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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Is it offensive to suggest that gender dysphoria, homosexual orientation, etc, while natural in the sense of not being someone's choice, are perhaps dramatically more prevalent than random chance over the past century due to environmental contaminants and modern diets during pregnancy and early human development? I recall reading a recent study about rodents born with iron deficiency exhibiting cross-sex traits.
That study showed the offspring of iron deficient mice were more likely to exhibit intersex traits.
There are more openly gay and trans people now because you're generally not allowed to shoot, drown, burn at the stake, institutionalise, lobotomise, chemically castrate them willy nilly any more.
Ask an elder queer (to my horror as a gen x i am becoming one) and the percentages have. Not. Changed. There's just less of us hiding.
And you wanna know where the older ones went in the current population? Google a little thing called AIDS
It reminds me of the prevalence of left-handedness in the US. If you look at a chart, left-handedness absolutely exploded in the early 20th century, going from 3% of the population up to 10%. But it's stayed at 10% for about 8 decades now.
No one actually thinks more of the population suddenly became left-handed and then stabilized. It was a combination of underreporting and forcing left-handed children to write right-handed.
Same as with any difference that can be hidden. We don't have more autistic people now; we're just better at recognizing that the guy that spent his entire life photographing snowflakes might've just lived before we had diagnostic tools or a cultural understanding of special interests and the autism spectrum.