Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples | Hacker News Reader

Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

theguardian.com

76 pointsandsoitis49 comments

The uncomfortable, not even close to proven hypothesis, is that increased exposures to such hormone-disrupting chemicals are associated with an increased incidence of sex- and gender-diverse identities. That might be a good thing...I think sex- and gender-diverse people are wonderful and interesting...but the uncomfortable thought though is what that might imply in terms of the consequences of environmental policies. This topic is so fraught, I think there is a reluctance to engage except for those with an agenda, one side or another.

The article is talking about the effects of these chemicals on infants breastfeeding and the effects on newborns.

While these are endocrine disrupting chemicals, people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced. The reason transgender people do hormone replacement therapies is so that they can change their hormonal balance. If these chemicals were making people trans, baseline blood tests, which you need to take when you start HRT, would tell different stories than they tell. N1, mine were normal, and this aligns with what others I know have experienced.

My guess is that there is an appearance of a greater number of gender diverse people today because culturally we've reached a point where we don't feel like we need to die with the secret of being transgender, rather than because there were proportionally that many fewer transgender people before.

> people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced. The reason transgender people do hormone replacement therapies is so that they can change their hormonal balance.

Not so sure, it could have to do with their hormones. I recall experiencing mild gender dysphoria during a period when my testosterone was recorded as below normal. When it returned to normal the dysphoria went away. It could be that some choose to say, "Since I think I'm a girl, perhaps I should swing the hormones even further in that direction."

I'm just one data point though, would be curious to hear other's experiences with dysphoria and what their blood work shows.

EDIT: And think about it, it's a logical contradiction to say that "hormones have nothing to do with it but write me an Rx to mess with my hormones so that I'm more of a girl."

Being transgender represents a misalignment between your internal sense of self and the sex you were born with. Sometimes this is about societal expectations and pressure to conform to gender ideals, sometimes it is about the physical body you were born into/the primary and secondary sex attributes of that body, and often it's both. Hormone replacement therapy is a way of altering the body's secondary sexual attributes to reduce the dysphoria that is cause from the misalignment of ones sense of self and their body.

Doing HRT carries massive life long side effects, which doctors are required to inform patients about. In some places, it requires months of therapy and a doctor's signoff. While I'm sure there are people who have hormonal imbalances, and some of them have perceived gender dysphoria because of it, I find it very unlikely (or at least extremely uncommon) those people would then start taking hormones, given that you have to be _pretty sure_ you're trans before getting near hormones. It seems very unlikely that in the course of a dip in hormone levels where dysphoria was sudden the course of action would be to transition rather than to seek an endocrinologist for answers. If this were common, I would think detransition rates, which many studies have shown to be very low, would be far higher than they are.

Even with 15 years of gender dysphoria, it took me six months post coming out to feel ready to start the hormone conversation, and an additional three months with the prescription sitting in my cabinet before I was ready to actually start taking it. Like I said, my hormonal level baselines were normal for a male.

Edit, RE your edit:

> "hormones have nothing to do with it but write me an Rx to mess with my hormones so that I'm more of a girl."

"Mess with my hormones" is a flippant and inaccurate way to describe a very difficult conversation trans people have with their doctors. You don't start hormones for fun and you don't start them because you're high on estrogen or testosterone. Hormones also don't make you "more of a girl." If you are a trans woman, you are a woman, regardless of whether you are on hormones, have had any kind of sex altering surgery, or have socially transitioned. You take hormones to bring your inward sense of identity outward and reduce the pain that comes from your sense of self not aligning with your appearance and the societal demands and expectations of your behavior.

I am not going to say that I agree with OP, or that OP's language isn't entirely too casual for someone close to this issue but it appears they're most focused on finding out why people have a different inner self than outer expression.

We recognize that the inner self's gender is unalterable (and if it weren't, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with that sort of mind control), so we must bring the outer in alignment.

However where the inner self gender comes from is something I'm not sure we know too well. Is it the womb? Is it early childhood development? Do hormones and nutrition affect this process which we haven't even pin-pointed in anyway?

Personally, I think it's too early to call out chemicals as a cause. That's a bet we can't take until at least we know the process. And if we're at that point, we could do that mind control that I'm so much against.

Why would the "inner self's gender" be unalterable? Almost everything about a person can change, even after reaching adulthood, height, weight, strength, personality, phobias, preferences, beliefs.

> Being transgender represents a misalignment between your internal sense of self and the sex you were born with.

These thoughts, like every other thought anyone has, are mediated by hormones. I'm not saying any particular balance or resulting thought is good/bad/right/wrong/healthy/unhealthy.

But this is akin to saying "being aggressive represents a state of excessive confidence, not elevated testosterone levels." Sure! That's true. But it's also true that elevated testosterone levels tend to increase the frequency and intensity of occasions in which people find themselves in a state of excessive confidence.

Weirdly though, exogenous testosterone tends to make people more generous and social until you cross some boundary. Roid ragers are using too much external T.

Definitely interesting! Aren't people starting to describe testosterone as something more like "status-seeking?" But also testosterone presumably exists in animals with ~no concept of status...

Just goes to show you how incredibly complex and broadly impactful these chemicals are.

Typically, blood work at the beginning of hormone therapy shows sex hormone levels that are normal for the AGAB

I just wanted to say that gender dyphoria is not the same as being gender diverse. A lot of times there can be no dysphoria if you live in a loving and accepting environment.

I have a few people in my life that are gender diverse, and simply changing their pronouns to they/them when referring to them has so far been sufficient to make them feel happy and accepted.

I believe fully in trans rights, and any reason why a person may be trans has no bearing on whether that person should have equal status in society as anyone else.

And this kind of argument is to me a dangerous sociopolitical mistake:

> While these are endocrine disrupting chemicals, people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced.

One should acknowledge that there may be a very significant difference between hormone effects in a breastfeeding infant while the brain is full tilt in the process of wiring itself vs later in life after things like language and identity are established. We definitely don't know. We can also acknowledge that we don't know how hormone effects combine with environmental/social effects. That need not alter one's feelings about gender diversity.

It's the same as the "gay people didn't choose to be gay" argument when really it should just be ok to be gay. Don't let reasons get in the way of reason.

We don't know enough to say if people are transgender because their hormones are imbalanced, but we do have reason to believe that transgender people tend to have a distinctive hormone balance even prior to any hormonal therapies.

For example, female → male transitioners have like a 2x - 3x higher incidence rate of PCOS before any therapies. Obviously there's something different going on.

The EDC question is also related to prenatal hormone exposure, which is not related to your anecdote about pre-therapy hormone testing.

In any case, the theory being put forth here re EDCs is not that every (or even most) transgender people are such due to EDCs and resulting hormone imbalances, but rather that even a small change (read: compression of variability) in hormone distributions across the entire population would produce all sorts of effects like everyone being slightly more androgynous. If that's the population-scale effect, you'd presumably expect more people to slide each way across the binary designations we tend to use for gender.

There is some evidence that hormone balance in the womb (including from the mother) can affect gender and sexuality. It's not impossible that it would also have an effect a little later as well, while the brain is still very plastic. I think the strongest version of the immutable gender/sexuality idea (that it is entirely genetic) is almost certainly false. My hottest take (mainly from my own experiences) is that it can perhaps in some cases be mutable a lot later than people think (which, to be clear, is a very different thing from it being a choice or controllable, and even if that were true, it would still be a valid choice).

Honest question: wonder why this "gender diverse identities" thing is not as prevalent in low income countries, who may be as much impacted by same plastics and chemicals, or maybe more (because of widespread pollution and neglect).

1st, as I said, this is an unproven hypothesis. 2nd, the dominant impact on reported prevalence rates are 1) social acceptance of those identities, and 2) the relative risk in revealing those identities.

If being stoned to death is the risk faced for being gay, people won't tend to admit to being gay to a researcher.

> social acceptance of those identities

Why would it not work the other way too? Maybe the Western society is hell bent on putting people into boxes, whereas people in third world countries are willing to look the other way for minor deviations [sic] as long as they're useful to their family / village / society?

If you didn't imbibe in your children that the only way to be a "man" is to be the jock on the football team, then maybe far less people would be suffering the dysphorias. Just like how exposure to Instagram causes body dysphoria in both young men and women.

Sexuality is so front-and-center in the Western society unlike many of the third world societies which are below in the 'hierarchy of needs'.

> If you didn't imbibe in your children that the only way to be a "man" is to be the jock on the football team, then maybe far less people would be suffering the dysphorias. Just like how exposure to Instagram causes body dysphoria in both young men and women.

From a queer perspective, I think this is what we really do want and support: raising children gender neutrally, free from role expectations that make them feel like specific kinds of toys or activities or clothes are or are not for them. Just letting people grow up to be whoever they are, etc. etc.

That being said, gender dysphoria especially does have biochemical component. Most men would feel horrible being on estrogen, most women would feel weird being on testosterone. That's true for both trans and cis people, not 100% of the time, but often. That's how they got Turing killed.

Instagram and unhealthy expectations is not really always dysphoria but rather dysmorphia. The difference really is more than a few letters. Dysmorphia is a disordered body image and obsession with flaws in yourself. Dysphoria is a persistent feeling of distress related to your physical gender characteristics and/or gendered social expectations.

Of course, where the lines blur is when people speak in memetic terms of male-to-Male transition: stuff like looksmaxxing, where dysmorphic body image stuff is mixed with toxic culture relating to the pursuit of high masculinity and acting tough in a certain way, to be more of a man, or something.

Sexuality is front and center is every human culture, and for that matter, every sexual species. The degree that non-hetero, non cisgender diversity gets accepted in human cultures depends on a lot of factors that is not easily put into categories like Western and non-Western. In general, experience with diversity of thought and opinions leads to more acceptance of that diversity. Cultures that have trended toward enforced conformity have also tended towards villifying non-conformity. This is something that can differ depending on security of 'hiearchy of needs' but in different direction depending on other factors that really make simple boxes the wrong way to make sense of these things.

I agree that hard gender-norms expectation cause gender dysphoria, which in large art explains greater anxiety and depression in gender diverse people's. It's a terrible thing, and causes a ton of hurt and death.

I helped analyze data from perhaps the first longitudinal study of long-term outcomes after wanting and receiving gender-affirming care [1]. Although preliminary in the scientific sense, it is an absolute travesty how it is getting demonized. The people I have interacted with who provide such care, despite how they get misrepresented, largely are very concerned providing such care only when appropriate and desired, and learning how to know before-hand which outcome is most likely. Gender diversity is real, and has real biological origins. Understanding and acting on that has negatively impacted my career via a canceled grant from the current administration's D EI policies, but I am still glad that I did, and hope to in the future.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40917741/

Please name one "third world country" that enforces gender roles less harshly than the US, particularly the liberal US cities where gender diversity is the most common.

Those countries tend to have much less cultural awareness/acceptance and much tougher lives where other priorities take precedence.

Easy to disprove.

1. who buys USA's milk? USA, largely. Doesn't export enough because doesn't pass standards in most other places.

2. Sex and gender diversity is proven both global and historical.

Therefor, something else is the motivator. Perhaps a drop in colonization-enforced repression? (Historical Europe had more diverse gender identities before the spread of Christianity ... and colonization.... no I don't pair them quite together, but they definitely travelled together)

Edit: don't forget that lactose tolerance is not a majority feature of humans.

Not really. EDCs are showing up literally everywhere. This is an article about them in breast milk, but you are mistaking that to mean this is the only place they've been found.

One of the challenges with disproving this hypothesis is that there's pretty much no control group left on the planet. Everyone has exposure to these chemicals.

The "increase" could just be that (1) we've evolved enough acceptance for people to come out of the closet and (2) lots of people have adopted neutral pronouns on social media as a way of showing support for the issue, not due to actual gender dysphoria. If you're trying to scare people, all of these people are now "trans".

Just like people are easy to scare about autism being some kind of epidemic when many people (like me) have a diagnosis of only a mild, borderline, or provisional form of it. That never would have been diagnosed until recently or would have been diagnosed as something else.

The "increase" is certainly in large part exactly that. However it might not be the only reason.

Autism frequency is increasing, and this is due in large part due to awareness, better diagnostic tools, awareness that autism happens in girls, etc, but it does not seem to account for all of the increase.

Before the 1500-2000s there were far more people with gender-diverse identities than even now (per capita). Dozens of major civilizations had official multi-gender class systems. Both gender diverse people as well as different ideas about what makes a man and woman were far more common sites for the world traveler. The reasons[1] for the relative recent decrease are well known. There has been a "war on gender" for the last 500 years and just now humanity is healing.

[1]https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/object/2000.371

These chemicals are so prevalent that there is no way to avoid them without legislature in a country that is destroying the ability to CHOOSE motherhood. So we’re setting ourselves up for forced births where the babies have no choice but to ingest these chemicals which negatively impact them. Hopefully this research leads to action to prevent this, but will likely get swept under a rug.

Has anyone seen evidence of lower levels in other countries? I searched for recent studies and it sounds like Canada and the EU have also reported similar findings but there isn't much widespread testing or totally comparable testing across locations.

I don't understand how The Guardian readers get through a normal day. Every headline on that page is doom-and-gloom news designed to get you to be fearful or panic about it.

Doom-and-gloom, fear and anger are the predominant emotions in the entire journalism industry.

Very few places are doing any just-the-facts reporting.

The articles cover an actual study, that wasn't theoretical but based on data of sampling. What kind of just-the-facts reporting do you actually want?

The language it uses to describe the story is clearly designed to make parents feel like the environment is unsafe.

Cherry picking scientific articles to cover that will cause fear is not just-the-facts reporting.

It... probably is unsafe for human babies (or even adults) to be ingesting compounds known to disrupt hormone production in mammals...

Contrarianism has become a mental disorder

It’s not actionable information though.

Sure it is. People should be outraged about this and demanding vastly more testing, more research, and more regulation.

The vast majority of information published anywhere at any time is not any more "actionable" than that. You just don't like this information because it makes you uncomfortable... as it should.

I don’t like this publication, I think the actual scientific study is good information.

The information should be considered by regulators and scientists. They should read the scientific journals directly. I want to be able to trust in institutions to make informed decisions to improve environmental factors that require collective action.

I don’t think informing citizens about danger so they can demand policy reform is the actual purpose of The Guardian article. I’d love to be wrong on this, but that’s a fairy tale about how the system actually works.

I'm quite confident that scientists (and hopefully regulators) read the source journals.

> I want to be able to trust in institutions to make informed decisions to improve environmental factors that require collective action.

And you want to be able to do that without the public being informed enough to even care and hold them accountable for that? Why on earth would a politician make a costly decision like introduce regulations that makes plastics a lot more expensive when the public literally has no reason to want such a thing?

> I don’t think informing citizens about danger so they can demand policy reform is the actual purpose of The Guardian article

The "actual purpose" of any published information is pursuit of incentives, so sure, you're right. Guardian publishes this article to get ad views. The journalists publish it to increase their notoriety and hopefully get a promotion. But the same applies to the information published in journals. The "actual purpose" of putting it there is to increase the researchers' stature in the research community.

> that’s a fairy tale about how the system actually works.

Not really. The entire system, insofar as any system works whatsoever, is to co-opt people's own imperfect incentives (like pursuit of ad clicks or personal notoriety) to produce positive externalities (like an informed public). This is literally every stable system. A company co-opts people's personal incentives to feed their families to produce the externality of a profit-generating corporation.

Pointing out that people and institutions have imperfect incentives and therefore the system is broken, that is the fairy tale that people tell themselves to avoid engaging with reality as it exists.

https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/scarred-for-life-the-epige...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6414251/

I don't think we are biologically far enough removed from "Oh my god, run, bear/snake/lion!"

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1376114/

And we may not be built (biologically) for the level of comfort that the majority of us (more so here on hacker news) live in.

I think the doom and gloom serves a purpose for a lot of people.

Are they accurate or inaccurate?

Because I'd quite like to be informed about accurate incoming doom.

Did I miss the link to the study? I was wondering if storage contamination were a possibility? Breast milk storage bags are all plastic, and cheap brands abound.

I'm a bit confused by the article. It seems to be about this study[0]. Its the first item on Toxic Free Future's list of research. But the article states that Ryan Babadi is a lead author of the study, while there's no Babadi on the author list of the Nature publication.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-026-00844-z

It is an absolutely critical question. Were plastic/plasticized extractors or bottles used? Or was it collected at a lab directly into glass? Note that silicone isn't entirely safe either as substances like D4 (octamethylcyclotetrasiloxane) are pretty bad too.

Sure, but at what levels? The dose makes the poison, and the article doesn't say

> The chemicals present a serious risk to infants because they likely interfere with hormones that are critical to newborns’ proper development, and have been found to be harmful at very low levels of exposure. About 92% of 50 samples were contaminated with at least one of the anti-microbials or plasticizers for which researchers checked.

If they were that significantly harmful it would be massively obvious at that level of prevalence.

Do you mean potentially showing up as a global decline in fertility rates and multi-generational bioaccumulation of these compounds, threatening to destroy the foundational structure of modern civilization (population growth)?

Well, do I have news for you!

Which is not to say that it's interfering with fertility rates by making partners less potent/fertile, because, presumably, we would have heard about a significant increase in failures to conceive. Or is your implication that it has affected sex drive?

My implication is that there are indeed large scale changes that are totally concordant with large scale endocrine disruption.

Desire to mate, sperm count and quality, rising obesity, falling testosterone, increases in testicular, prostate, and breast cancer, increases in autism and attention disorders, etc. etc.

It's ridiculous to say that we know these aren't causing problems because "we haven't seen problems." We do indeed see very, very big problems population-wide that are similar to what we see in the lab when poisoning mammals with these chemicals.

Presumably none of these problems is caused exclusively by EDCs, and potentially none of them are caused by EDCs at all. But there are plenty of changes worth investigating.

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