The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [150]
“Is it a coincidence that since the introduction of the chlorinated pesticides around 1935—1940 the rate of transsexualism has been climbing steadily? The first generation born after the introduction of pesticides was also the first generation to have significant numbers of transsexuals. The condition is virtually absent from the U.S. historical record prior to 1952, when Christine Jorgensen made headlines,” Christine Johnson writes in a brief posted on the TransAdvocate website. “Every generation since then has had higher and higher rates. Clearly researchers knew that sexual developmental changes were observed with DDT in animals as early as 1950, yet this information was ignored, deliberately or not. Fifty years later, large numbers and quantities of EDCs are being distributed around the globe without adequate consideration of the consequences.”
I met with Christine Johnson in May 2002, in Philadelphia. As I soon discovered, Johnson is passionate about this subject. She speaks eloquently about the damage that she believes has been inflicted on transsexual people who have been told for years that their gender variance is a mental health problem, when the scientific literature shows quite clearly in animals that in utero exposure to exogenous hormones and hormone mimics affects the brain and behavior. “When I saw the words ‘endocrine disrupter’ a lightbulb went off in my head. Because for years and years I had been reading what all these shrinks have been telling us—that in theory transsexuality could be due to hormonal problems, but they don’t measure any natural hormonal variations [in adults]. That’s been commonly reported throughout the literature. Diamond showed in ‘57 in guinea pigs that when exposed to opposite sex hormones [they] would develop in the opposite gendered way,” she says, describing her realization that rising rates of transsexualism might be linked to EDCs. “So I knew that hormonally active chemicals, anything that modifies the function or behavior of the endocrine system, is going to have this kind of effect, whether it’s a natural hormone or a hormone mimic—the body can’t tell. As far as the body is concerned, it’s all information.”
In 2002, Johnson submitted the results of her research on endocrine-disrupting chemicals and transsexualism to the peer-reviewed International Journal of Transgenderism, published online. The journal rejected it in a somewhat cavalier fashion, Johnson says. She believes that the psychiatric profession in general and the HBIGDA “establishment” in particular don’t want to promote discussion of the endocrine-disruption hypothesis because it poses a direct challenge to their power and authority as gatekeepers of services for trans people. “They are arguing from their paradigm against our paradigm, but the paradigm is what is in question,” she says. “So they can’t use their paradigm to argue against the endocrine-disruption paradigm. Their attitude is ‘we’re not going to talk about this.’ That is in violation of the scientific tradition.” In her view, the scientific community and the trans community are so blinded by traditional ways of viewing gender variance that they are failing to see the obvious. “If you look at the evidence that Benjamin presented, he acknowledged that 45 percent of his patients had hypogonadism. That’s another thing they don’t explain.”
Scott Kerlin recently uncovered a provocative lead suggesting that Benjamin was aware of a possible correlation between prenatal DES exposure and transsexuality. A new member of the DES Trans online discussion list, completing her transition from male to female in 2004, told Kerlin that in 1971 she and her mother had actually seen Benjamin and discussed the mother’s belief that DES was implicated in her child’s gender dysphoria. According to the list member, Benjamin had indicated that he too suspected that prenatal DES exposure was a likely culprit.
Kerlin then searched Benjamin’s publications, and although he was unable to find