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Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

theguardian.com

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

> 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.

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#32
post #23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 attribut…

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.

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#33

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.…

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

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#34
post #15

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.…

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 ne…

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.

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#35
post #23
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 attribut…

> 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.

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#36
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#37

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.…

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…

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.

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#38
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#39

> 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 l…

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!

Re: Dangerous hormone-disrupting chemicals found in US breast milk samples

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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