RFK Jr. Touts Transsexual Frog Conspiracy on Peterson Podcast
Are pesticides turning frogs transsexual?
by Evan Urquhart
A castration-anxiety fueled conspiracy theory has popped up in an utterly unsurprising place: Jordan Peterson’s podcast interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The podcast, which went live on June 5th, has more recently been removed from YouTube, reportedly due to misinformation. Jennedy Jr, a fringe Democratic presidential candidate,known for his anti-vax beliefs, discussed his fears that feminizing chemicals in the water are turning America’s good straight boys into transgender women.
The claim, which Kennedy Jr. expounded on by talking about hermaphroditic frogs, came up when Peterson asked Kennedy Jr. about why young people are so demoralized. About two thirds of the way through the 95 minute video, Peterson started his question by attributing youth unhappiness to vaccine mandates and fears about climate change (the latter of which Peterson considers unjustified). In response, Kennedy Jr. brought up a topic he described as “kind of a footnote”: Specifically, that chemicals including “atrazine throughout our water supply” are responsible for ”a lot” of the problem of depression in young people.
"In fact, I think a lot of the problems we see in kids—and particularly boys—it's probably under-appreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we're seeing,” said Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy Jr. then shared an anecdote about how atrazine was found to cause feminization in male frogs (more on that later). Most of the males exposed in a laboratory setting became infertile with a mix of male and female characteristics, he explained, while 10 percent became fully fertile females. Kennedy Jr. then stated, falsey, that “if it’s doing that to frogs then there’s a lot of evidence that it’s doing it to human beings.” (While the lab experiment happened, there is no evidence of this.)
So, what’s atrazine and does it really cause frogs to become hermaphrodites? Atrazine is an herbicide used commonly in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, but banned in Europe because it contaminates groundwater incredibly easily. While exposure to high levels of atrazine in drinking water has been credibly linked to low birth weight in humans, there is no evidence the pesticide is causing male humans to become either fertile female humans with XY chromosomes, or to become trans women, or gay men, or that exposure to atrazine has any impact whatsoever on sexuality or gender identity whatsoever. However, the true story behind the anecdote is interesting and it illuminates the way stories of real life corporate shenanigans can combine with transmisogyny and fringe online communities to create reactionary folk theories that are believed to contain hidden scientific knowledge.
The sex determination process of amphibians lies somewhere between mammals (whose sex is genetically determined), and reptiles (whose sex is environmentally determined). Frogs’ sex is usually detemined by genetics, but frogs are known to change sex due to environmental factors, even in the wild.
That’s important context to understand a lab experiment in which exposure to a common herbicide was said to have turned some male frogs female. The research is famous in fringe conspiracy communities, and formed the basis of Alex Jones’ famous rant about gay frogs, which will live on as a meme in perpetuiy. Tucker Carlson also referenced a garbled version of the story on Fox News last year. The real experiment was conducted by Tyron Hayes, a biologist at U.C. Berkely, and published in 2010. However, because frog sex is known to be mutable by environmental factors, this completely undermines any reasonable expectation that a human beings would respond similarly to frogs after exposure to atrazine.
Scientists can produce genetically male frogs of many species that look, breed, and behave as females by exposing them to estrogen. In fact, Hayes himself used this method to breed the frogs he would later expose to atrazine, producing a group of all male frogs by breeding male and female frogs that both had a male (ZZ) genotype. Hayes then exposed 40 such frogs to water which contained low levels of atrazine for 3 years. This produced 4 normal males who seemed to have been unaffected, 30 infertile animals who displayed a mix of male and female characteristics, and 4 fully fertile females. The 2010 paper that resulted was controversial, and at least one of Hayes’ colleagues questioned its conclusions due to an unorthodox peer-review process. However, Hayes believed he was being unfairly smeared because his results were inconvenient to the corporate makers of the herbicide.
screenshot from Scientific American
Hayes stood up for his research and claimed Syngenta, the Swiss corporation that produces atrazine Syngenta, was intentionally trying to discredit him. These claims initially sounded paranoid to many of his friends and colleagues, but a 2012 class action lawsuit against Syngenta resulted in the release of internal company documents that showed the corporation did, in fact, engage in a coordinated campaign to discredit Hayes and undermine his standing in his profession. The corporate shenanigans aspect of the story, along with the shock-factor of sex-changing frogs, seems to have given the anecdote its deep conspiratorial resonance.
In 2020 the role of cultural anxieties over gender and race played in the impact of this story were examined by Meg Perret in an article published by Niche, a Canadian publication focusing on the historical context of topics relating to the environment. The TL;DR would be that the transmisogynist discomfort people feel when they’re confronted with the reality that biological sex is neither as binary nor as immutable as advertised has influenced the way people talk and think about Hayes’ original research. Even though frogs changing sex is a natural feature of frog biology, it is shocking and alarming to people, particularly those who are predisposed to feel that cultural masculinity is being threatened.
As for atrazine, it continues to be an open question whether the herbicide is damaging amphibian populations. There are also legitimate concerns that it could contribute to low sperm counts among men in agricultural areas with high pesticide contamination (this is difficult to establish because such men are exposed to a wide variety of similar chemicals). However, we do know that humans being are not frogs. The idea that atrazine causes transgender identity is not based in science, or in any reasonable inference from scientific findings. It is a fantasy.
Instead, the atrazine story should be understood to have gone through a free-associative process, not a logical one. That’s how an effect in frogs was connected to the existence people who exhibit femininity outside the norms for people with their sex characteristics. This association has been marshalled to provide evidence for a belief in more nebulous and pervasive threats to white masculinity which the conspiratorial fringe, especially on the far right, have long believed is happening.
If this were a logical belief, then it would imply several things that run contrary to the narrative of white masculinity in crisis as it’s understood by the far right. For one, we would expect to see much more feminization in rural agricultural areas and of agricultural workers, less in cities and people in white collar professions, and much less in Europe, as atrazine is banned there. We would expect trans women (and gay men) to be disproportionately rural and to come from farming families, with the phenomenon much rarer in large cities. The idea that atrazine causes transness also contradicts other popular theories of the cause of transness, such as the social contagion model which imagines trans identity is due to peer effects, or the religious model which imagines transness is a sin everyone is vulnerable to, but one that can be resisted through prayer.
If course, none of this logic should be expected to help dissuade people like Kennedy Jr. who believe that atrazine or other chemicals cause trans identity, because the core belief, that masculinity is under threat by nebulous forces, is not negotioable. Conspiracy theorists start there and proceed by attaching whatever facts or ideas seem to superficially support their idea of masculinity under threat, and no amount of data is likely to have any influence. The belief in transexual frogs should instead be taken as a marker for the underlying belief in a crisis of white male masculinity and attempts to find support for it, which is an unusual marker to see in someone who says he wants to be a Democratic party candidate.