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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

Apparently everyone is downvoting everything they can because this is a sensitive topic. I'd just like to call out, where feminization is a major concern (US, maybe Europe), there is less than 1ng/L of this compound in water, see elsewhere on this thread for the graphic.

The lowest dose of EE2 for trans-women is 2mg a day orally. That means whatever the dosage is in the US it's less than 1/10th* of what trans folk find actually useful. That's based off drinking 4 liters of water a day, lord knows most people don't drink that though.

In summary: US and Europe folks don't need to care about this and if you see a news story hyping this compound up, it's probably just that: hype.

*EDIT: I had a couple mistakes here:

- EE2 is not estrogen and can be considered ~100x more effective

- 1ng / 1mg is 1000th not 100th.

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Trans women typically take E2 (bioidentical estrogen), not EE2. EE2 is 100 times more potent than E2 for certain endocrine interactions. Unlike E2, EE2 is not a naturally occurring hormone. E2 causes female puberty when administered to males (except for menstruation), but EE2 isn’t necessarily going to do the same thing because it is a different molecule. While worrying about “feminizing” is probably hype, worrying about possible effects such as infertility seems totally reasonable.

Back in the day ('70s and '80s i think), trans women used to take synthetic estrogens (such as premarin, IIRC was the drug of choice) before switching to bioidentical estrogen from estradiol tablets in the '90s and '00s, I think because bioidentical E is seen as more effective with a softer side effect profile than the synthetics, in particular bioidentical doesn't hurt the liver as much.

Drinking horse piss in the 70s sure was metal though. ("pre-mar-in" = "pregnant mare urine," a source of estrogen since 1930).

(folk knowledge and personal anecdata)

Permarin was made into pills, not drank directly. Permarin is a conjugate estrogen (mix of natural estrogens). It had a higher risk of blood clots than pure E2. However it was not EE2.

It's still not that bad though, because the math is off. 4 ng is about 250,000x less than the smallest E2 dose a trans woman would take, and 2 million times less than the strongest doses some take.

Thank you for the correction!

This still sounds concerning to me, if the dose is 2mg for a healthy adult what is it for children and infants? What about babies in the womb?

We saw the same exact thing with PFAS/PFOA, the experts said it was harmless, present in impossibly small quantities, and it would "pass right through you" for literally years. But then it turned out the experts were completely wrong. They found 2000PPM of PFAS in my Mom's well in New Hampshire, out in in the country, miles away from a Teflon factory that leaked into the water supply. She found it after hundreds of dollars of testing when I told her she should be paranoid.

For this specific chemical, it actually has been studied since at least 1943[1] and used in a few different medical contexts. That mean it has a leg on some random pollutant never considered for medicinal use.

Does that mean it's great in drinking water? No... but I think we shouldn't just jump from one type of catastrophizing to the next. There's endless questions we can ask to scare ourselves, but maybe it's a better use of our time to point that concern on things which we already know or damaging our kids, like: lead in drinking water, malnutrition, lack of affordable pre school options, etc etc.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethinylestradiol

2000 PPM is 0.2% or one-in-fivehundred, right? That’s massive pollution. My layman’s logic would suggest you need to dump 0.2% of total aquifer volume of 100% PFAS to reach that level? And then I expect pollution to spread in a semi-sphere unless there are rocky sediments. Edit: thinking more about water, perhaps you can dump less in wetter conditions and then in a drought get higher values because PFAS won’t evaporate. But still, it suggests tons and tons of dumping?

It sounds like the Teflon plant has been dumping their polymerization process water into the environment, much like what happened in Parkersburg, WV.

The forever chemicals like those are absolutely awful.

Fracking is another source of chemicals into water supplies.

Also it's not just endocrine disruption. Forever chemicals and microplastics can lodge in muscle and cause accumulated damage as the body tries to encapsulate it to keep from getting injured. And the circulatory system where it can clog arteries/veins/capillaries and cut off circulation. The images in this paper show plastic fibers embedded in fish muscle:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...

Maybe most particles are too large to cross the intestinal lining, but can they prove that's still the case with "leaky gut" which a large number of people in the US are susceptible to due to the missing fiber in our diet? What about worse inflammation like IBS, IBD, Crohn's disease and diverticulitis?

https://nypost.com/2021/12/23/irritable-bowel-syndrome-linke...

We eat a credit card's worth of microplastic every week, mostly coming from our water supply apparently. This is the kind of news whose implications are so serious that it's much easier to just ignore it!

> We eat a credit card's worth of microplastic every week, mostly coming from our water supply apparently

There ia a lot written about this online but they always skim over the detail of how humans actually ingest this.

Do you have any source that explains that the source is mostly via our water supply?

Shoot I can't remember where I read that offhand. I did find this paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6449537/

In figure 1, untreated tap water ranked higher than bottled water in plastic particle count per unit volume. They conclude that standardization of micro plastic analysis and more studies are needed.

It's said that we should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, but, the plastics lobby has so much power that suggesting they had nothing to do with our ignorance of this issue is.. laughable at best.

>We eat a credit card's worth of microplastic every week

No, we don't. Here is a 4 minute video explaining how this bit of misinformation came to be spread across the internet. https://youtu.be/2Ntp6BqhSng

Thanks for that, I hadn't seen it, so I'll stop ranting about eating plastic until I see new evidence. Also I'm a big fan of Hank Green, but his proof is still just one data point in a mountain of evidence to the contrary. I feel that microplastics are a symptom of deregulation and lack of enforcement of existing laws, mostly due to the factory farming lobby:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPbF45-ZB5M

If just drinking water gives you 10% of the dose that a trans person would seek medically, that seems like an incredibly high amount. Your post seems to reinforce concerns, not dissolve them.

I agree here. It bothers me to see people try to defend a contaminant in the water supply.

Another important point is that trans women typically start on an antiandrogen as well as an estradiol supplement. Testosterone's effects are orders of mag stronger than estrogen, so trans women typically have to take drastic measures to significantly reduce testosterone first so the estrogen can work, such as taking large amounts of spironolactone or cyproterone acetate or orchiectomy; without these measures, estrogen isn't nearly as effective. You don't exactly see much spironolactone in the water supply! (Personal anecdata)

> I'd just like to call out, where feminization is a major concern (US, maybe Europe)

What’s that supposed to mean? The article shows the rates in Southeast Asia are 10 times higher than the US. I can assure you that “feminization” would be a much more significant concern there than in the US or Europe.

I believe they mean the fear of feminization.

i think OP's two points are that

1. backlash against "feminization of men" is something that people seem to care about more in the USA than other countries (HN audiences skew toward this population anyway);

2. these days, right-wing extremists in my country (USA) see "feminization of men" as a politically beneficial wedge issue, and this politicization makes it impossible to study the actual societal effects impartially/neutrally.

> backlash against "feminization of men" is something that people seem to care about more in the USA than other countries

Only because in most countries the established gender norms are taken for granted and aren’t being challenged.

Not really. Gender norms are being challenged pretty much everywhere. They certainly are in the Islamic world, in East Asia (including China), and in South America, which is most of the world.

Just because they didn't change in the same way or magnitude as they did in the West as of now doesn't mean they aren't being challenged - they very much are.

In my home country, "challenging gender norms" means "maybe women should go to school and participate in the work force." They're covering territory that western countries covered decades ago. By contrast, the reaction in America is to progressives who want to push us into uncharted territory ("gender is a spectrum").

It's very odd to suggest that America is more right wing than other countries for the backlash against progressive ideas that are gaining traction in America but would not even be viable in those other countries.

Asia, the Middle East and South America skipped the giving rights to women part and have jumped straight to the backlash against it in sync with what’s happening in the west. I’m not even joking.

>So in the end the number is less than 1/20th.

even for fully-grown adults it is an extremely alarming figure.

god only knows the full extent of damage done to children by this and other phytoestrogens.

Your math is a bit off. 4 liters would be 4 nanograms, which is 250,000 times less than a trans woman would take (in the milligrams, not micrograms)

Is there any accumulation in food? Is it heat stable to survive cooking?

If you live in the US lead* is probably a far greater concern, and that sure does survive cooking.

s/led/lead/ ?

This is a diversion, not a direct answer to the question asked.

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