The Gay Frogs Election

A year ago, I predicted health would be one of the defining issues of the 2024 presidential election

I wrote this essay for American Mind in 2023. I called it “the Gay Frogs Election” as a nod to Michael Anton’s Famous “Flight 93 Election” essay. My basic thesis was that the 2024 election would be marked by a focus on health, after the entrance of RFK Jr. into the race. Well, things have certainly turned out that way, and now “Make America Healthy Again” is a central part of President Trump’s agenda, with RFK Jr. as the man set to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

---

It’s now been eight years, believe it or not, since Alex Jones unleashed his “gay frogs” rant on the world, securing a place for himself in the annals of meme history. Jones had been talking about secret government plans to create a “gay bomb” that would feminize the male population and reduce the birth rate. “What do you think tapwater is? It’s a gay bomb, baby,” he said calmly. And then, just like that, Jones was the bomb exploding. “I don’t like ‘em putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay! Do you understand that!?” he bellowed, smashing the desk with his fist and sending his papers flying. “Aargh! Crap!”

This wasn’t the first time Jones had brought up the relationship between chemical exposure and sexual confusion. Five years earlier, he had suggested that the government was deliberately putting estrogen-mimicking chemicals in the water and in consumer products such as beverage cans and processed food.

In 2015, though, Jones was talking specifically about the effects of the herbicide Atrazine, a chemical that has been sprayed in enormous quantities all over the U.S., but especially in the Midwest Corn Belt, where it’s used to treat corn and soybeans. By the early 2000s, 76 million pounds of the chemical were being applied annually in the U.S., making Atrazine the nation’s second-most, widely-used herbicide after glyphosate, another chemical that Jones has singled out for criticism—quite rightly, I should add—for its negative effects on health.

Jones was gesturing—or gesticulating, rather—toward a 2010 study by Hayes et al. which found that Atrazine exposure at levels typical of U.S. waterways could chemically castrate male frogs and even cause them to become hermaphrodites. Hayes and his colleagues exposed male African clawed frog larvae to the chemical in a laboratory setting and found that as much as 10 percent of the larvae became “atrazine-induced females” that grew into “completely feminized” adults: these transgender frogs would mate with control males that had not been exposed to Atrazine and would even produce viable eggs. As a result, the researchers hypothesized that Atrazine is a potent endocrine disruptor that causes the “male” hormone testosterone to be converted to the “female” hormone estrogen (I’ve used scare quotes because both hormones have important roles to play, in the correct proportions, in male and female bodies).

Hayes et al.’s frog study was heavily publicized upon its release, including by National Geographic and Science magazines, which took the findings deadly seriously. But when Jones repeated the study’s conclusions, in his own inimitable way, he was roundly mocked and condemned in the media for spreading yet another “conspiracy theory.” A video excerpt of the “gay frogs” rant went viral on Twitter, receiving half a million views and thousands of comments, and so too did the hashtag #gayfrogs. The rant even became a song. Never one to let a controversy go to waste, Jones would go on to dress as a gay frog on his show, in a full-body suit with green facepaint and a pink tutu. “Thanks to Atrazine there will be no more frogs but we are gay so that’s cool,” he cooed, sipping from a bottle labelled “Atrazine.” “I’ll never have children and I’m sterilized, but the media says I’m totally cool. I’m a gay frog!”

Of course, this isn’t just about frogs. It’s about people. If Atrazine and other similar chemicals are having these effects on amphibians, then they’re probably doing bad things to us too, at the very least. Maybe they’re even having the same effects.

Back in 2015, transgenderism wasn’t quite the live issue it is today, but the implications of what Jones was saying were clear enough to his liberal detractors, or so they thought. In the intervening years a slew of articles with titles like “White Genocide and Male Extinction in the Rhetoric of Endocrine Disruption” tried to convince us that fears about the effects of exposure to chemicals like Atrazine are rooted in patriarchy, racism, and something called “white extinction anxiety.” “White extinction anxiety,” for those who don’t know, is the fear that the future of the white race is imperilled by falling birth rates, changing demographics, and the new political realities that they bring. What Jones’s rhetoric really amounts to, on this view, is a “greening of hate,” or “ecofascism,” “in which concern for the environment is co-opted as a ruse for increased control over women’s reproductive capacities, surveillance of racial minorities, and securing the borders against immigration.”

Now, eight years later, in 2023, a candidate for the presidency is also talking about gay frogs. Like Alex Jones he isn’t joking, but this time there’s no room for doubt: the frog suit and tutu are nowhere to be seen. In a recent podcast appearance with Jordan Peterson, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. carefully linked the explosion of gender dysphoria in America to environmental pollution and our massively increased exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. In doing so he explicitly referenced the Hayes frog study. He also made it clear that he believes these chemicals are having serious negative effects that go well beyond gender and reproductive health. The podcast has since been removed from YouTube for unspecified terms-of-service violations, but you can watch a clip of the relevant moment from the interview here. Kennedy then repeated the claims in a three-hour appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which so far has managed to avoid being taken down.

Environmental pollution and its role in the growing crisis of reproductive health were already having something of a moment, largely due to the Tucker Carlson documentary The End of Men, which RFK Jr. featured in, alongside right-wing bodybuilders like myself, and the book Count Down by Professor Shanna Swan, which makes a truly apocalyptic prediction about the future of human fertility. According to Swan, by 2045 we could be unable as a species to reproduce by natural means. The median man will have a sperm count of zero, meaning that one half of all men will produce no sperm whatsoever, while the other half will produce so few as to be functionally infertile.

Swan is well placed to make such a prediction: she’s one of the world’s foremost reproductive health experts, with a lifetime’s experience studying the effects of various chemicals on the sexual development and fertility of boys and girls and men and women around the world. All she’s doing is extrapolating current trends in male sperm counts, which have been declining precipitously for decades, and applying her knowledge of a huge body of scientific literature about the wide-ranging effects of endocrine disruptors on animals and humans. Documented effects range from falling testosterone, declining sperm quantity and quality, and shrinking penises in males to rising numbers of miscarriages and conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome and uterine cancer in females. Many of the chemicals that have these effects are also obesogens and encourage weight gain, another serious risk factor for infertility, and they’ve been linked to other serious health conditions as well, like heart disease, auto-immune disorders, and brain damage.

If this is “white extinction anxiety” at work, then white supremacists must dominate the scientific community now as well. New studies appear almost daily. For example, a study out of Singapore has just revealed that women’s chances of conceiving and bringing a live baby to full term decrease by as much as 40 percent when they are exposed to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a class of ubiquitous endocrine disruptors that are used in personal care products, plastics, greaseproof paper, non-stick cookware, and fire retardants. A study by Swan and others, published after Count Down, has established for the first time that the dire trends in fertility we’ve seen in the West are indeed being repeated in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. So this really isn’t just a “white” problem: it’s a species-wide catastrophe. What’s more, the trends appear to be accelerating. “Spermageddon,” as it’s dubbed, may arrive even sooner than predicted.

On paper, we have every reason to believe that exposure to harmful endocrine-disrupting chemicals could be behind the startling rise of gender dysphoria. After all, hormone therapy is a central part of the medical process of transitioning, just as much as surgery to reconfigure genitalia and remove tell-tale physical signs like a prominent Adam’s apple and masculine facial structure. If you’re a man who thinks he’s a woman, hormone therapy means administration of significant doses of synthetic estrogen. (Some men with gender dysphoria who can’t get a hold of estrogen sometimes boil plastic bags and drink the liquid as a kind of homebrew knock-off.) Nobody can deny this. And it’s really not that hard to imagine how, say, a boy born with an improperly formed tiny penis and an excess of estrogen in his body might grow up thinking he’s not a boy, especially as other boys around him develop normally and he just doesn’t. The truth about exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals is that it’s happening at every stage of development, from conception right through puberty and beyond, interfering with the delicate natural hormonal balance that is responsible not only for sexual differentiation in the womb—boy or girl—but also the much longer and no-less-crucial process of maturation that takes place over decades. It’s entirely possible that endocrine disruptors could contribute to gender dysphoria at any point in life.