Welcome. An Introduction.

Welcome to my new blog, Fear of a Pink Planet.

As background, this blog title is taken from a chapter in Deborah Rudacille’s book The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights which discussed my work along with those of others attempting to connect the dots between environmental change, medicine, and the increase in the number of transgender people seeking treatment, many of whom are searching for a rational explanation of how gender identity forms and how the developmental process can be altered.

Like many trans people, I felt a discordance between my sense of gender identity and my physical body from my earliest memories, around age three. After many years of struggle and many deliberate attempts at avoiding and denying my own deeply-held sense of self, I decided to transition in 1995 rather than commit suicide, which I felt was my only other realistic option. Although the transition process was arduous at times, I no longer feel that same sense of dissonance regarding my gender. In many respects, things have turned out far better than I ever could have imagined. It turns out that the fear was much worse than the reality.

Nonetheless, being the curious type, I began to research possible causes of transsexualism around the time of my transition, and have read everything I could find on the topic. I was particularly dubious of psychological explanations that claimed gender identity is determined solely by sex of rearing, a theory that has been prominent since John Money first introduced it in 1955. His theory didn’t fit my circumstances or upbringing at all, so I kept searching for some explanation that might prove to be more consistent with my own experience.

In early 2001, while doing research on another topic, I stumbled across the term “endocrine disrupting chemical” and for the first time, I had a strong feeling that I had inadvertently found a key piece of the puzzle. I began to research the environmental health scientific literature, and much to my amazement, a completely new picture emerged, and all those disparate pieces of information I had collected along the years finally fit into a coherent framework. In addition, it also suggested a course of action and areas to study that would likely be fruitful along these lines.

Along with my friend Angie Kimble, we created the website www.transadvocate.org, where I published my papers and tried to gain a wider audience for my work. Angie did much of the advocacy and outreach work, and shared my passion regarding the immense importance of the uncovered evidence. The goal was to change the terms of the debate, and to reframe transsexualism as the predictable outcome of exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals during crucial periods of development. That is, I wanted to widen the scope of the problem to an ecological perspective.

In 2002, I was interviewed by Deborah Rudacille for her book after she had come across my website, and was somewhat surprised to see my claims given such a prominent role, even though the publishers and reviewers routinely avoided mentioning that section of the book. In retrospect, she was very kind; at that time I had a limited understanding of the consequences of my work, and she could have easily painted a far different picture.

Later that same year, I returned to college, entering the Environmental Studies program at The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. During my time there, I had access to a much larger body of research data and many journals that are unavailable to the public. In fact, this was a large part of my interest in returning to academia, simply to get access to this literature. As part of my coursework, I wrote a master’s thesis examining the relationship between endocrine disrupting chemicals and transsexualism.

For the last six years, I have been much less active in my research. While the reasons for this are partially due to circumstance, to a large degree it was simply to get some distance from the problem, since by that time I had been researching for almost a decade, and full-time for almost four years. I needed to take some time off to regain some perspective and to resolve some long-standing personal issues. During that time, I also ran into some financial problems, and lost the www.transadvocate.org web domain, which was subsequently bought by a pay-per-click cyber-squatter who has been capitalizing from links to the site for the last four years. Despite my best attempts at recovering the domain, they have all failed. So reader, please be advised that I have not had any relationship to www.transadvocate.org for the last four years, and you are wasting your time going there.

Nonetheless, I have watched the news over the last few years and see evidence mounting that the number and quantities of endocrine disruptors in the environment are steadily increasing, animals are increasingly at peril, government regulation and enforcement is completely broken, and an increasing number of children are being pathologized by over-zealous “treatment providers,” and the psychological establishment at large.

My aim with this blog is to provide information in a weekly posting that will help readers to “connect the dots” so that interested people will be able to understand and act intelligently when it comes to endocrine disruptors and their effects on gender and sexuality. For those of you who have an interest, all my original papers from the transadvocate website have been archived by my friend Jenny, and can be found here.