RFK Jr. links herbicides in drinking water to gender dysphoria

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. identified the herbicide atrazine as the chemical responsible for gender confusion among the youth, echoing the claim of InfoWars founder Alex Jones.

He shared this finding during an interview with Canadian clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson. According to the founder and general counsel of Children's Health Defense, climate change or mental health issues shouldn't be blamed for the youth's gender confusion. Chemicals in the water supply are the real culprit, he said.

"A lot of problems we see in kids – and particularly boys – is probably under-appreciated; how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphorias we are seeing," RFK Jr. told Peterson. "They are swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today and many of those are endocrine disruptors."

The presidential hopeful said the herbicide atrazine, which is used to selectively control annual grasses and broadleaf weeds before they emerge, is abundant in the drinking water supply.  

"If you put atrazine in a tank full of frogs, it will chemically castrate and forcibly feminize every frog. Ten percent of the male frogs will turn into fully viable females able to produce viable eggs," he revealed. "If it's doing that to frogs, there's a lot of other evidence that it is doing it to human beings as well."

RFK Jr.'s remarks mirrored those of Jones, who had been arguing that chemicals secretly released by the government are turning people gay. In 2015, he shouted his dislike of the government "putting chemicals in the water that turn the frogs gay." Two years later in 2017, the InfoWars founder claimed that "majority of frogs in most areas of the U.S. are now gay" due to being exposed to these chemicals over the years.

Study finds that atrazine does turn the frogs gay

According to a March 2010 article by David Biello of Scientific American, some 36 million kilograms (kg)" of atrazine are sprayed on farms to control grassy weeds. He added that some 225,000 kg of atrazine gets washed away by the rain each year, sometimes reaching up to 1,000 kilometers from source farms.

Biello also cited a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). The paper found that atrazine negatively affected the reproductive capabilities of male African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) – proving the claims of Jones and Kennedy true.

Biologist Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues exposed 40 African clawed frogs to 2.5 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine in a water solution continuously for three years. The said level is below the three ppb permitted in drinking water by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

According to the study authors, 30 of the frogs were chemically castrated and became incapable of reproducing. Four frogs actually turned female, going so far as to mate with other males and produce viable eggs despite being genetically male. While another four of the treated frogs apparently resisted atrazine's effects, the rest "lacked male reproductive behavior and had reduced male features, severely reduced sperm and low fertility."

"These data are consistent with effects of atrazine observed in other vertebrate classes. The present findings exemplify the role that atrazine and other endocrine-disrupting pesticides likely play in global amphibian declines," concluded Hayes and his colleagues.