Thoughts on Toxic Bodies

Growing up in a post-Silent Spring world on an organic farm staffed and patronized largely by devout environmentalists, I was taught a great deal about toxic chemicals (primarily lead and BPA-laden plastics) from a very young age. Sections of my family’s house still required cleanup as a result of lead paint and trimmings, certain water sources were known to utilize lead pipes, and my parents and friends were constantly on the search for alternatives to plastic for food and water storage, especially for the farm. To me, this was a part of everyday life, and as such I was surprised at how much focus was given to the issues of chemical and plastic leeching in high school science classes. Of course, I was unaware of the wider and more prevalent dangers of toxic chemical buildup outside of the agrarian settings which spurred much of my education on the subject.

Now, a few years later, I’ve come to notice a surprisingly similar trend between the (often) well-meaning but entirely wrong explanations constructed by families in nearby towns and the medical excuses made for a binary definition of gender as written on by Suzanne J. Kessle. There is a particular insistence upon one particular definition of “normal” that, once instilled in the mind of a group, persists forever and a day. In the case of doctors and intersex babies, it was an unshakeable belief in the binary nature of gender. In local families, it was a firm belief that pesticide and manure runoff was entirely unrelated to more than doubled rates of cancer and infant deformity in communities serviced by local water lines. While the two situations were entirely dissimilar, I was honestly incredibly surprised at the similarity in justifications used by the two entirely disparate groups.

On the subject of Toxic Bodies, my initial thought upon completing Chapter 1 was, sadly enough, that the evidence presented in the previous pages in regards to birth defects, especially any studies related to birth defects, might be used to justify the the status of intersex individuals as somehow “wrong”. While I have no doubt that chemicals have affected the fetal development of many thousands of people, justifying a diverse range of cases across hundreds of years of recorded history based on nonhuman studies is a stretch to say the least. More disturbingly, it seems to be the kind of “evidence” that would be rapidly and widely accepted given the overwhelming historical support for the gender binary.