In 2016, an anonymous Australian successfully underwent a complicated surgical process. There was not much news about it, except that the patient was a 4-year-old who swapped genders.
No one
disclosed if a boy had just become a girl, or vice versa. Either way,
it was not the first nor the last case. Australian officials revealed that hundreds of kids had been
enrolled in gender transition programs.
The vast swapping trend followed a strange story.
Way back in 1907, Leo Baekeland, a chemist, invented a new type of synthetic plastic.
This material, named Bakelite, was one of the game changers of the modern age.
It was eventually
accompanied by PVC, polyester, nylon, and other synthetic materials, produced by the huge petrochemical industry from fossil fuels.
Media reporters, business leaders, and eminent scientists applauded the innovative plastics that smoothly conquered the world. The Second World War gave a nice push to the boom, which went on
for decades before some nasty side effects drew serious attention.
1. Due to the durability of the new materials, plastic waste tends to accumulate, not disintegrate. Thus, for instance, the oceans around the world turned into colossal dumps of plastics.
2. Some chemicals commonly found in plastics, (e.g. bisphenols) damage the hormone system of humans and other species. Such hormone disruptors – also called endocrine disruptors – routinely leach from plastic materials...