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Diethylstilbestrol, a powerful artificial estrogen formerly used as a treatment for preventing miscarriages. The doctors who originally came up with the idea of using DES as a miscarriage preventative clearly had no conception of how powerful a drug it is, and their recommended doses turned out to be insanely high - hundreds of times higher than would be used in comparable estrogen hormone treatment today. Nonetheless, these same crazily high doses carried on being used right up until DES was pulled off the market around 1980.

Today, the daughters from DES pregnancies suffer from high rates of cancer, and many were never able to have children of their own, the damage to their reproductive systems was so great. The official line is that the sons from DES pregnancies came through their exposure virtually unscathed. No cancer, no infertility, no nothing, apart from a mildly increased rate of "noncancerous epididymal cysts".

However, the story doesn't quite end there. DES and other artificial estrogens have been shown to cause intersexed development in fish, birds, and lab rats, and anecdotal reports certainly suggest similar effects on human beings. In particular, within the transgender community, DES exposure has long been rumoured to be a cause of being transgender, and a 2005 study of DES and gender found that 150 out of 500 DES "sons" identified as women rather than men. It shows the power of the pharmaceutical industry, that they've so far kept that story out of the news!

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