that act as endocrine disruptors for years now, and every so often some evidence emerges. People understandably don't like such mundane explanations when they've built large parts of their identity around the issues it may have caused them though.
In the womb times two…
Girls are born with all their eggs, and so a pregnant woman who is having a girl is also carrying half her grandchild.
Now, from what I’ve read before about stress, heavy stress like living in a war zone can produce so much cortisol than it affects the unborn child. Given this, I suspect this could also effect a soon to be born girl’s eggs too!
It's been shown that heavy stress in children can modify the glucocorticoid receptor gene which your brain uses for stress response. The study of this phenomenon is called Epigenetics. It's pretty intuitive once you go one layer deep: stress itself does not change your genome, but stress triggers a hormonal/chemical response which does.
It's not so trivial as you're making it out it be. But at the same time I agree that if there's a chemical influence, I would not be surprised if it's occuring in utero.
Trans people have been around ages, same as gays and all that. Yet no gay gene discovered.
We know that a living being is just not only DNA, but also its environment; now on top of that add all the big complexity of human social behaviour and gender into it. I doubt they will find a "cause" to trans-ness.
I’m not saying there is evidence that it has the same root cause, or even that there are more trans people now than before (I haven’t seen the numbers), but kids are hitting puberty 2+ years earlier now, probably because of endocrine disruptors.
As a thought experiment, it seems hard to intentionally design a drug that changes what year puberty onset starts at without having some impact on LGBTQ+ prevalence.
As somebody under that umbrella myself
> soy turning me trans or social media turning me trans I agree is absolutely mind-numbingly naive.
However, I feel like there's only so many options for where sexuality and gender-identity can come from -- and if we know there's no god doing it, and we know it's not entirely learned (because of case studies of surgeons who assigned a gender to babies with ambiguous genitals), the remainder must be from the environment... and it just so happens that almost all of the body's signaling around gender, puberty, and development is chemicals in one form or another.
Combo of tricyclic antidepressant and amphetamines "turned me gayer and gayer" (and gave me the shitters) which reversed a few weeks after I stopped them. My Testosterone was stable throughout those months.
And I just remembered a girl I studied with whose ex-boyfriends turned gay or bisexual post-relationship. Pretty sure it was her gut bacteria.
Completely anecdotal, but I recently did a round of oral antibiotics and afterwards followed up with an expensive probiotic.
It was like $60 a bottle for a 1 month supply, but I was told that oral antibiotics can wreck your gut biome so I figured this was the ideal time to repair/replace the biome I have.
In the 6 weeks since then I've lost ~30 lbs (I am following a diet, of course, this has been wildly successful but intentional in the abstract) and I have more energy, sleep better, and have lost my baseline "snack late at night" urges. Physiologically I do not feel deprived of food, hungry, or tired all the time like I have with previous diets. I've also cut my caffeine intake to almost 1/3rd of its previous amount and I drink more water.
I am sure there's a lot going on beside that, so I am not blaming my progress on the 1 thing by itself, but that being said, it does seem highly coincidental and correlated.
Might be worth a deeper dive, blow out (mostly) healthy people's gut bacteria, replace it with very specific blends, accumulate the data on what changes happen or what people report happening in the 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months 1 year afterward.
They should look on the bright side: eliminating plastic exposure could be a great wellspring of identity. I mean to really avoid them you’d have to make all your food from raw unprocessed ingredients, and then there’s clothing, all the objects you interact with throughout the day, etc.
Edit: expanding a bit more on the idea. DIYing all the stuff you’d need to avoid plastics is a much bigger identity statement than neurodivergent. Tho saying I’ve been subtly poisoned is far less sexy than saying I’m neurodivergent.
You're idea is hardly novel. I've had plenty of people tell me this or that chemical caused me to be trans. I've also spent plenty of time researching possible biological causes of transness. I'm personally open to the idea that maybe there's a biological cause but I haven't found a convincing explanation yet.
The problem is that when I have conversations with people about soy turning me trans or social media turning me trans they are often trying to use that as a way to deny me any agency over my own life.