David Glick - 50 Ways to F**k the Planet

The next step is to target the stuff where it will have the most effect. And that, as the West Yorkshire pipe amply reveals, is perhaps the easy part. Just flush it down the loo. Then, contact like-minded ecocide sympathizers, pass on details of where to obtain the chemical and soon you will command a small network of UK volunteers stationed by their lavs in the pursuit of aqua gender-bending. It might be prudent to dissolve the pills in warm body-temperature water before flushing, in order to guarantee that they safely navigate the antiquities of Britain’s sewage system. Thankfully, the effects of etinyloestradiol will not be diluted. Conventional sewage treatment does not eradicate the hormone, and synthetic oestrogen is not broken down in the wild, a factor that grants it better weighting on the value-for-money scale. The effects will be reassuringly quick.

Scientists in Canada added oestrogen at levels found in sewage to a remote lake in Ontario. After just a year they started to observe a creeping feminization. Even the male fathead minnow (and one wonders in disbelief how this creature could ever hope to pass itself off as a lady) turned sex. Inevitably, delightfully, ‘reproductive failure’ followed and fathead numbers began to crash. They never recovered, according to the results of the Canadian tests.

Other inspiring reports abound. There are the male tadpoles in Sweden who morphed into females after being fed oestrogen. In one experiment, tadpole dudes who were fed heavy dosages of the hormone became 100 per cent dudess. An Environment Agency report tells of roach who, after feasting on oestrogen, experienced deformities in their sexual organs and began producing eggs rather than sperm. Results of tests on zebra fish at Cardiff University using etinyloestradiol were so pronounced that researchers expressed unease at observing ‘large-scale effects at such low levels of concentration’. But the best news arrived with reports that a male hornyhead turbot had been transformed into a lady. The development must have caused groans in rivers from Leeds to Lagos. If the macho hornyhead could be tamed, scaly chaps everywhere must have thought, what hope for them? The game was up.

Of course, there are other ways to turn man to woman, and it would be unwise, even reckless, to overlook the old ‘gender benders’, or ‘endocrine disruptors’, as the scientific community would rather these chemical lovelies be known. Synthetics found in plastics, shampoos and food packaging mimic oestrogen when ingested. Such useful material gets everywhere and is particularly effective when ingested in cocktail form over the years. Plenty of these ‘endocrine disruptors’ appear to be travelling north on the moist air currents that blow from Europe to the Arctic. When confronted with the frosty, Arctic air, these chemicals condense and fall. They are perhaps most revered for creating the famously pseudo-hermaphrodite polar bears with penis-like stumps, a result which to this day remains one of the most celebrated achievements in the world of chemical scalps. And clearly there is no merit in trying to better such a masterpiece.

Despite a forensic EU review of chemical legislation, a decent number (up to five hundred) of potential endocrine disruptors remain in use, and, thankfully, these hormone-disrupting chemicals are still allowed to be sold even though safer alternatives are available. The next review of legislation is not due until 2012, giving you a reasonable window of opportunity to shrink the man bear a little more. By then, who knows what else will have shrunk, changed or grown?

When scientists chose an estuarine site in the West Country to examine clams, which they had naively hand-picked in the hope that they would be free of chemicals, they experienced a bit of a shock. The clams were transsexual, their Devonian testes containing both sperm and eggs. 60 per cent were like this. For you, it offers a thrilling possibility: initial evidence that oestrogen can potentially survive in seawater, battling the salty tides to turn aquamarine life female. Here, quantities of the female hormone had messed around with clams at the bottom of the food chain. Could, you dare dream, the entire sea one day be declared girls only? Embarrassing speedos would become a thing of the past.

Little surprise that those studying the feminization of fish describe the West Country clam as the aquatic equivalent of the miner’s canary, the bird which chirps an alarm long before men are aware of impending doom. With the mines now mostly closed, instead there’s something in the water. The sexual revolution has proved to be intensely liberating for humanity. Now it is the turn of the misunderstood bloke fish who only ever wanted to be a woman. Once we start adding the Pill to the rivers of the world, there is no reset button. The new sexual revolution is underway.

* Government makes over-the-counter pill more widely available. Certainty.

* Male pill goes on general sale. Female carp duly start growing penises. Unlikely.

* Etinyloestradiol leak reported from factory into river system. Male fish in the area seen wearing matching bra and knickers. Scientists say this could be evidence of feminization. Unlikely.

* Male bull whale gives birth after growing ovaries. Never.

* Overhaul of the disposal of the contraceptive pill announced by government. From 2011 it has to be disposed of in special council bins and safely stored in landfill sites. Possible.

Likelihood of majority of male fish turning female by 2015:23%

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