Quote from: Isabelle on August 29, 2015, 08:35:28 PM
Fascinating, is there much research published on this? I'd love to learn more
Since joining this site in 2014, I've been putting most of what I find in this thread:
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,84224.0.htmlThere's a fair bit of published literature about DES's effects on natal women, but almost nothing about its effects on natal males. I first found out about it from a book called "Brain Sex", which talks about sexual dimorphism in the brain, and how the differences between male and female brains arise in utero, depending on whether the fetus is exposed to androgenic hormones or not. Although it doesn't say anything about gender identity, one of the things mentioned in passing in that book, is that teenaged "DES sons" often show a characteristic pattern of very shy, socially withdrawn behaviour,
"What happened with Jim was that the extra female hormone had feminised his brain while it was developing".
Everything it describes in that section (other than the bit about electronics and chemistry) is a very close match to my own life as a teenager, and it's how I originally found out about DES, and the fact that there are quite a lot of people alive today who've had their brain development altered by being prenatally exposed to manmade hormones.
While DES has feminizing properties, there's also quite a few hormones that have been used during pregnancy that have androgenizing properties (driving male development in biologically female fetuses), and this, and the way girls exposed to them in the womb often have masculinized behaviour, gets mentioned several times in the book. They don't say anything about gender identity though. I think this is because "Brain Sex" is quite an old book (first published 1989), and at the time it was written, the prevailing view was that babies are born "gender neutral" and that the gender you identify as later in life depends on how people treat you during early childhood. There was no internet in those days, and most of us from that time period had never even heard of being trans and were doing our best to fit in as our assigned sex. If you went back now and talked to the people in the case studies in that book, I think you'd find that a lot of them are actually trans.
Most of the books on DES were written by DES mothers and daughters, and focus primarily on the effects on women. It's my opinion that all the institutions and organizations involved in the DES disaster (who are also the same people that are supposed to be investigating what harm it's done), have, since about 1980, not been doing any serious research into its effects at all, but have instead been trying to downplay the whole thing as much as possible (and particularly its effects on natal males). When a pharmaceutical industry disaster affects a few thousand people, they can afford to make a big show of compensating the victims, but when millions are affected, it looks like their approach is to avoid any admission of liability and to try and bury the whole thing as quickly as possible. If you look at what little published research into DES sons there is, in most of it, they've done things like selecting people whose exposure was far smaller than typical, or where treatment didn't start until late in the pregnancy (which greatly reduces the likelihood of physical abnormalities). The only studies I found looking at DES-exposed natal males who'd been exposed to the standard DES miscarriage treatment, were 3 studies looking at the offspring of mothers from the original study in the 1950s that showed that DES was completely ineffective at preventing miscarriage. I think I've mentioned them in the DES thread. The main finding was that sperm production was much lower in the DES exposed group - on average, just half as many sperm cells per ml as the control group, and a considerably smaller ejaculate volume too. Unfortunately their hormone analysis was incomplete and didn't include estradiol or SHBG, but I think if it had, it would have shown considerably lower testosterone production and free T in the DES sons group (which would explain why most of us seem to have signs of chronic below normal male testosterone production).
Some of the other research I found includes a 1977 study showing that the world's top psychologists already knew at that stage, that prenatal exposure to pharmaceutical hormones (estrogens and progestins) produces measureable, lifelong alterations to the personalities and behaviour of the exposed children. That gets mentioned in the DES thread too. Estrogens stopped being used during pregnancy altogether shortly after that study was published, however progestins remain in use even now, in pregnancies where the mother has a history of recurrent premature birth, or is otherwise thought to be at risk of going into premature labour. Whether that's enough to explain why so many kids seem to be being born trans recently, I don't know. Estrogens and progestins are also the magic ingredients in birth control pills and other forms of women's hormonal contraception, so there's always the possibility of exposure occurring if the mother doesn't realise she's pregnant. It's also possible that medicines which aren't hormones themselves, but interfere with hormone metabolism (such as phenobarbital), could be a cause of ->-bleeped-<- too.
At the very least, it's blatantly obvious that there was a problem with DES. There was a study published in 2005 in which 150 out of 500 of the DES "sons" in the study identified as women. The only place I've seen the DES - trans connection talked about in any depth in print though, is a chapter in Deborah Rudacille's book "The Riddle of Gender". There's a Google Books preview of that chapter here:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oVHcOYz4jM8C&pg=PA257&lpg=PA257&dq=des+sons+teleconference&source=bl&ots=hbgJX5wbu9&sig=l5oNWx6_DJ84ytSNdSoeYI2H7j4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CGcQ6AEwCGoVChMI9u6om6euxwIVCbUaCh200A1n#v=onepage&q=des%20sons%20teleconference&f=falsewhich has quite a lot of pages missing unfortunately.
