In 1976, my parents and I took a trip to Washington, DC. We did the Smithsonian, we saw 4th of July fireworks from the Capitol grounds. It was a pretty cool thing to do for my fifth birthday.
What I only found out much later was that this trip had another purpose: my father had been offered a job at NPR, building out their network, after doing a great job getting the New Orleans classical/NPR station going around the same time my mother was pregnant.
Ultimately they decided against it, preferring to stay in New Orleans.
The thing I just realized: One of the things I often suspect may have been a contributor to my being trans? Drinking New Orleans tapwater. Sure, they filtered out the poop. The stuff they knew was bad. But we are talking about water that comes at least partially from the Mississippi. Which I lovingly refer to as “the cloaca of the nation”. Rivers in more than half of America flow into it. And everyone dumps their effluvia into their rivers. I grew up drinking a crazy soup of all of the industrial runoff of most of the country.
I mean, from what I hear the Potomac isn’t that clean either. But it’s only draining from four of those tiny little Northeastern states. There are less opportunities for someone to pour industrial runoff into it.
So in the alternate world where they decided to move to DC… did five years of not drinking all the stuff in the Mississippi result in me not needing to transition? (I started to get the first rumblings of it around eleven.)
I’ll never know, of course. And I don’t blame my parents for deciding to stay put; they made the decision they felt was best for themselves and me with the data they had. Still. That’s a heck of a question to suddenly ask myself.