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No, the world hasn’t gone insane. What’s happening is that a medical disaster of epic proportions has been quietly unfolding ever since the first mass market synthetic hormone, an artificial estrogen called diethylstilbestrol (or DES), was invented in 1938.

Doctors and the pharmaceutical industry quickly seized on DES as a new wonder drug, and one of the first uses they put it to was as a treatment to prevent miscarriages. Between 1940 and the mid-1970s, around 5 million pregnant women worldwide were given DES. These women gave birth to between 2 and 3 million “DES daughters” and an equal number of DES sons. DES abruptly lost its FDA approval in 1971 after high rates of a previously rare type of cancer were discovered in the DES daughters. It was subsequently discovered that many of the daughters had also been born with abnormalities of their internal reproductive organs, rendering it difficult or impossible to have children of their own. Both mothers and daughters were also found to have elevated rates of several kinds of cancer.

By contrast, the official line has always been that the DES sons came through their exposure virtually unscathed.

I first became involved with the DES sons in 2011, because I’d developed a theory that exposure to testosterone-blocking drugs could cause a male fetus to develop as female instead of male during the time the drug exposure is taking place. I’d discovered that, along with miscarriage prevention, DES had a second use: suppression of testosterone production in men with prostate cancer. The dose required to completely shut down testosterone production in adult men undergoing prostate cancer therapy is 3mg per day; the starting dose for preventing miscarriages in pregnant women was 5mg per day.

Towards the end of 2011 I joined an online group of DES sons. One thing that immediately struck me was that this was supposed to be a group for DES sons, yet a good half of the group seemed to be using womens names. I soon discovered that these people were actually DES sons to begin with, but now identified as women. This didn’t come as a total surprise, since I already knew from what I’d read about development in the unborn child, that nearly all the exposure to DES (and other hormonal treatments to prevent miscarriage) takes place after the genitals have already completed their development, but during the time most sexually dimorphic brain development takes place. It makes sense from a theoretical point of view that you would end up with people who look male, but nonetheless have a strong internal feeling of being a woman rather than a man. It’s still quite a shock to see that real people have been affected in that way though!

Since that time I’ve been trying to raise the profile of DES in the trans community, and to find out whether the younger transsexuals who were born after DES was phased out were also exposed to hormone treatment before birth. DES was taken off the market 40 years ago, but I think it’s highly likely that some of the hormone treatments that replaced it are producing similar effects.

Unfortunately, a lot of trans people seem to be quite uncomfortable with the idea that a chemical might be responsible for their condition, and that what it’s done to them is to cause part of their prenatal development to go down the male pathway and part down the female one. Many of them seem to have this very fixed idea in their head that they are actually ordinary women, who were somehow born in the wrong body. In a way it’s true, since I think most of the time with these miscarriage treatments you do end up with someone who has what is effectively a woman’s brain inside a man’s body. Nonetheless, the majority of trans people seem completely disinterested in what I have to say, and there’ve been a few quite angry and hostile reactions too. I’ve tried posting on a couple of doctor’s websites, but had no response from them either.

That’s my story so far. Now you know why there’s suddenly so many “trannies” all over the place!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylstilbestrol

“Fivecatsandadog”, I don’t seem to have permission to reply to emails, so I’ll answer your question here.

Although I seem to have a great deal in common with DES sons (born with a genital abnormality, “eunuchoid” body structure and other symptoms of below normal male testosterone production, and with parts of my behaviour and psychology that appear to be female rather than male), I don’t think I’m actually a DES son myself. There was no reason for my mother to prescribed DES: no history of miscarriage, nor (according to my Dad) any problems during the pregnancy or any drugs prescribed as far as he can remember. There’s also the fact that I don’t identify as a woman, and seem to be more psychologically male than most of the DES sons I’ve chatted with.

I originally started looking at the effects of DES on male development because I’d come up with the idea that my mother had tried to abort me by taking an overdose of contraceptive pills. My idea was that she’d taken the overdose at around the time she’d first felt me moving inside her, and that it had severely disrupted my endocrine system so that for a few weeks I stopped producing any testosterone. Since the default developmental pathway is the female one and male development only takes place if there’s testosterone present, the result was that, during those few weeks, I developed as female instead of male.

By that point in fetal development (around 15 to 17 weeks after conception), the genitals have already completed their development, but the process of “axonal and dendritic growth”, or creating the permanent connections between cells in the brain, is just beginning.

Embryonic and fetal development takes place in a kind of evolutionary sequence, starting with the most ancient and ending with the most evolutionarily recent. All the things that, in me, seem to have ended up female instead of male, are associated with evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain, so that makes me think whatever happened to me must have occurred near the beginning of this process of building the permanent structure of the brain.

I couldn’t find anything in the medical literature dealing with what happens if something temporarily interrupts testosterone production partway through male fetal development, however I did discover that progestins (which are the main hormonal component of contraceptive pills), are highly effective at shutting down testosterone production in adult men. I also discovered that this is a property that they share with the drug DES, which had been widely used as a treatment to prevent miscarriages from 1940 until the mid-1970s.

That’s where it all started.