Polluting Our Common Life

 By Matthew Hanley from The Catholic Thing:

Monday, July 31, 2017

A graduate student at the University of Arizona thinks he is a hippopotamus. Well, that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. He calls himself a “tranimal.”

Ordinarily, any layman could diagnose him – sight unseen and without a fear in the world of malpractice – as non compos mentis. But we have all been put on notice, as the pace of just such egged-on derangement has intensified, that however anyone “self-identifies” must be validated.

Just ask the Canadian professor facing hassles galore for refusing to go along with pronoun abuse; his overlords insist that Gnostic inventions such as Ze, Hir, Xe, Verself, etc., are to be used as replacements for standard English pronouns (he, she, hers, etc.), whensoever anyone deems grammatical reflections of biological reality way too restrictive.

Since the legal profession has seen fit to force delusions upon the masses (and we were lamentably litigious long before this moment), I think the University of Arizona is on very shaky ground. A lawsuit clearly beckons – if not against the university then against whoever is supplying this hippopotamus with a steady supply of food. I count myself fortunate to have seen hippos in the African wild, and I’m pretty sure every game park the multicultural world over insists that feeding the wildlife is punishable by law.

So which is it going to be, when the exaltation of autonomy in the realm of sexuality – which now includes redefining biological reality – conflicts with respect for the environment? It’s really no contest: wildlife takes the back seat. Autonomy is in the driver’s seat.

Speaking of wildlife, let’s look at another example of this conflict. It even involves a “tranimal” – inasmuch as you could refer to the phenomenon of “inter-sex” fish with some such term. These are male fish in whose testes eggs develop. How on earth does this happen? Too much estrogen in the water; sewage treatment plants are simply unable to break down all the estrogenic hormones that humans consume, eliminate, and flush back out into the natural world.

There are decades worth of evidence – to which even mainstream journals such as Nature attest – that the active ingredient in the birth control pill (EE2), along with other estrogens “cause widespread damage in the aquatic environment by disrupting endocrine systems in wildlife.”

Earlier this month University of Exeter Professor Charles Tyler added his dramatic findings to the growing evidence base in a keynote address to an International Symposium sponsored by the Fisheries Society in the British Isles.

His presentation, tellingly entitled“The Feminization of Nature – an Unnatural History,” was quite technical, but one of the main takeaways was that testing at fifty sites revealed an astonishing one in five fresh-water male fish in the U.K. had feminine characteristics. This, among other adverse impacts, diminishes the capacity of those fish to reproduce. The ecosystem, in short, is taking a hit.

Many other contaminants are implicated, such as the by-products of cosmetics, plastics, and cleaning agents, but – like the pill – they too have estrogenic properties that account for these imbalances at the physiological level. Other chemicals, such as those found in antidepressants, trigger abnormal changes in the realm of behavior.

It is well established that the pill is carcinogenic; direct consumption, however, may not be the end of that story. Other fallout from elevated estrogen levels in the water supply may be on the horizon. There is a strong correlation – not, I stress, established causation – between use of the pill and the incidence of prostate cancer in men. At the least, that significant association arose in every one of the eighty-eight countries in which it was investigated.

Read on at thecatholicthing.org