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.
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."
If being stoned to death is the risk faced for being gay, people won't tend to admit to being gay to a researcher.
Just like people are easy to scare about autism being some kind of epidemic when many people (like me) have a diagnosis of only a mild, borderline, or provisional form of it. That never would have been diagnosed until recently or would have been diagnosed as something else.
Very few places are doing any just-the-facts reporting.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6414251/
I don't think we are biologically far enough removed from "Oh my god, run, bear/snake/lion!"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1376114/
And we may not be built (biologically) for the level of comfort that the majority of us (more so here on hacker news) live in.
I think the doom and gloom serves a purpose for a lot of people.
If they were that significantly harmful it would be massively obvious at that level of prevalence.
Why would it not work the other way too? Maybe the Western society is hell bent on putting people into boxes, whereas people in third world countries are willing to look the other way for minor deviations [sic] as long as they're useful to their family / village / society?
If you didn't imbibe in your children that the only way to be a "man" is to be the jock on the football team, then maybe far less people would be suffering the dysphorias. Just like how exposure to Instagram causes body dysphoria in both young men and women.
Sexuality is so front-and-center in the Western society unlike many of the third world societies which are below in the 'hierarchy of needs'.