I listened to this story on the radio yesterday. I found it very interesting but I also felt sick to my stomach afterwards.
I think of myself as very healthy person that just doesn't fit into the social constrains of the binary gender system but this story just made me uneasy with it's findings.
here is the link to the transcript and the audio download:

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=11-P13-00001&segmentID=7

I skimmed through it. Here is how I see it. If its chemical exposure, nurture, a mental issue, whatever, it doesn't matter to me. The cause doesn't change how I feel. Not everything goes to plan, and thanks to Murphy's law it happened. I am trans because it is possible.

Well sure it's possible for certain chemicals to mimic hormones in animals, which might cause issues similar to what they're talking about in this story. And, most of us here can testify to what hormones can do to us, mentally and physically.

But the jury is out on if it applies to us being trans or not.  Maybe it's genetic, maybe it's chemical, maybe mum drank some dirty tap water when she was pregnant, maybe robots from the planet Transatron1138 have been irradiating us, maybe there's no reason at all... there doesn't always have to be one.

We're here, and we are... regardless. I say we make the best of it :-)

Certainly its a possibility, but I feel like why it happened doesn't really matter as much as the fact that it is what it is and we are what we are and now its just for us to deal with it.

Maybe we were all poisoned in some way or another... but it certainly can't be simply reversed.  We're all long out of the womb now, and well on our way [well many of us] to/through our transition.

Xenoestrogens are real whitch is what there talking about.

He didn't give the species name of the frog they were working with so when they mentioned somthing about sex imbalances in frogs caused by a lack of propigation of the female sex chromosome I don't know if those frogs us XY or WZ sex system.

However he did get this wrong.
All fetuses are programmed to develop ovaries unless they're told otherwise by certain hormones like testosterone and androgen.
Differentiation from the undifferentiated fetal gonad into the male or female types is not regulated by Testosersone exposure cAIS women have 0 T sensitivity yet they have testis.

Development or elimination of the female repoductive structures is done by AMH (Anti-mullrian hormone) sectreted by immature testis cells that destroy the structure that would become the uterus. not androgens although androgens can effect the development of the vagina and clitoris.

I'm also pissed off that the doctor the interviewed was one of those sick butchers who insists kids must be "normal" and that genital surgery on them is a good thing when will socioty stop mutilating kids?

My mom was prescribed testosterone to prevent miscarriage of me after having hermaphrodite twins (the yr before) who the catholic Dr told my mom that they had died at birth but she thinks they were snuffed out because the Catholic Dr couldn't put them in a gender box.

Now i can't be sure exactly what mom took because she can't remember at 88 but this is what she told me over a dozen yrs ago when her memory was much better.

Also!

trans-folk are found 'round the world,... many of these chemicals, on the other hand, are not.

While this is interesting research, no doubt, I must agree with the above. Regardless of how I arrived at this point in my life, the only way to go is forward.   

Quote from: pebbles on January 17, 2011, 03:38:31 AM
I'm also pissed off that the doctor the interviewed was one of those sick butchers who insists kids must be "normal" and that genital surgery on them is a good thing when will socioty stop mutilating kids?

Oh, I was boiling over during that part of the interview!