Why boys are turning into girls

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Why boys are turning into girls

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s-are-turning-into-girls.html_

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e-turning-into-girls.html) #

Gender-bending chemicals are largely exempt from new EU regulations, warns

Geoffrey Lean.

Here's something rather rotten from the State of Denmark. Its government

yesterday unveiled official research showing that two-year-old children are

at risk from a bewildering array of gender-bending chemicals in such

everyday items as waterproof clothes, rubber boots, bed linen, food, nappies,

sunscreen lotion and moisturising cream.

The 326-page report, published by the environment protection agency, is

the latest piece in an increasingly alarming jigsaw. A picture is emerging of

ubiquitous chemical contamination driving down sperm counts and feminising

male children all over the developed world. And anti-pollution measures

and regulations are falling far short of getting to grips with it.

Sperm counts are falling so fast that young men are less fertile than

their fathers and produce only a third as much, proportionately, as hamsters. A

nd gender-bending chemicals are increasingly being blamed for the mystery

of the " lost boys " : babies who should normally be male who have been born as

girls instead.

The Danish government set out to find out how much contamination from

gender-bending chemicals a two-year-old child was exposed to every day. It

concluded that a child could be " at critical risk " from just a few exposures to

high levels of the substances, such as from rubber clogs, and imperilled

by the amount it absorbed from sources ranging from food to sunscreens.

The results build on earlier studies showing that British children have

higher levels of gender-bending chemicals in their blood than their parents

or grandparents. Indeed WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund), which

commissioned the older research, warned that the chemicals were so widespread

that " there is very little, if anything, individuals can do to prevent

contamination of themselves and their families. " Prominent among them are

dioxins,

PVC, flame retardants, phthalates (extensively used to soften plastics)

and the now largely banned PCBs, one and a half million tons of which were

used in countless products from paints to electrical equipment.

Young boys, like those in the Danish study, could end up producing less

sperm and developing feminised behaviour. Research at Rotterdam's Erasmus

University found that boys whose mothers were exposed to PCBs and dioxins were

more likely to play with dolls and tea sets and dress up in female

clothes.

And it is in the womb that babies are most vulnerable; a study of

umbilical cords from British mothers found that every one contained hazardous

chemicals. Scientists at the University of Rochester in New York discovered that

boys born to women exposed to phthalates had smaller penises and other

feminisation of the genitals.

The contamination may also offer a clue to a mysterious shift in the sex

of babies. Normally 106 boys are born for every 100 girls: it is thought to

be nature's way of making up for the fact that men were more likely to be

killed hunting or in conflict. But the proportion of females is rising, so

much so that some 250,000 babies who statistically should have been boys have

ended up as girls in Japan and the United States alone. In Britain, the

discrepancy amounts to thousands of babies a year.

A Canadian Indian community living on ancestral lands at the eastern tip

of Lake Huron, hemmed in by one of the biggest agglomerations of chemical

factories on earth, gives birth to twice as many girls as boys. It's the same

around Seveso in Italy, contaminated with dioxins from a notorious

accident in the 1970s, and among Russian pesticide workers. And there's more

evidence from places as far apart as Israel and Taiwan, Brazil and the Arctic.

Yet gender-benders are largely exempt from new EU regulations controlling

hazardous chemicals. Britain, then under Tony Blair's premiership, was

largely responsible for this – restricting their inclusion in the first draft

of the legislation, and then causing even what was included to be watered

down.Confidential documents show that it did so after pressure from W

Bush's administration, which protested that US exports " could be impacted " .

Now the Danish government is planning to lobby to have the rules toughened

up. It is particularly concerned by other studies which show that

gender-bending chemicals acting together have far worse effects than the

expected

sum of their individual impacts. It wants this to be reflected in the

regulations, citing its discovery of the many sources to which the two-year-olds

are exposed – modern slings and arrows, as it were, of outrageous fortune.