How clean is it, really…?

If you’re drinking water out of the tap, then you’re a transsexual. At least, that’s the conclusion I come to from reading the Associated Press report on the drinking water supply in the United States.

After five months of investigation, AP found “a vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones” in the drinking water that Americans in 41 different cities drink. For example:

– In Philadelphia, they found 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems and 63 pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.

– In Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas, the drinking water tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

– In Tucson, Arizona, they found three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in the local drinking water supply.

– In San Francisco, a sex hormone was detected in the city’s drinking water. No wonder there are so many transsexuals in San Francisco!

But seriously, folks, if you’re drinking tap water anywhere in the United States, there’s a very good chance that you’re consuming estrogenic hormones as well as an array of pharmaceuticals.

If you are HIV-positive or are immune-compromised in any other way, the contamination in the drinking water supply in your city could well compromise your health, as it will that of people in cities across the country. But what is most shocking is that, as Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard reported in the AP story on the issue, “The federal government doesn’t require any testing and hasn’t set safety limits for drugs in water.”

Of the 62 major water providers contacted, the AP reporters note that the drinking water for only 28 was tested. “Among the 34 that haven’t: Houston, Chicago, Miami, Baltimore, Phoenix, Boston and New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection, which delivers water to 9 million people,” Donn and his colleagues note.

The estrogenic impact of the contamination of the water supply could also be having an impact on sperm count in males of our species, which has been decling for years, as indicated by National Institutes of Health data.

But pesticide run-off and other chemical pollutants in the waters of our planet are also affecting other species, including frogs. The commonly-used herbicide atrazine is now changing the sex of male tadpoles, according to a study by a team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley.

Now, as an openly transgendered woman, I’m the last person who would be opposed to those who would change their sex. But of course, transgendered people who choose medical transition are doing so under conditions of informed consent; adults and especially children who are being subjected to hormones or pharmaceuticals in the water supply are not; and non-human species are not represented in the policy-making and corporate elite that determine the conditions under which drinking water is supplied to people in the United States and throughout the world.

Perhaps Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain could take the time to address this important issue at some point in the course of the world’s longest presidential campaign; one can only hope that public health policy will be at the top of the agenda of the next president of the United States.