(Updated to include a picture.)
First of all let me state that I am not an expert on either gender confusion or atrazine, and don't want to become one. Leading anything is burdensome to introverts; I'm an introvert; Glyphosate Awareness is burdensome enough.
But those who are interested enough to scroll through my Disqus profile might note that I've got into some conversations on "conservative" web sites with people who seem more than normally dismayed by the increasing incidence and/or awareness of gender confusion in humans.
In laboratory animals, crowded conditions, all by themselves, reliably produce a variety of effects that reduce the rate of reproduction. That's the first thing people concerned about their children and grandchildren need to bear in mind.
Simple sterility in actively heterosexual individuals is the mildest of these effects, the one that doesn't seem to cause phobic reactions in observers when it happens to humans. When I say that I had regular hormone cycles and no PMS between ages 13 and 20, then had killer PMS along with other symptoms of "chronic mononucleosis" after age 21 and was asexual between ages 21 and 24, and then became heterosexual again, but irregular and sterile, for the rest of my young-woman life, people don't usually start railing about the decline of society. They say things like "Oh poor dear...Was it painful? Did you want children? Did you try to adopt any?"
(Tangent: Only the PMS cramps were painful. My husband and I talked about adopting children, but in the absence of a specific child who wanted to be adopted by us and the presence of a few children who might have have had to be, the talk didn't go far. I like children, thought I'd be a good foster or adoptive mother for the right one if I'd had a steadier income, but it only really bothers me when I read that one particular child I once wanted to adopt has become a twenty-something delinquent. I'm glad I didn't marry the man who wanted to adopt her with me, but can't help wondering whether, if we'd adopted that child, the newspapers would now be reporting her graduating from college rather than being charged with misdemeanors. However,The Nephews have been quite satisfactory.)
Well, that's my reaction. Other people go asexual. (Confusion has been created when young people want to add various degrees of semi-demi-hemi-sexual to the categories of asexuality, many of them basically meaning that they're monogamous and "sensitive to the other's needs," which a lot of women at one site insisted is "normal heterosexual female." To what extent that really describes a majority of women, or a majority of women at age 30, or a stereotype to which Nice Girls want to conform, is less certain.) Asexuality is absolutely legitimate in the Christian tradition; St. Paul described himself as asexual, or possibly postsexual, and Jesus Himself at least acted as if He were too. Nevertheless some people seem to be perturbed by the possibility that, if their normal presexual children or grandchildren identify as ace, they might be sucked into "the gay community." Meh. Nice Girls have coped with involuntary celibacy by forming intimate same-sex friendships, sometimes more intimate than the Nice Girls really wanted them to be, for a long time. I personally feel that that kind of thing is a betrayal of friendship, but others feel that it's a consummation. Anyway it has not interfered with the production of heirs in the past and seems unlikely to have that effect now
About "the gay community" everyone has heard probably more than even "the gay community" really wanted to hear. So then there's the one percent of humankind who are born with genuine physical gender confusion. Usually these people have been asexual and seemed to prefer to be left alone, except when and as they earned their livings displaying their unusual bodies in sideshows. In the twentieth century medical advice was to assign them a gender and try to rear them in conformity with the gender selected for them at birth. Around the turn of the century a few people started complaining bitterly about this, demanding the right to change their official gender at will. (It must be borne in mind that most of the people who really belong in this category have only a social gender, no clear physical sex. They are not, in real life, easily confused with the physically normal heterosexual men who have recently started claiming to be "transitioning" in order to harass women.) Then the Loony Left took up this cause as a way to distract attention from serious issues, and started pestering people with this "choose your pronouns" silliness.
I seriously think it would help culturally "conservative" readers if they bear in mind that the "choose your pronouns" silliness is a smokescreen. Ignore it, and consider what it's being used to distract attention from. Most people, even if "gay," have an unmistakable physical sex and are not amused by babble that denies this.
I see all these sexual aberrations as a continuum that has unmistakable counterparts in other species, even insects. It is nature's first and mildest warning that a species is overpopulated. The more crowded their living conditions, the more infertile individuals will develop and the more dramatic their sterility is likely to be. Human society is right to take alarm. If you know more than two married couples who aren't wasting a fortune on "birth control" pills and gadgets, and still have no children, that is probably an indication that you should commit to having one child or none. But there's no more valid reason to persecute the "gay" and "trans" individuals than there is to persecute the sterile couples.
Persecution is a different thing from limiting their behavior. Society limits all of our behavior; we all wear clothes even in the kind of weather North America has had recently, pay for things or wait for them to be offered to us rather than just grabbing them, and at least try to seek the social bonds we all want by making it easy for others to like us rather than dislike us. I think "conservatives" can, for example, reasonably observe that many people dislike receiving Too Much Information. It doesn't bother me at all that writers whose work I like--no, not Emily Dickinson or Willa Cather, but probably Charlotte Mew and Rumer Godden, and of course a lot of living people who've written about other things but said they were "gay" in their personal memoirs--have been "gay." That's an odd bit about them, like their preferences for food and music. It might make me reluctant to be their roommate but it does not affect my enjoyment of their writing. I have a different reaction when I read a short unimpressive article and learn at the bottom of the page that "Babe Bartleby is a 'queer' writer who earned a M.F.A. at Overpriced University and lives with two roommates and a lot of student debt in Boston." It's not hate, it's not fear, but it is something like "Someone should do this wretched youth the favor of telling person to find some other way to pay off that student debt--writing is not per vocation." A real writer would have absorbed, by the time the writer had finished the M.F.A., that nobody likes T.M.I. Only the serious fans who buy the memoir want to know anything about a writer's sex life.
Sterile heterosexual adults don't hesitate to condemn the behavior of a sterile adult who might want a baby so badly that person would just go out and kidnap one--though I suspect that only actually happens in bad movies. So I see no reason why "gay," "trans," or left-wing people should hesitate to condemn the behavior of a teenaged boy who demanded a place on the girls' swimming team in order to harass and bully the girls.
But that's not the full extent of the situation, Gentle Readers. In some parts of the United States we are seeing an additional increase specifically in male sterility and/or gender-confusion. One clue that led scientists to identify the cause of this increase was that it's more common in pond animals than in land animals. Incomplete development of male bodies has been confirmed as a serious threat to whole populations, even species, of some frogs. For frogs, this seems to be caused by a specific chemical--the highly water-soluble herbicide atrazine.
One of the frog species studied is this Northern Leopard Frog, photograph courtesy of the Burke Museum, Seattle.
What does atrazine do to little boys who play on sprayed grass? I saw a kid working in a public place last year. It struck my eye as a fat kid more than as a boy or girl. It had a "boy" name. It had a loud, harsh, raucous "girl" voice--as some teenaged boys do. The fat didn't taper in even slightly at the waist or spread out again over the hips; the biggest fat deposit was above the belt. There were small, flabby, male-type fat deposits above the big one, on either side. People who seemed well acquainted with the kid spoke to it as a boy. Other people who felt a need to speak to the kid called it "Miss."
The kid may well have been a frog, in the U.S. student slang sense of a student in grade nine or in the first year of college. (They're also called freshmen, the purpose of which is to teach everyone even in high school that the suffix "-man" is different from the word "man.") The kid had a somewhat froglike face and figure.
I had to wonder whether, at a critical stage of childhood, that poor fat kid had been exposed to atrazine.
Without encroaching on the family's privacy, Google thinks it's likely that he was. Type "atrazine effects human male" into your browser bar, and you can pick your major medical study. Atrazine "feminizes" humans who are genetically male. Heavy exposure can even produce what appear to be sterile females whose DNA tests as male. More typical exposure produces males who know they're male but feel less manly than other men, whose smaller and less functional male parts are a source of shame and bitterness that might even cause them to want to try to join the girls' swim team just to avoid having to compare their bodies with those of healthy male athletes.
Google's top picks for documentation of these effects, with gruesome medical details that Google allows for sites like NIH.gov but discourages for Blogspot, as of today:
There is something you can do to protect your grandsons from this, "conservative" readers. The Environmental Protection Administration is currently reevaluating atrazine. We are by no means out of the woods yet with Glyphosate Awareness and it's not time to move on to the next dangerous chemical, but from now through the fifth of September is the appointed time to submit your (polite, printable, scientific) comments to the EPA. You can use the "docket number" to go directly to their site and comment in detail, if you have anything to add to the existing documentation, or just add your name to the USPIRG petition here:
The position of this web site is that it's interesting to see how readily government acknowledges the harm done by chemicals that take the pleasure out of being male, compared to the way government acknowledges the harm done by chemicals that merely cause severe asthma, bone-deep skin lesions, uncontrollable vomiting and/or diarrhea (people walking down the road can't see a difference in the puddles, and it's possible, though rare, to have both reactions at the same time), kidney failure, loss of immunity, life-threatening birth defects, sudden death in smaller animals up to the size of cats, and faster progress of, especially, liver, kidney, and breast cancer. Glyphosate is worse than atrazine. Nevertheless, we do want a ban on atrazine. Personally I want a ban on spraying anything outdoors that you wouldn't want to drink.
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