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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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