Transgender player attains college basketball first

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The women’s basketball team at Mission College expected the bleachers to be full and the hecklers ready when its newest player made her home court debut.

In the days leading up to the game, people had plenty to say about 6-foot-6-inch, 220-pound Gabrielle Ludwig, who joined the Lady Saints as a mid-season walk-on and became, according to advocates, the first transsexual to play college hoops as both a man and a woman.

I’ve discovered what appears to be a colossal hidden medical disaster involving medicines containing artificial female hormones that are being given to women during pregnancy, and I’m wondering what to do about it. Looking through the photo gallery attached to the sun times article you’ve linked to, I think Gabrielle Ludwig is probably one of those affected.

For decades, doctors have been using medicines containing high doses of artificial female hormones in pregnant women thought to be at risk of miscarriage or having a premature birth. In general, these drugs have relatively minor effects on women, but in adult men even quite low doses of them shut down hormone production in the testicles and produce a state of chemical castration. No one in the medical profession seems to have taken in the significance of that fact. Over the years, literally millions of pregnant women have been given these drugs in doses well beyond what is required to chemically castrate an adult man.

It isn’t a widely appreciated fact (even among doctors), but male development in the unborn child isn’t driven directly by genes, but instead is driven by hormones produced in the testicles. If anything stops those hormones from being produced or doing their job, you get female development during that part of the pregnancy, even if the person is genetically male (see, for instance, the wikipedia articles for CAIS and Swyer’s syndrome).

As far as I’ve been able to tell, there are literally millions of nominally male people alive today who were exposed to castration-inducing doses of these drugs in the womb, and have presumably partly developed as female instead of male as a result. Since most of the pregnancy is devoted to brain development rather than genital development, it isn’t necessarily going to be immediately obvious if that has happened.

I’ve spent the last year investigating one particular group of these people, the “DES sons” (sons of women given a drug called DES as a treatment for miscarriage). There definitely is a problem as far as that drug is concerned. I think it’s likely that many other artificial hormones have a similar effect though.

DES (or diethylstilboestrol) is an extremely powerful artificial estrogen which was commonly used as a treatment for miscarriage from about 1940 until 1971 (when it was abruptly pulled from the market after a link to cancer was found). The typical dosage used for miscarriage treatment was absolutely colossal, equivalent to around half a million of today’s low dose contraceptive pills, most of which was administered during the second half of the pregnancy.

The official line is that the DES sons suffered almost no effects from being exposed to the equivalent of half a million contraceptive pills before birth, which to me seemed a little too good to be true. What I’ve found so far suggests that a colossal disaster took place and that there’s been a whopping cover up, aided by the level of shame associated with intersex conditions and people’s reluctance to talk about them.

There’s four main problems that DES sons seem to experience:

* infertility
* physical intersex conditions (most commonly undescended testes, hypospadias and micropenis)
* lifelong low testosterone and other endocrine problems.
* Psychological problems of various kinds, along with “gender dysphoria” (the feeling of being a woman trapped in a mans body).

Many of them seem to have a “eunuchoid” body structure, which is often seen in intersex cases and is a consequence of having abnormally low testosterone levels during puberty. Looking at the pictures in the photo gallery of that article, Gabrielle Ludwig appears to have that body structure too. It’s basically a body that looks a bit like a cross between a man’s and a woman’s, with long, slender arms and legs; legs significantly longer than the upper body; quite feminine facial features (well they probably were when she was younger); an armspan greater than height; not much body hair and an inability to build upper body muscle (unless you take anabolic steroids, which most professional sportsmen do). From one of the photos it looks like Gabrielle has a female digit ratio too, i.e. index finger as long or longer than the ring finger.

The infertility many DES sons seem to experience is I think the result of direct damage to the testicles caused by prolonged exposure to such a high dose of artificial female hormones before birth. The other effects I think are due to testicular hormone production being suppressed during the time the DES was being given (typically the entire second and third trimester of the pregnancy). The genitals and reproductive organs develop during the first trimester, and the remainder of the pregnancy is when sexually dimorphic brain development takes place. What DES seems to have done to most of the DES sons is to create people with a male(ish) body, but a brain that has developed partly or completely as female instead of male. I appreciate it sounds preposterous that doctors could do something so reckless or get away with concealing it for so long, but I’ve put a lot of effort over the last year looking into this and it does appear to be what’s happened. Why else would you suddenly have people popping up all over the place who are trying to change themselves into women?

There’s a book about the DES disaster available as a free download:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/pat-cody/des-voices-995/ebook/product-17522743.html

The author, Pat Cody, lost her daughter to DES-related cancer and the book is more about DES daughters than DES sons, but in chapter 3 she does mention some of the effects many DES sons have suffered (and also their extreme reluctance to admit to or talk about them). She clearly didn’t know that the genital abnormalities and probably the endocrine problems too, are actually the result of intersexed development. I’m sure there are people who do know, but so far they’ve managed to keep a very tight lid on the whole thing. I’d like to shine a light on their dirty little secret. Is there any way free republic could help do that?

Hugh

Yes, it should be made public knowledge, but nobody seems to want to know! I tried writing to one of our national newspapers (who I thought might be sympathetic since they previously ran a story about DES daughters). They didn’t even have the courtesy to send me a reply. Probably they put my email in the same bin they use for stories about hoax moon landing conspiracies, and I think that’s been the same problem with everyone else I’ve tried contacting about it too. Artificial hormones are just about the most widely used and most profitable class of drugs there are in the entire field of medicine, and they’ve been in widespread use for more than 50 years. How could the fact that they can cause an unborn child to partially develop as the opposite sex have passed unnoticed for all this time?

The answer is, it hasn’t. Of course there are people who know. The trouble is, the problem doesn’t seem to have been spotted until the mid-1970s, and by that time there’d already been a colossal number of babies born with deformities of various kinds - probably in the millions.

In the US, it was mainly genital abnormalities among the DES sons, while here in Europe the problem was more thalidomide-type deformities (i.e. missing limbs, abnormalities of internal organs, and a condition called VACTERL syndrome), caused by hormone pregnancy tests.

“Hormone pregnancy tests” were the standard way of diagnosing pregnancy before urine test strips became available in Europe around 1975. Basically the test involved taking 1 or 2 tablets containing a high dose of the same hormones that are used in birth control pills. If the woman wasn’t pregnant, this would cause her period to start. If her period didn’t start, then she was pregnant (and now at risk of giving birth to a severely deformed baby!).

Generally these tests were done earlier than 6 weeks after conception (which is when sexually dimorphic development starts), so rather than causing intersexed development, they tended to affect limbs and major organs, since these develop very early in the pregnancy.

Here’s the story of a mother who was given one of these tests and whose son was born deformed as a result:
http://www.cbgnetwork.org/2883.html

There’s very little else in the way of information about hormone pregnancy tests available online, even though hundreds of thousands of pregnant women were being given this test every year up until 1975 and a very large number of babies must have been born deformed as a result. It was a major scandal at the time here in the UK, with numerous newspaper articles, questions asked in parliament and at least one TV documentary produced (whose broadcast was blocked by court order). Nonetheless, there’s virtually no mention of any of that online, the whole thing has pretty much been erased from history!

There was a third pregnancy hormone disaster that seems to have converged with these other two, which at least does have a wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progestin-induced_virilisation
(although the number of cases mentioned in the article is small, these drugs were in widespread use and the wiki article must be massively understating the true numbers affected).

Progestins are a class of hormones which are supposed to mimic the action of the female hormone progesterone, but the early versions of these drugs also mimicked the action of the male hormone testosterone at the same time, sufficiently well to result in a lot of baby girls exposed to them before birth developing intersexed or male genitals (and presumably experiencing male brain development too, though they don’t talk about that in the wikipedia article!).

In short, there seems to have been a sudden realisation around 1975 or so, that literally millions of babies had been born with deformities of various kinds during the preceding 3 decades because their mothers had been given artificial hormones of various kinds during the first trimester of pregnancy.

The thalidomide disaster with just 10,000 victims cost the pharmaceutical industry and medical establishment billions in lawsuits. What were they going to do with another birth defects disaster with 100 times as many victims? They must have taken one look at the numbers and decided their only option was to pretend the whole thing never happened. That’s how I see it anyway.

Presumably they were in a bit of a panic at the time, because they don’t seem to have properly understood that many of the deformities they were seeing were actually the result of intersexed development rather than just being regular birth defects. Instead of prohibiting the use of hormonal drugs during pregnancy outright, the prescribing guidelines were changed to stop them being used during the first trimester (which is when the development of the genitals and reproductive organs takes place). There were and are no restrictions on the use of hormonal medicines during the later stages of the pregnancy, which is when sexually dimorphic brain development takes place. The result, as far as I can see, is that there must be a large number of people (well into the millions) alive today whose body matches their genetic sex, but whose brain is partly or completely that of the opposite sex, all thanks to medication their mother was given during pregnancy. It’s mostly genetically male people at risk, but some of these drugs can mimic the action of testosterone and thus cause male development in an otherwise female baby, so genetically female people are at risk too.

Based on what I’ve seen over the last year, there definitely is a problem with testicular damage, infertility, physical intersex conditions and female gender identity among the DES sons. There are between 2 and 3 million of them worldwide, and yet they’ve remained completely off the radar as far as the public is concerned for more than 40 years. If that number of people can be hidden away for that length of time, how many more could be affected by other pregnancy hormones?

Hugh

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