Chemical Exposures and Gender/Sexual Ambiguity

The hormonal theory of sexuality states that exposure to certain hormones plays a role in fetal sex differentiation thus such exposure influences the sexual orientation that emerges later in the adult. Prenatal hormones are seen as the primary determinant of adult sexual orientation.

Scientists have postulated a wide range of adverse human health effects of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). With the frightening amount of toxins now circulating on earth, there’s something else that is happening to particularly frogs and humans due to the chemical exposures – gender/sexual ambiguity. Science positively proves that chemicals are disrupting the critical hormones, including the primary chemical messengers that play a vital role during the fetal development stage.

In the frog/fish/other animal populations, we have long been seeing an increase in offspring with “mixed” gender, which makes them infertile and unable to reproduce.

Toxic exposures cause fish and other marine mammals to be “feminized”: i.e., they develop, even if genetically male, only female sexual genitalia and not male. This is part of the reason these populations are decreasing because they cannot properly reproduce. A similar process is happening in human populations. More children with ambiguous genitalia (internal and external) are being born. Note: This is not the same thing as one’s sexual orientation or gender role identity. It is a physical sexual abnormality caused by the disruption of the normal development due to an exposure to toxic, cell-changing chemicals.

We don’t hear much about this because the parents are often embarrassed and would not want their children’s difference to become socially known. But it is a very real phenomenon that is happening to many more people since the advent of The Chemical Age in the 1950s. That uncontrolled experiment is affecting human fertility and normal sexual growth.

A rapidly growing number of children are born with intersex variation (ambiguous genitalia). Documented evidence shows that endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the household environment causes reproductive variations via dysregulation of normal reproductive tissue differentiation, growth, and maturation if the fetuses are exposed to EDCs during developmental times in utero.

Animal studies support fish and reptile embryos exhibited IV and sex abnormalities when exposed to EDCs. Occupational studies proved a higher prevalence of offspring with mutations in chemically exposed workers (both male and female). Chemicals connected with endocrine-disrupting ability in humans include but not limited to organochlorine pesticides, petroleum distillate based laundry detergents, poly-chlorinated biphenyls, phthalates, and furans. Other EDCs include a variety of substances classified according to their known or suspected activity in relation to sex hormone receptors and pathways. The most-studied and best documented are the environmental estrogens, which mimic estradiol and bind to estrogen receptors (ERs). ER agonists also include the pesticide methoxychlor, certain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), bisphenol A (BPA; a high production volume chemical utilized to make polycarbonate plastic), pharmaceutical estrogens such as diethylstilbestrol (DES).

Intersex individuals may have concurrent physical disorders that require life-long medical intervention and experience gender dysphoria.

An urgent need exists to determine which chemicals possess the greatest risk for for ambiguous genitalia development and the mechanisms by which these chemicals are capable of interfering with normal physiological development in children in order to prevent serious complications.