What’s causing the imbalance? Chemicals:
Industrial chemicals like polychlorinated biphenols (banned since the 1970s but doggedly persistent in land, water, and food), flame retardants, dioxins, and pesticides like DDT. "It turns out the chemical burden is not the same" for Danish and Finnish baby boys, says researcher Main, who was surprised by the finding. "It's higher here. The higher your burden, as measured in breast milk, the higher the risk of undescended testes."The United States has higher chemical burdens than even Denmark. A recent study has linked maternal phthalate exposure (in hairspray) to sons with penile deformities. Another study connected abnormal sperm to blood levels of chemicals used to make nonstick coatings. The theory that chemicals disrupt hormones early in the womb is gaining ground.
Do these chemical alterations of hormone levels only affect physical characteristics? Of course not. Boys exposed to higher uterine levels of phthalates are less likely to play with toy guns than those exposed to lower levels. Phthalates are found in soft plastics (shower curtains, baby toys), plastic packaging, lotions, fragrances, cosmetics, deodorants, and pharmaceutical coatings.
I ran across another version of this idea while doing research on Silent Spring. Janisse Ray, in the chapter “Changing Sex” of the book Courage for the Earth, first describes a study in 1994 that discovered that after pesticides and chemicals were dumped in a lake, alligator testosterone levels dropped to the point that males and females were almost indistinguishable, showing relatively equal amounts of testosterone. Female alligators showed double the normal amounts of estrogen. Unsurprisingly, populations of young alligators declined by 90%. Males also had less-developed phalli and testes; chemicals were “disrupting animals’ reception of their own hormones” (pg. 112).
Ray goes on to enumerate many studies on fish where males are found to have immature eggs in their testes, fish that become “intersex.” Whales, black bears, seagulls, and snails are also seeing physical confusion of gender. More than 100,000 chemicals that may be capable of such endocrine disruption, according to a 2003 report by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, are currently on the market. These chemicals can be found throughout our food chain, in mothers’ milk.
Research has directly linked phthalate levels in mothers to adverse affects on human male reproductive development – lower testosterone development, incomplete genital development. That’s not to even mention the studies that show problems with a number of chemicals and mice’s reproductive development.
Finally, the most interesting part of the article: Ray talks about a friend of hers who is transgender, from female to male, now married to a scientist who works on environmental toxins and endocrine disruption. They theorize that environmental toxins could explain the modern rise of transgender people. This had occurred to me before, but I had always thought that chemicals were perhaps making boys more like girls, so they wanted to be girls, and vice-versa; Ray and her friend take the opposite tact. What if her friend, “C.B.,” had been a boy at birth, but environmental toxins had adjusted his testosterone and estrogen levels so that he physically developed as a girl?
If you want more information, just google “anogenital index” for a bunch of articles about chemicals affecting hormonal development.
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