RFK Jr. claims chemicals in the water are turning boys trans

In a recently unearthed video interview, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the noted anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and a Democratic challenger of President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection bid, claimed chemicals in the water supply are turning boys trans.

“A lot of the problems we see in kids, particularly boys, it’s probably under appreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing,” the scion of the Kennedy political dynasty said during an interview with Canadian psychologist and ring-wing pundit Jordan Peterson.

“I mean, they’re swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals today, and many of those are endocrine disruptors,” Kennedy said, adding, “there’s Atrazine throughout our water supply, and atrazine, by the way, if you, in a lab, put Atrazine in a tank full of frogs, it will chemically castrate and forcibly feminize every frog in there and 10 percent of the frogs, the male frogs, will turn into fully viable females able to produce viable eggs.”

“If it’s doing that to frogs,” he said, “there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.”

Kennedy, whose career has been defined as much by his membership in one of America’s most famous families as by his allegiance to dangerous conspiracy theories, has recently suggested pharmaceuticals have caused mass casualty school shootings.

“Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country and we’ve never seen them in human history, where people walk into a schoolroom of children or strangers and start shooting people,” he said earlier this month during an interview with increasingly right-wing Twitter CEO Elon Musk.

Research indicates Kennedy’s claims about atrazine are specious, at best.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, “When the general population is exposed to atrazine, exposure levels are expected to be very low.”

The agency wrote, “Maximum seasonal and average atrazine concentrations of 61.6 and 18.9 ppb, respectively, were detected during a 1993-1998 monitoring program of community water systems in the United States.”

“There was a possible association between atrazine use/exposure of male farmers and increased pre-term delivery, but not decreased fecundity,” the CDC wrote.

“Epidemiological studies, examining developmental end points, have found an association between Iowa communities exposed to atrazine in the drinking water and an increased risk of small for gestational age babies and other birth defects.”

At the same time, “Farm couples living year-round on farms in Ontario, Canada, did not have altered sex ratios, and the risk of small for gestational age deliveries was not increased in relation to pesticide exposure.”

The video of Kennedy and Peterson was tweeted on Sunday by Mehdi Hasan, host of MSNBC’s “The Mehdi Hasan Show,” who pointed out that Kennedy’s comments echo claims by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who said in 2015, “I don’t like ’em putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin’ frogs gay!”

Recent surveys have shown Kennedy earning as much as 20 percent support from Democratic respondents — but according to The New York Times, “the main reason voters liked him was because of the Kennedy name.”