Obviously this is baseless speculation, but I sure do wonder if various psychological conditions that are so diverse and hard to pin down (i.e. 3 out of these 9 symptoms around attention, social behavior, or impulse control) are ultimately just going to be proven to be purely biological. And since genetics can only explain less than half of it, it sure seems that something messing with chemical signaling would be a reasonable explanation for the rest.
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I've been speculating on industrial pollutants that act as endocrine disruptors for years now, and every so often some evidence emerges. People understandably don't like such mundane explanations when they've built large parts of their identity around the issues it may have caused them though.
You're idea is hardly novel. I've had plenty of people tell me this or that chemical caused me to be trans. I've also spent plenty of time researching possible biological causes of transness. I'm personally open to the idea that maybe there's a biological cause but I haven't found a convincing explanation yet.
The problem is that when I have conversations with people about soy turning me trans or social media turning me trans they are often trying to use that as a way to deny me any agency over my own life.
> I've had plenty of people tell me this or that chemical caused me to be trans.
Isn't this pretty obviously true? Some chemical in the womb caused every one of us to be or feel the gender they do.
In the womb times two…
Girls are born with all their eggs, and so a pregnant woman who is having a girl is also carrying half her grandchild.
Now, from what I’ve read before about stress, heavy stress like living in a war zone can produce so much cortisol than it affects the unborn child. Given this, I suspect this could also effect a soon to be born girl’s eggs too!
It's been shown that heavy stress in children can modify the glucocorticoid receptor gene which your brain uses for stress response. The study of this phenomenon is called Epigenetics. It's pretty intuitive once you go one layer deep: stress itself does not change your genome, but stress triggers a hormonal/chemical response which does.
It's not so trivial as you're making it out it be. But at the same time I agree that if there's a chemical influence, I would not be surprised if it's occuring in utero.
Trans people have been around ages, same as gays and all that. Yet no gay gene discovered.
We know that a living being is just not only DNA, but also its environment; now on top of that add all the big complexity of human social behaviour and gender into it. I doubt they will find a "cause" to trans-ness.
I’m not saying there is evidence that it has the same root cause, or even that there are more trans people now than before (I haven’t seen the numbers), but kids are hitting puberty 2+ years earlier now, probably because of endocrine disruptors.
As a thought experiment, it seems hard to intentionally design a drug that changes what year puberty onset starts at without having some impact on LGBTQ+ prevalence.
How would early puberty affect who you’re attracted to, or what you see your gender as?
I can tell you my attraction has been consistent before and after puberty. And trans friends speak of having gender dystopia at a very young age.
> or even that there are more trans people now than before
More openly trans people for sure. But who knows how many kept it bottled up and hidden, perhaps even from themselves, throughout history?
There is a theory the gene that increased womens fecundity also turns men in the family gay, for a net positive increase in babies. 2024 Czech study apparently doesnt support it though.
As somebody under that umbrella myself
> soy turning me trans or social media turning me trans I agree is absolutely mind-numbingly naive.
However, I feel like there's only so many options for where sexuality and gender-identity can come from -- and if we know there's no god doing it, and we know it's not entirely learned (because of case studies of surgeons who assigned a gender to babies with ambiguous genitals), the remainder must be from the environment... and it just so happens that almost all of the body's signaling around gender, puberty, and development is chemicals in one form or another.
Combo of tricyclic antidepressant and amphetamines "turned me gayer and gayer" (and gave me the shitters) which reversed a few weeks after I stopped them. My Testosterone was stable throughout those months.
And I just remembered a girl I studied with whose ex-boyfriends turned gay or bisexual post-relationship. Pretty sure it was her gut bacteria.
Completely anecdotal, but I recently did a round of oral antibiotics and afterwards followed up with an expensive probiotic.
It was like $60 a bottle for a 1 month supply, but I was told that oral antibiotics can wreck your gut biome so I figured this was the ideal time to repair/replace the biome I have.
In the 6 weeks since then I've lost ~30 lbs (I am following a diet, of course, this has been wildly successful but intentional in the abstract) and I have more energy, sleep better, and have lost my baseline "snack late at night" urges. Physiologically I do not feel deprived of food, hungry, or tired all the time like I have with previous diets. I've also cut my caffeine intake to almost 1/3rd of its previous amount and I drink more water.
I am sure there's a lot going on beside that, so I am not blaming my progress on the 1 thing by itself, but that being said, it does seem highly coincidental and correlated.
Might be worth a deeper dive, blow out (mostly) healthy people's gut bacteria, replace it with very specific blends, accumulate the data on what changes happen or what people report happening in the 2 weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months 1 year afterward.
They should look on the bright side: eliminating plastic exposure could be a great wellspring of identity. I mean to really avoid them you’d have to make all your food from raw unprocessed ingredients, and then there’s clothing, all the objects you interact with throughout the day, etc.
Edit: expanding a bit more on the idea. DIYing all the stuff you’d need to avoid plastics is a much bigger identity statement than neurodivergent. Tho saying I’ve been subtly poisoned is far less sexy than saying I’m neurodivergent.
Removing plastics from my apartment has made it come to life
The biggest change was giving all of my plants real planters. They are so much happier now :)
Food. It’s food. We are only just beginning to understand the less obvious effects of the modern diet, including all the processing and additives. Much has not been explored, such as is if the abundance of various toxic chemicals at supposedly safe levels has a synergistic effect, for example the many endocrine disrupting compounds with diverse mechanisms. But over the past decade it has become pretty clear that the Gut-Brain relationship is extremely important, including in understanding psychopathology.
Another emerging idea is that much of the negative health trend that’s been progressing extra rapidly since the 90’s is the result of mitochondrial dysfunction, driven by the multifactored (ultraprocessed foods, icides and tives, sedentary lifestyle, the incessant toxin-boosted immune shocks throughout development, possibly even omnipresent modulated emf) assault on our biology. It makes a lot of sense, to me at least, that crippling the source of cellular energy would precipitate seemingly unrelated chronic pathologies. This last paragraph especially is still highly speculative and controversial.
What you're detailing is a growing body of study under the BioPsychoSocial model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopsychosocial_model?wprov=sf...
From personal experience I can say a dietary change reduced systemic inflammation for me and had as much of an effect on recovery as medication treatment. The anti-inflammatory diet eliminates foods well-known to cause inflammation in a sizable portion of the population. Out gut micro-biome takes the pharmacokinetics of nutrition even deeper by introducing another layer of breakdown or secretion.
Thanks for clearing this up, I certainly find your citations compelling.
It’s trivial to find studies detailing lower-magnitude negative effects of the things mentioned, but in isolation. As far is I’m aware, the net impact on our biology of the dozens of environmental stressors we face remains to be studied.
This doesn’t directly go to anything I said, but I will share this fun review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221475002...
Ah, VAERS strikes again.
Sure? Is “Of all reported SIDS cases post-vaccination, 75 % occurred within 7 days (p < 0.00001)” that simple?
No, it's just a lie. For example, vaccines _prevent_ SIDS: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety...
But wait, there's more: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/missed-vaccinations-did-n...
Missing vaccines did not reduce the incidence of SIDS. This is as close to a clean experiment as possible to get.
That’s what the study concluded, how is it a lie? I don’t see where your first source says they prevent SIDS, it cites some studies that found no effect and one where “The authors concluded that these data support findings of past controlled studies showing that the temporal association between infant vaccination and SIDS is coincidental and not causal.”, so perhaps the reasoning about the findings in the paper I linked are off the mark, but what you linked does not show that the statistics are wrong.
Thanks. I’m stealing that one :)
> are ultimately just going to be proven to be purely biological
What else would it be?
Lack of moral fiber has been a popular reason for the last forty years or so.