Tap water frogs gay
‘Gay frogs’ and atrazine: Why the alt-right likes RFK Jr.
Prominent provocateur and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones went viral in 2017 claiming there were “chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay.” The ridicule was swift and severe. Multiple remixes of the clip laying Jones’ rant atop club music were posted to YouTube, and crafters on Etsy sold merchandise depicting frogs frolicking among rainbows.
But today, nearly a decade later, someone who buys into the equal conspiracy could soon be the nation’s top health official, with two Senate committees considering Robert F. Kennedy’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services this week.
Kennedy has spread misinformation multiple times over the past three years claiming that herbicides and other chemicals are leading to “gender confusion” among kids and “destroying them.” That those claims have barely entered the widespread discourse over his nomination speaks to both the expansive number of conspiracies Kennedy spreads, and also to the rise of alt-right groups and other conservatives twisting environmental science to justify restricting the rights of vulnerable populations.
Kennedy’s promotion of chemical
“Chemical Castration”: White Genocide and Male Extinction in Rhetoric of Endocrine Disruption
Editor’s Note: This is the third post in the series, Succession: Queering the Environment, which centers queer people, non-humans, systems, and ideas and explores their impact within the fields of environmental history, environmental humanities, and queer ecology.
In 2002, biologist Dr. Tyrone Hayes conducted a series of experiments that revealed that the most usual herbicide, Atrazine, “feminized” male frogs at concentrations below that allowed in drinking water in the United States.1 He hypothesized that Atrazine works as an endocrine-disrupting chemical (EDC), converting testosterone to estrogen in frogs. Hayes’s study ignited an ongoing political controversy over whether Atrazine causes hermaphroditism in amphibians, humans, and other species. Although the manufacturer of Atrazine, Syngenta, argues that the pesticide is safe, Hayes and other scientists have increasingly demonstrated a link between Atrazine and threats to public health and the environment.
In this essay, I examine the role of gendered r
Pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs into females
Atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used pesticides, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, according to a recent study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.
The 75 percent that are chemically castrated are essentially “dead” because of their inability to reproduce in the wild, reports UC Berkeley’s Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology.
“These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. So their fertility is as low as 10 percent in some cases, and that is only if we isolate those animals and pair them with females,” he said. “In an environment where they are competing with unexposed animals, they have zero chance of reproducing.”
The 10 percent or more that turn from males into females – something not known to occur under natural conditions in amphibians – can successfully mate with male frogs but, because these females are genetically male, all their offspring are male.
“When we grow these guys up, dep
Air Date: Week of January 7, 2011
Scientists are continuing to sound the alarm about some shared chemicals, including the herbicide atrazine, and link them to changes in reproductive health and progress. Endocrine disrupting toxic chemicals have been found to feminize male frogs and cause homosexual habit. Ashley Ahearn reports on how these substances may be affecting human maturation and behavior.
Transcript
CURWOOD: It’s Living on World, I’m Steve Curwood. From the carpets in our living rooms to the liners of our canned goods we’re exposed to manmade chemicals every night. We use lab-made chemicals for everything from plastics to pesticides. They eventually make their way from our farms, households or industry into the environment – and into our bodies. And they may be affecting our reproductive health – indeed, even our sexual preferences. Producer Ashley Ahearn reports.
[DOOR OF FROG LAB ROOM OPENS, VENTILATOR FAN RUNNING]
HAYES: So these are the South African Claw frog.
[WATER SLOSHING IN TANK]
AHEARN: Tyrone Hayes peers into a big gray fiberglass tank like a tiny boy looking for critters in a tide pool. Below the su