CNN’s Unwitting Queering of the News

I hoped that we got rid of what is called “queering” the news years ago. I thought important media outlets like National Geographic had decided not to do that sort of underhand thing just for clicks any more. But leave it to to CNN reporters Abby Turner and Andrew Kaczynski of the K File to carry the shameful, harmful torch of queering environmental news.

In a recent report on CNN’s website, they sacrificed factual, informed reporting to do a take down on Democratic primary presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. whom they say has “repeatedly suggested that chemicals in water are impacting sexuality of children .”

I turn to CNN for news, among other sources, but am disappointed, although not surprised, at this sacrificial abuse of science to discredit Kennedy. And, with all of the self-inflicted public wounds he carries and that spill over unwittingly into some of the things he says I wish he wasn’t a spokesperson for our anti-toxics movement. That’s because he’s not a clear speaker, and he sensationalizes just like the reporters that damned him, and he’s as culpable as Turner and Kaczynski.

But, still, it shows how badly CNN needs an environmental or anti-toxics reporter who knows the science and has a depth of understanding to effectively communicate a novel and important understanding of our environment and gender.

Intern Turner and K File’s Kaczynski took solid science that they twist so badly they have become unwittingly not only anti-LGBTQ+ but pro-cancer industrial shills. And for what? To discredit Kennedy with false information when there were so many better factual ways to take him down — if that’s what they want to do?

Kaczynski’s twitter banner is now ironic in that he proclaims, “End Pediatric Cancer” but supports the anti-science from industry that allows for the disease to proliferate and have increased roughly one percent per from the late 1970s into the 2000s.

Turner and Kacyzynski write “Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a history of repeatedly sharing unfounded conspiracies that man-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay or transgender and causing the feminization of boys and masculinization of girls.

They cite Kennedy on his own podcast in June 2023 as saying, “I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors because our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion. These kinds of issues that are very, very controversial today.”

He’s absolutely right — except for one thing: these trends are not controversial at all among the informed scientific community. We have so much human evidence piled upon everything we observe in nature’s mirror that what he’s saying is simply fact. But Kennedy and CNN have both decided to talk about only a very small implication of the of our pervasive exposures to EDCs.

“The baseless claim that chemicals — particularly in tap water — could turn people gay has gained popularity with conspiracy theorists over the years, most memorably with conservative radio host Alex Jones, who said chemicals in the water were ‘turning the friggin’ frogs gay.”

Turner and Kacysnski themselves are queering the news, which occurs when poorly informed, industrially paid or influenced reporters or click-bait publications conflate environmental events of gender and sex as something bad and “queer,” disturbing, happening only to LGBTQ+ persons and that somehow the general population is immune.

Discussion of EDCs’ possible effects on gender identity in the US media, however, is heavily frothed by sensationalized headlines that lend themselves to heteronormative politicization, and conflation, as experts have said in their own online reports.

The Sun Sentinel in Florida reported in 1994 “Nature in Drag: Males Gators Becoming Female.”

National Geographic, which should be commended for publishing some of the first news coverage, nonetheless, consistently used transphobic hooks like “Female Fish Develop ‘Testes’ in Gulf Dead Zone,” “Sex-Changing Chemicals Found in Potomac River,” and “Animals’ Sexual Changes Linked to Waste, Chemicals” to bring attention to the first signs and symptoms of EDC exposures.

“News articles like ‘Otters’ penises are shrinking — and why yours might be too’, or those that warn of ‘male frogs acting like females’ often conflate human concerns about masculinity (i.e. that ‘boys should act like boys’) with effects of EDCs that harm animal life and survival (and these effects are many),” notes an online article. “Decades of scholarship in both the sciences and humanities has shown that being queer or trans does not prevent animals from reproducing and even flourishing (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010; Roughgarden 2013). There is no obvious connection between queerness, ecological harm, or ‘species declines’– even if these factors are associated with EDCs.

“Disentangling harm from ideas rooted in homophobia, transphobia and ableism is important as it influences the scientific questions we ask, what counts as truth, the forms of activism we engage in, and the solutions we propose (Shotwell 2016, Lee and Mykytiuk 2018).”

These meta-messages have become amplified in social media and used by publications and bloggers to advance an insidious argument: variations in gender identity, that do not conform to traditional norms duiring a different time period when plastic chemicals weren’t pervasive, are the result of chemical pollution and mistakes.

In contrast, CNN should raise the standard for a morally clear narrative that will lead to a greater understanding of the complex role that environment plays in gender identity and behavior.

The truth is, Kennedy is telling us something very important, and it’s unfortunate that he too sensationalizes what is happening — and has to carry so much other baggage with a scientific truth.

I have always been interested in the natural world, and it was my fascination with the alligators of Lake Apopka, the fourth largest freshwater body of water in Florida, and a series of reports published in scientific journals, that initially turned me onto what was happening with our wildlife — and started me to wonder whether the same was happening to us too. After all, we are both swimming in a sea of estrogen.

The author of these reports was an alligator hunter named Dr. Louis Guillette. Fresh from earning a doctoral degree in reproductive endocrinology at the University of Colorado, Dr. Guillette arrived at the University of Florida in 1985. At the time, the state was trying to figure out whether alligator ranching could become a sustainable industry. A state alligator expert, Allan Woodward, asked him to study the reptiles in depth.

Studying sustainability meant learning about the gators’ reproductive habits. Going from region to region, Dr. Guillette wound up at Lake Apopka. In nests at most lakes, he learned that 70 to 80 percent of the eggs were hatching. But when he reached Lake Apopka, some 80 to 95 percent of the eggs failed to hatch. Subsequently, of those few eggs that did hatch, Dr. Guillette observed that the penises of the male juvenile gators were only one-quarter the normal size; mature males had testes that were flat and resembled ovaries. In some cases, the gators were born intersexed with both testes and ovaries. Typically, in healthy female alligators, each follicle houses a single perfectly formed egg, but there were three or four prematurely released smaller-than-normal eggs in the follicles of the Lake Apopka females. Levels of testosterone in infant and juvenile males were so out of proportion he figured they were probably sterile. In other cases, levels of testosterone were normal, but their hormone effect had been somehow blocked.

Playing detective, Dr. Guillette couldn’t help but observe that, on the shores of Lake Apopka, Tower Chemical Co. had manufactured the pesticide dicofol for years with several major spills into its waters. As it turns out, dicofol, which is still sprayed on the raisins packed in snack boxes our kids take to school, is contaminated with the highly estrogenic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), known to science since the 1940s to stimulate uterine tissue growth, a surefire indicator of a hormonal effect. Pesticides like DDT that interfere with the body’s endocrine system, especially the sex hormones, are called endocrine-disrupting chemicals or EDCs. Despite the gator males’ outward intimidating appearances, these reptiles’ reproductive systems were in a state of gender chaos. Over time, Dr. Guillette was able to show this effect was no doubt from the alligators living in a sea of estrogen.

Here’s what was happening. All alligator and other sexually differentiated embryos (including we humans) start out life with the potential to become either male or female, depending on our chromosomes. When we first begin as fetuses, our bodies actually simultaneously develop two separate kinds of tissues, one that gives rise to male and the other to female reproductive systems. Early in the prenatal period, under the influence of a burst of sex hormones, a developmental switch is thrown and the proper set of tissues is signaled to develop while existing tissues fated for the opposite sex are signaled to self-destruct. This is the job of the messenger chemicals that are part of the endocrine systems of all vertebrates. One such messenger chemical, Mullerian Inhibiting Substance (MIS), is normally released in developing male vertebrates to cause the resorption of the embryonic tissues that would produce a female reproductive system.

However, small amounts of hormone-like chemicals from the environment that become mixed into the thyroid, estrogen, testosterone, and other endocrine systems disturb this precise hormonal ebb and flow. In the lake’s alligators, they were confounding development and causing potentially serious problems including crossed messages and development of the sexes with varied intensities of feminization and demasculinization of males or defeminization and masculinization of females. As a result, the offspring of Lake Apopka’s alligators had become some sort of intermediate design, a third gender, when compared to those that develop by genetic inheritance alone.

Throughout his professional career in an effort to save the population and learn more about endocrine disruption, Dr. Guillette shared the findings from his living lab. One person with whom he shared his work was Dr. Theo Colborn, a wildlife biologist with the World Wildlife Fund who had begun noticing similar toxic effects in the wildlife of the Great Lakes region. She became especially concerned by the increasing rates of infertility among the dying populations of herring gulls, great blue herons, double-crested cormorants, Virginia rails, and bald eagles.

When scientific skeptics reminded Dr. Colborn’s team that the Great Lakes were known to be among the most highly polluted regions on Earth and that they shouldn’t draw too many general conclusions from their work for the rest of our wildlife or human populations, she traveled to the Midway Islands where there was a declining population of albatrosses that fly the North Pacific Ocean and feed only on the surface waters. The scientist did the chemistry on some of the eggs and blood from the birds and found that these birds also had levels of chemical contaminants just at, and slightly below, the level they were finding in other troubled populations of birds around the Great Lakes.

In 1991, led by Dr. Colborn, a group of scientists met in Racine, Wisconsin, at the Johnson Foundation, and, after several days of intense scientific debate, they issued the Wingspread Statement that warned of the effects of endocrine disruptors in our environment:

“The concentrations of a number of synthetic hormone agonists and antagonists measured in the US human population today are well within the range and dosages at which effects are seen in wildlife populations. Unless the environmental load of synthetic hormone disruptors is abated and controlled, large-scale dysfunction at the population level is possible.

“Many wildlife populations are already affected by these compounds. The impacts include thyroid dysfunction in birds and fish; decreased fertility in birds, fish, shellfish and mammals; decreased hatching success in birds, fish and turtles; gross birth deformities in birds, fish and turtles; […] demasculinization and feminization in male fish, birds and mammals; defeminization and masculinization of female fish and birds; and compromised immune systems in birds and mammals.”

In 1996, Dr. Colborn, with Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers, published Our Stolen Future, detailing her findings on the wildlife of the Great Lakes region. As with the gators of Lake Apopka, Dr. Colborn’s work established that endocrine disruptors’ hormone effects were real and far more widespread than anyone anticipated.

As it turned out, Dr. Colborn based a portion of her Great Lakes research for Our Stolen Future on work I had done at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) when she later joined the same committee on which I had represented the public interest from 1989 to 1991 to advise Congress on enacting safe-seafood legislation.

My research at the NAS involved documenting the cancer risks and reproductive effects from pesticides and industrial chemicals being found at high concentrations in our nation’s seafood. One seafood-producing region that we looked at was the Great Lakes.

Working with Dr. Dale Hattis, who was then with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we created models for cancer risk for people eating Great Lakes seafood. The two of us probably knew more about the concentrations of chemical toxins in the nation’s seafood than any two people on Earth. However, being a specialist also had its limits. I was so laser-focused on studying these chemicals’ cancer-causing effects, I was completely oblivious to the larger impact that other researchers like Dr. Colborn had begun documenting. I didn’t realize that the chemicals I was studying were now being recognized as endocrine disruptors that interfered with the body’s hormone systems including the sex steroids testosterone and estrogen. I am grateful that Dr. Colborn found our data useful to her monumental work, and, as I became familiar with her landmark findings, she and I became friends. In fact, I called her in 2005 to discuss the implications of her wildlife studies for human health for a chapter in a book I was writing. We discussed the pervasive presence of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in our consumer products, especially ones such as phthalates that are widely used in cosmetics.

“The effects on male sexual health are clear,” she said. “Pediatricians can visually spot some of the physical defects in newborn boys, but, unless something is obviously as serious as, say, hypospadia [a misplaced penile opening], micropenis, or an undescended testicle, doctors usually don’t mention anything to the parents. It would just worry them.”

“But it’s the neurological effects that also worry me. We’re talking about how an individual can function,” she said. “What about a child who doesn’t socially integrate as well? Or has lost as many as six points off his IQ? This is what is happening with these chemicals.”

She added, “Cancer may hit one in a thousand kids. But one in every five babies born may have a functional change that is not visible. Only a trained lab technician can detect these kinds of subtle physical or neurological differences. But the child will not be functioning the way that he or she was programmed to function by the genes inherited from his or her mother or father.”

“Do these impact gender identity?” I asked.

This drew a pregnant pause.

Dr. Colborn’s area of expertise was wildlife. She had a terrific reputation in that field, and I could tell she didn’t want to step into the middle of the nation’s culture wars.

She warned against discussing EDCs’ effects on gender identity and behavior when I told her I was contemplating writing about the subject.

“Beware of collateral damage,” she said. “If you write about intersexed Missouri River sturgeons, gender-changing frogs, or sexual blurring of Florida panthers, how does that translate into the lives of intersexed or transgender-identifying kids and their self-worth? What is the message we’re sending to these kids? You have to be very careful. There’s a lot of transphobia in this country. What we say can be weaponized and used against the LGBTQ community. We don’t need to make things worse.”

“Besides,” she concluded, “there just isn’t enough human evidence. At least not yet.”

I put that conversation away in the back of my mind. But it never quite died.

Dr. Guillette’s passionate concern for the beasts of the lake led him to champion their cause throughout his life, but he acknowledged shortly before dying in 2015 that the alligators of Lake Apopka were in no better shape than when he had found them three decades earlier. Nor were we. There was also a great deal more published, peer-reviewed human evidence for gender-related behavioral effects than a decade earlier when Dr. Colborn and I first spoke.

I didn’t think it was right to deny the possibility that pervasive exposures to gender benders in our own lives were also having an effect on our sexual health, gender identity, and evolving definitions of what it is to be male or female. After all, it was clear that our society was changing too. The rate of transgender- and gender non-binary (TGNB)-identifying individuals, trying to transcend the usual societal polarization that one is either male or female and nothing in between the two, was clearly increasing. In the past, researchers generally put the rate of TGNB individuals at about 560 per 100,000, but a recent survey administered to some 81,000 ninth and eleventh graders by the Minnesota Department of Education and reported in 2018 in the journal Pediatrics found exceptionally high rates of TGNB-identitfying kids, as high as 2,700 per 100,000, or almost 3 percent. In a bit of an understatement, the study’s lead author Nic Rider, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow who studies transgender health, told the media, “Diverse gender identities are more prevalent than people would expect.”

Writing in the journal Translational Andrology and Urology, Dr. Alisa L. Rich of the World Health Organization’s Chemical Risk Assessment Network, notes, “Regardless of specific prevalence rates, most studies demonstrate two clear trends: (I) growth in the proportion of TGNB self-identifying individuals over time; and (II) a higher proportion of TGNB identities among the younger generations.”

While we can attribute some of these increasing rates to greater societal acceptance for transgender- and gender non-binary-identifying persons, nonetheless, it is clear that there are biological influences at work as well.

We know this because, improved diagnostic techniques aside, the rates of intersexed children born with signs of both genitalia are also on the rise and estimated to be as high as 1.7 percent of the American population. “An increasing number of children are [being] born with intersex variation,” Dr. Rich writes.

That the environment shapes gender identity, behavior, and sexual health is nothing; it always has. Rather, with trillions of low-level exposures to EDCs, the environment is doing so in a novel manner. Could endocrine disruptors whose amounts in our tissues are measured in the parts per billion be playing a role in increasing numbers of intersex babies, smaller genitalia, changes in normative gender-related behavior, shiftting percentages? How far do these effects on gender identity go?

To answer these questions requires understanding the emerging science of gender identity and connecting the dots of how we become who we are in a completely new way.

Teflon-Coated Gene Receptors

The endocrine system is one of the body’s key communications networks. It is made up of the hypothalamus, pituitary, testes, ovaries, thyroid, adrenals, and pancreas, which secrete the body’s messenger chemicals called hormones. The endocrine system’s influence on the development and regulation of the nervous system is so profound scientists often combine them into one larger entity: the neuroendocrine system.

The influence of hormones on the nervous system occurs at levels so minute that scientists measure their concentrations in the parts per billion or parts per trillion range. To visualize a single part per billion, imagine one drop of ink in a shiny tanker truck used to haul gasoline. A single part per trillion is the equivalent of a grain of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

In a series of papers, first published in 1989 in the Journal of Animal Science, and funded by the National Institutes of Health, the lab of Dr. Frederick vom Saal at the University of Missouri demonstrated this sensitivity in a series of mouse experiments that showed in multiple-birth species it was possible for adjacently positioned male and female fetuses to transmit tiny amounts of hormones to each other, with pronounced consequences.

Dr. vom Saal, who has published more than 140 articles on the effects of fetal exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, notes, “We found that a difference of about a part per billion of testosterone and about twenty parts per trillion of estradiol [endogenous estrogen] actually predict entirely different brain structures, behavioral traits, enzyme levels, and receptor levels in tissues, hormonal levels in the blood — there is nothing you look for that . . . doesn’t differ in these animals.”

In fact, this kind of natural precision presents a myriad of opportunities for perturbation from chronic, low-level exposure to EDCs that mimic, block, antagonize, or synergize the sex hormones.

You’ve probably heard of forever chemicals like Teflon, the miracle material popularized in the 1960s that is resistant to flames, heat, and water. Teflon and other brands like Gore-Tex and Stainmaster are used in non-stick cookware, Hush Puppies shoes, pizza boxes, grease-resistant food packaging, waterproof clothing, furniture, carpeting, panties, even yoga and activewear. These so-called miracles of modern living help to make our daily lives less messy, but the convenience comes at a cost.

Every day, people are waking up to local and national news reports that drinking water, dental floss, panties, popcorn, or even their so-called healthy activewear is contaminated with EDCs.

Less well-known is that the beauty industry is loading its products, including popular brands, with estrogen mimics that pose dire health consequences.

The two largest sexual organs in the human body are the genitalia and human brain; both rely on the sex hormones to develop along normal patterns, but, of the two, the brain defines gender. While most of us know that sex hormones are required for our gonadal development, the male brain also requires testosterone at critical points during pregnancy in order to properly grow and differentiate. These two organs, both highly sensitive to the sex hormones, actually develop at different times with the genitalia receiving an initial burst of sex hormones; many weeks later, these hormones, in another surge, direct brain development; yet, such hormonal bursts can be thrown off-balance, suffering confusion from very low-level exposures to environmental estrogens.

For example, Teflon provides a protective non-stick coating in cookware, but, in the human body, its chemical molecules “coat” or occupy receptors on our cell membranes for extended periods of time. They remain in the bloodstream for decades. As the body’s own endogenously produced estrogen and testosterone molecules circulate in the bloodstream, they should be able to dock on these receptors, found on cell surfaces, to transmit hormonal and environmental signals to the genes for proper gonadal and brain development. But if the body’s bloodstream is filled with these hormonal impostors they displace our own naturally produced hormones, blocking their beneficial influences. And unlike natural compounds, these synthetic ones don’t breakdown. They build-up in the breast as well as reproductive tissues, such as the placenta, to exert toxic estrogenic effects that can crossover into the fetal tissues. Once lodged in human tissues or during pregnancy passing through the placenta, they turn on and off gene switches that encourage the body to produce toxic forms of the sex hormones that are long-lasting and increase the risk for cancer and reproductive toxicity.

Following up on the work of Dr. vom Saal, in 2009 neurobiologist Dick Swaab, former director of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, began to put forward what only a few years earlier had been labeled a “premature” hypothesis: that prenatal exposure to sex hormones affects brain development and gender identity — how a person identifies him- or herself — and may even conflict with physical characteristics.

Writing in the January 2009 issue of the journal Functional Neurology, Dr. Swaab and his colleague Alicia Garcia-Falgueras explained the two-step process:

“During the intrauterine period the fetal brain develops in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) … are programmed into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. Since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in transsexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain.”

Prenatal hormones, the two argue, are the primary determinant of adult sexual orientation.

Indeed, Dr. Swaab strenuously disagrees that social conditions influence gender identity. He notes that in young children, as well as in vervet and rhesus monkeys, gender-differentiated behavior in toy preference is seen as early as three months.

“There is no proof that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity,” says Dr. Swaab.

To review Dr. Swaab’s argument, our sexual organs are differentiated first during weeks six to twelve of pregnancy. The brain is sexually differentiated after this period Because these two processes occur separately and can be subjected to different hormonal influences, Dr. Swaab argues, the degree of genital masculinization does not necessarily relate to the masculinization of the brain. He adds: “The changes brought about in this stage are permanent.”

This was made even more clear from brain-imaging results of autopsies that Dr. Jiang-Ning Zhou and colleagues at the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research performed and published in 1995 in the journal Nature. They studied the brains of autopsied heterosexual men and women, homosexual men, and transsexuals (in this case men who had gone through hormonal treatment and irreversible sexual reassignment surgery to become women). Interestingly, they found that heterosexual and gay men shared relatively similarly sized brain structures. However, they found distinctly female structures in a particular portion of the brain called the thalamus of transsexuals proclaimed genetic males at birth.

The thalamus has been referred to as the “Grand Central Station” of the brain because virtually all incoming information relays through it en route to the cortex. In turn, all areas of the cortex communicate with the thalamus. This is true for both sexes. But within the thalamus, the terrain is distinctly different between the sexes. These are what scientists call sex-based dimorphic differences.

One such structure consists of a band of fibers running along the lateral margin of the ventricular surface of the thalamus. These fibers are called the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), which is responsible for how we behave under acute, prolonged stress and threats.

The BSTc is one of the structures within the thalamus that has been well-studied through autopsies and is known to be significantly smaller in females than males.

Dr. Zhou’s team found that the volume of the BSTc is about twice as large in men than in women. Further, BSTc volume did not differ significantly between heterosexuals and homosexuals.

But in male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals, BSTc volume was only 52 percent that of the reference males — a volume analogous to that seen in women.

Since MTF transitioning often involves prescribing sex hormones and we don’t know the comparative sizes of the BSTc in infancy, one might wonder whether the use of later-in-life steroid drugs caused the structural differences. Fortunately, from a scientific perspective, one of the autopsied subjects included a transgender MTF who had never done hormones. Her BSTc size was smaller too, confirming such effects are from prenatal hormonal exposures that “could affect the development of gender identity but not immediately result in overt changes in the volume or neuronal number of the BSTc.”

These findings, the researchers write, “support the hypothesis that gender identity develops as a result of an interaction between the developing brain and sex hormones.”

For someone like me and so many others who grew up during less-enlightened times, brainwashed by the moralistic teachings of suppressed, cruel societies, religions, and cultures, this is a game-changing insight about gender identity: the body’s largest sexual organ is the brain, not the genitalia. And the two don’t always match.

It may well be, as we connect the gender-identity dots, that EDC exposures are also among the reasons why the Millennials and especially Gen Z, the first generation conceived from chemically altered DNA and completely immersed in a world of fake estrogens, are more likely to be self-identifying with more fluid concepts of gender than ever before.

In fact, the rates of youths seeking transgender-oriented health care at clinics are dramatically increasing throughout the UK, US, and Australia. Meanwhile, Russia continues to experience social upheaval from its own increasing numbers of transgender-identifying citizens, and more babies in America are being born intersexed. We are creating our next generation of gender-fluid youths.

Are we ready?

As it turns out I am not alone in asking these kinds of questions. Doctors, psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers want to know too. Indeed, within the context of so many influences and the different genetics and susceptibilities represented in any population, it is a scientific miracle that researchers can even begin to ferret out the sexual health and gender impact on millions of persons of a single chemical that is measured in the parts per billion. But they have.

Gender identity is no longer a binary choice or one relegated to anatomy. So what has changed in the human body that is leading to these new norms?

This is the story of how these chemicals that are found in baby toys, plastic grips of utensils, rain gear, beauty products, and even our drinking water are influencing sexual health and gender identity.

This is actually our story — of evolving gender norms, behavior, and human sexual development being repeated in another ten-thousand communities.

As National Institutes of Health scientist Retha Newbold, a pioneer in the study of endocrine disruption, sexual health, and gender identity, notes, “People are just now recognizing that this is indeed a possibility.”

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