“Transgender Frogs Turn Your Son Gay”: Endangered Amphibians, Estrogenic Pollution, and Male Extinction

Abstract:Scientists, conservationists, and environmentalists argue that the use of Atrazine, one of the most commonly used herbicides in the US, contributes to global amphibian population declines and extinctions. Researchers have also linked Atrazine to increased rates of cancer and other health complications in humans that disproportionately affect already marginalized communities. However, prevailing public discourse has focused primarily on the speculative risks that Atrazine, as an endocrine disruptor, could pose to normative human gender, sex, and sexuality. These concerns were sparked by experiments in the early 2000s, conducted by Dr. Tyrone Hayes and colleagues, characterizing frogs exposed to Atrazine as “feminized” and “chemically castrated.” I find that scientific and popular discourse surrounding the Atrazine controversy encodes cultural anxieties about the maintenance of normative masculinities and the future of humanity in an increasingly toxic world. Moreover, depending on the context, rhetorical depictions of frogs exposed to Atrazine reify binary sex/gender or, contrastingly, affirm sexual diversity. The case of Atrazine demonstrates that environmental discourse can sustain normalized and naturalized ideas of gender, sex, and sexuality even as the meanings imposed on them are contradictory and contextual.