Picked up Mint this summer and it has been a joy to use. The progress they've made in the last three years is astounding and opposed to every other time I've used Linux there have been zero moments of needing to run ten terminal commands from stack overflow to get sound to work.
The article is talking about the effects of these chemicals on infants breastfeeding and the effects on newborns.
While these are endocrine disrupting chemicals, people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced. The reason transgender people do hormone replacement therapies is so that they can change their hormonal balance. If these chemicals were making people trans, baseline blood tests, which you need to take when you start HRT, would tell different stories than they tell. N1, mine were normal, and this aligns with what others I know have experienced.
My guess is that there is an appearance of a greater number of gender diverse people today because culturally we've reached a point where we don't feel like we need to die with the secret of being transgender, rather than because there were proportionally that many fewer transgender people before.
> people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced. The reason transgender people do hormone replacement therapies is so that they can change their hormonal balance.
Not so sure, it could have to do with their hormones. I recall experiencing mild gender dysphoria during a period when my testosterone was recorded as below normal. When it returned to normal the dysphoria went away. It could be that some choose to say, "Since I think I'm a girl, perhaps I should swing the hormones even further in that direction."
I'm just one data point though, would be curious to hear other's experiences with dysphoria and what their blood work shows.
EDIT: And think about it, it's a logical contradiction to say that "hormones have nothing to do with it but write me an Rx to mess with my hormones so that I'm more of a girl."
Being transgender represents a misalignment between your internal sense of self and the sex you were born with. Sometimes this is about societal expectations and pressure to conform to gender ideals, sometimes it is about the physical body you were born into/the primary and secondary sex attributes of that body, and often it's both. Hormone replacement therapy is a way of altering the body's secondary sexual attributes to reduce the dysphoria that is cause from the misalignment of ones sense of self and their body.
Doing HRT carries massive life long side effects, which doctors are required to inform patients about. In some places, it requires months of therapy and a doctor's signoff. While I'm sure there are people who have hormonal imbalances, and some of them have perceived gender dysphoria because of it, I find it very unlikely (or at least extremely uncommon) those people would then start taking hormones, given that you have to be _pretty sure_ you're trans before getting near hormones. It seems very unlikely that in the course of a dip in hormone levels where dysphoria was sudden the course of action would be to transition rather than to seek an endocrinologist for answers. If this were common, I would think detransition rates, which many studies have shown to be very low, would be far higher than they are.
Even with 15 years of gender dysphoria, it took me six months post coming out to feel ready to start the hormone conversation, and an additional three months with the prescription sitting in my cabinet before I was ready to actually start taking it. Like I said, my hormonal level baselines were normal for a male.
Edit, RE your edit:
> "hormones have nothing to do with it but write me an Rx to mess with my hormones so that I'm more of a girl."
"Mess with my hormones" is a flippant and inaccurate way to describe a very difficult conversation trans people have with their doctors. You don't start hormones for fun and you don't start them because you're high on estrogen or testosterone. Hormones also don't make you "more of a girl." If you are a trans woman, you are a woman, regardless of whether you are on hormones, have had any kind of sex altering surgery, or have socially transitioned. You take hormones to bring your inward sense of identity outward and reduce the pain that comes from your sense of self not aligning with your appearance and the societal demands and expectations of your behavior.
I am not going to say that I agree with OP, or that OP's language isn't entirely too casual for someone close to this issue but it appears they're most focused on finding out why people have a different inner self than outer expression.
We recognize that the inner self's gender is unalterable (and if it weren't, I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with that sort of mind control), so we must bring the outer in alignment.
However where the inner self gender comes from is something I'm not sure we know too well. Is it the womb? Is it early childhood development? Do hormones and nutrition affect this process which we haven't even pin-pointed in anyway?
Personally, I think it's too early to call out chemicals as a cause. That's a bet we can't take until at least we know the process. And if we're at that point, we could do that mind control that I'm so much against.
Why would the "inner self's gender" be unalterable? Almost everything about a person can change, even after reaching adulthood, height, weight, strength, personality, phobias, preferences, beliefs.
> Being transgender represents a misalignment between your internal sense of self and the sex you were born with.
These thoughts, like every other thought anyone has, are mediated by hormones. I'm not saying any particular balance or resulting thought is good/bad/right/wrong/healthy/unhealthy.
But this is akin to saying "being aggressive represents a state of excessive confidence, not elevated testosterone levels." Sure! That's true. But it's also true that elevated testosterone levels tend to increase the frequency and intensity of occasions in which people find themselves in a state of excessive confidence.
Weirdly though, exogenous testosterone tends to make people more generous and social until you cross some boundary. Roid ragers are using too much external T.
Definitely interesting! Aren't people starting to describe testosterone as something more like "status-seeking?" But also testosterone presumably exists in animals with ~no concept of status...
Just goes to show you how incredibly complex and broadly impactful these chemicals are.
I just wanted to say that gender dyphoria is not the same as being gender diverse. A lot of times there can be no dysphoria if you live in a loving and accepting environment.
I have a few people in my life that are gender diverse, and simply changing their pronouns to they/them when referring to them has so far been sufficient to make them feel happy and accepted.
I believe fully in trans rights, and any reason why a person may be trans has no bearing on whether that person should have equal status in society as anyone else.
And this kind of argument is to me a dangerous sociopolitical mistake:
> While these are endocrine disrupting chemicals, people aren't transgender because their hormones are imbalanced.
One should acknowledge that there may be a very significant difference between hormone effects in a breastfeeding infant while the brain is full tilt in the process of wiring itself vs later in life after things like language and identity are established. We definitely don't know. We can also acknowledge that we don't know how hormone effects combine with environmental/social effects. That need not alter one's feelings about gender diversity.
It's the same as the "gay people didn't choose to be gay" argument when really it should just be ok to be gay. Don't let reasons get in the way of reason.
We don't know enough to say if people are transgender because their hormones are imbalanced, but we do have reason to believe that transgender people tend to have a distinctive hormone balance even prior to any hormonal therapies.
For example, female → male transitioners have like a 2x - 3x higher incidence rate of PCOS before any therapies. Obviously there's something different going on.
The EDC question is also related to prenatal hormone exposure, which is not related to your anecdote about pre-therapy hormone testing.
In any case, the theory being put forth here re EDCs is not that every (or even most) transgender people are such due to EDCs and resulting hormone imbalances, but rather that even a small change (read: compression of variability) in hormone distributions across the entire population would produce all sorts of effects like everyone being slightly more androgynous. If that's the population-scale effect, you'd presumably expect more people to slide each way across the binary designations we tend to use for gender.
There is some evidence that hormone balance in the womb (including from the mother) can affect gender and sexuality. It's not impossible that it would also have an effect a little later as well, while the brain is still very plastic. I think the strongest version of the immutable gender/sexuality idea (that it is entirely genetic) is almost certainly false. My hottest take (mainly from my own experiences) is that it can perhaps in some cases be mutable a lot later than people think (which, to be clear, is a very different thing from it being a choice or controllable, and even if that were true, it would still be a valid choice).
VRChat came out more than 5 years before Horizon Worlds did, and already had an established player base by the time Horizon Worlds even came out. It was in early access for ages, but that didn't matter to the VR audience, who's used to there being jank. Not to mention that Horizon Worlds was probably never more of a finished product than VRChat to any significant degree.
If you've already got a VR social space, why switch to a different one?
VRChat was designed for people to hang out, Horizon Worlds was built as a platform for people to purchase meta services and desired corporate use which came with a lot of sterility (you don’t want half the people in your corporate all hands to be some form of anime girl, see the reactions that even just Anubis’ logo gets here).
This came in both world design and novel design where vrchat lets people import basically arbitrary 3d models with a wide range of expressiveness. VR went for corporate Memphis upper torsos which immediately makes the world feel more bland. Letting people import whatever would also eliminate the opportunity for meta to sell that, and have the risk that there might be too much breast for a corporate audience.
Add to that and the fundamentals just worked so much better in VRChat when horizon worlds tried to make its big splash and the fate was sealed.
I had a OnePlus 3T and really didn't want to let it go (particularly because it DOES support VoLTE!) but ultimately got a Pixel 4 and have been using it since.
Hey thanks! I hope so too. I actually want it to be a semi-regular thin on HN, like Who Is Hiring, or WHat are You Working on. I think the utility is in the joy and laughs, but also in the novelty/interestingness of the titles that cause quite a number of people to actually read articles they wouldn't have otherwise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46775501 - the joy however is a big thing, if you read through the comments of my previous popular posts in this vein, there's so much pure enjoyment. I love that, and it's a reall good to see here.
Also it breaks the monotony of seriousness and is a welcome relief. Humor expands the mind and shifts perspective. It's a genuine good. That said, the mods don't feel the same way (not saying they are humorless!) and side with those who complain about these posts or are tired of them. The mods say this is because they are repetitive, and not original, and they've already given more than usual space to me for posting these. They say this is about a balance. I feel they really don't want more of these to be posted, and seem certain they will not allow these to become new front page stories again.
However, while I might have failed to convince them, if you email them, and explain your thinking/reasonsing, it might make a dent in their perspecitve. Idk, but if you or others who enjoy this stuff could try, you might be able to convince them to semi-regularize it, something I would be happy to do: hn@ycombinator.com
My feeling is there are a bunch of people who really despise these kinds of posts for various reasons, and they are vigilant and loud. And the mods have precedent for punishing repeitition (yet its permitted for genres like WIH, and WAYWO). I think the mods just don't want to deal with the loud complainers who this displeases, and also genuinely believe this kind of post is bad for the community.
However, I know the mods change their mind when the community speaks, too. So if you want to maybe add some voices of reason to those who might email and complain about these, I beseech you, do email and support a semi-regular "honest/savage titles" type post! And if we get approval, I'm happy to do these like last friday of every month, or every friday or whatever cadence is good.
I don't know about everyone else, but bottom line for me is, for all the ones this displeases, I know you have your principles about this, but are you really not laughing at any of it? 100% zero joy sparked? I would be surprised. But if that's the case do we really need to kowtow to the joyless who would rid our community of the joy of many, for thier own poverty of enjoyment?
You might not agree with how I feel about it, but if you would like to see more of this, and have some reasons, I really encourage you to email the mods and relay your support. Then, this might happen! Otherwise the mods have made it clear it will not be permitted to become a real front page story again ("short amount of time on front page then moved to second page soon after" quoting email from mod). That limits the joy collectively because only a fraction of people can see it then.
I'm fine if I get 0 karma for these posts, if the mods require such "concessions." It's about the joy and good vibes of all. I think balance should be more star trek balance and less volume balance. I truly feel the joy of the many here outweighs the few sours. To the sours: skip over it, don't engage; don't let our joy break your joy. Compartmentalize!
A fun little functional language where everything is a parameter in a glorious cascade of functions from a parent function. It's called OAF (Oops All Functions).
Tangentially, if you enjoy The Great Gatsby, you might also enjoy All The King's Men, which is a work of fiction that I think similarly richly described a swath of the American experience.
As for Gatsby, I think it's a great piece of fiction that invites a lot of readings, and everyone's invited to that ownership of the text. I think you can come away with the deeply shallow understanding of "the twenties were cool," and still be enriched by Fitzgerald's writing style.
I don't think anyone has made a good film adaptation of Gatsby and I don't know if anyone will, as long as it's adapted literally. The imagery and iconography of wealthy 1920s America eats so much of anything that tries to adapt it, that they tend to come out feeling shallow, and the writing is so dense that dialogue feels stilted and weird spoken out loud. You'd either need to, in my opinion, lean heavily into both, or abandon both, to make a good adaptation (leaning into both immediately feels like a Wes Anderson movie to me).
I think the best adaptation would be to do something like Jobs, where they just take a few scenes from the book and create a movie out of that.
A hobby language called OAF (Oops All Functions). Everything is an argument of a parent function PROGRAM. It's very cursed but it's now fully competent as a general purpose language.
