Beginning in the 2010s, various media personalities promoted conspiracy theories claiming that exposure to endocrine disrupting chemical pollutants in the water supply are responsible for an alleged increase in the gay or transgender population. These claims are not supported by scientific evidence and appear to be a conflation with active research claims that endocrine disruptors induce a feminizing effect on certain non-human animals.[1][2]
Research in the 2000s suggested that the herbicide atrazine, an endocrine disruptor, may have a feminizingeffect on male frogs causing them to become hermaphrodites.[3][4] Other research failed to reproduce these results in frogs,[5][6][7] though reports of reproductive impact has been reported for other animals, and a meta-analysis conducted in 2010[8] on selected amphibians and freshwater fish showed sublethal reproductive effects at ecologically relevant concentrations. Reviewing 19 studies in total, the United States Environmental Protection Agency concluded in 2013 that atrazine has no consistent effects on development in amphibians;[5] this review has subsequently been criticized on grounds of a substantial conflict of interest between Syngenta, which manufactures atrazine, and the EPA.[9][10][11][12]
In 2015, American conspiracy theorist and radio personality Alex Jones claimed that atrazine had caused a majority of frogs in the US to become homosexual, and that the US government was waging a "chemical warfare operation" to increase rates of homosexuality and decrease birth rates.[13][14] This claim, which is far beyond what was originally reported in the scientific literature, subsequently became an internet meme.[15][16]
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