Presidential stalking horse Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been under criticism recently for a number of outrageous statements he has made during the COVID-19 pandemic: alleging that the virus was somehow engineered to spare Chinese and Jews, and likening vaccination with the Holocaust.
So it is hardly surprising that he has also promulgated some highly dubious anti-LGBTQ claims.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a history of repeatedly sharing unfounded conspiracies that man-made chemicals in the environment could be making children gay or transgender and causing the feminization of boys and masculinization of girls.
Experts dispute the claims from Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and anti-vaccine activist, and told CNN’s KFile his theories that “sexual identification” and “gender confusion” among children could be from their exposure to “endocrine disruptors” found in the environment are completely unfounded.
“I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors because our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion,” Kennedy said on his podcast in June last year. “These kinds of issues that are very, very controversial today.”
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The baseless claim that chemicals – particularly in tap water – could turn people gay has gained popularity with conspiracy theorists over the years, most memorably with conservative radio host Alex Jones, who said chemicals in the water were “turning the friggin’ frogs gay.”
On numerous podcasts between March 2022 and June 2023, Kennedy has alleged that certain chemicals, particularly atrazine, are responsible for the gaying of a generation, largely based on the pesticide's effects on frogs.
While it is certainly true that mankind has been disposing of all manner of chemicals and medications and toxic fumes into our air and water, most experts who actually know what they are talking about dismiss Kennedy's allegations that atrazine is turning kids gay and trans, delaying puberty in some and accelerating it in others. CNN interviewed Dr. Linda Kahn, assistant professor in the departments of pediatrics and population health at New York University, who rebutted that comparing frogs to humans is an “apples and oranges thing, it’s not appropriate.” For humans, atrazine is metabolized and excreted from the body within 12 hours, she said.
What is more likely is that in societies where LGBTQ+ members are more likely to be accepted, LGBTQ+ persons are more likely to be out and open about themselves. There was no sudden increase of environmental endocrine disruptors in Weimar Germany, the court of Edward II, or the Sacred Band of Thebes.
More worrisome than Kennedy's charges themselves is the implicit message that there is something intrinsically wrong with LGBTQ+ persons.
Not to mention how this, taken together with his anti-vax hysteria and racist claims that COVID-19 was designed to target some ethnic groups and not others, makes it easier for skeptics to disregard honest environmentalists as crackpots crying wolf.
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