It’s In The Water

When another trans-person from one particular town in Connecticut came to the support group we used to joke that it must be because of the water and not to “drink the water” but there is something to that. The town in question had a chemical plant in the town they polluted the group water and the river next to them.

As more male bass switch sex, a strange fish story expands
By Darryl Fears
Washington Post
August 3, 2014
At first she was surprised. Then she was disturbed. Now she’s a little alarmed. Each time a different batch of male fish with eggs in their testes shows up in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, Vicki Blazer’s eyebrows arch a bit higher.

In the latest study, smallmouth bass and white sucker fish captured at 16 sites in the Delaware, Ohio and Susquehanna rivers in Pennsylvania had crossed over into a category called intersex, an organism with two genders.
[…]
Those endocrine-disrupting chemicals throw off functions that regulate hormones and the reproductive system. In the newest findings, at one polluted site in the Susquehanna near Hershey, Pa., 100 percent of male smallmouth bass that were sampled had eggs, Blazer said.

With the mutant bass, she said, “we keep seeing . . . a correlation with the percent of agriculture in the watershed where we conduct a study.”

Many communities get their water from rivers that flow through agriculture areas and the water treatment plants were never designed to filter out those chemicals and we are drinking the same water that make fish intersex.

Runoff from farms that give animals growth hormones and people who flushing down the toilet estrogen products (I put my estrogen patches in the trash where they get incinerated) are all contributing that the problem.

When chemical use reporting was proposed to track chemical usage, the bill was amended and weaken because of objection from agi-businesses.