alt Hacker NewsThe 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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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.
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).
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 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.