Few men in America have been so spectacularly vilified and misunderstood as Alex Emmerich Jones, the founder of Infowars. In the febrile atmosphere of post-2016 America, it’s almost impossible to find anyone who doesn’t have a strong opinion about him. Depending on which side of the fence you’re sat on, Alex Jones is either a deranged conspiracy-obsessed lunatic who should be made to pay every last cent of the $965 million in damages he owes the families of the Sandy Hook victims he slandered; or he’s a brave patriot, a charismatic warrior for truth who is being destroyed by America’s globalist elite for revealing their schemes and helping get Donald Trump, their mortal enemy, elected as president. There isn’t really a middle position.
This makes it difficult, if not impossible, to talk about Alex Jones and the truth of what he says with any kind of equanimity. And that’s a real shame, because Alex Jones is right and has been right about a lot of things—important things. In many cases, he was right long before anybody else in the public eye, and he kept being right even though he was ridiculed for what he was saying. There’s no better example of this than his infamous “gay frogs rant.”
It’s been over eight years since Jones bellowed, live on air, “I don’t like ‘em putting chemicals in the water that turn the frickin’ frogs gay,” before smashing his fist into the desk and sending his papers flying. Just like that, a meme was born. Critics in the mainstream media by turns mocked and condemned Jones for spreading yet another “right-wing conspiracy theory.” #gayfrogs trended on Twitter, with a video excerpt of the rant garnering over half a million views and thousands of comments. The rant was even turned into an indie song.
A meme was born—and a very serious issue all but died. Of course, Jones did little to help his own credibility in the matter by dressing up as a gay frog live on air, replete with a pink tutu and a bottle labelled “atrazine,” from which he sucked campily. In an instant, it became all but impossible to talk seriously about the havoc being wreaked on living organisms, whether they be frogs or humans, by harmful chemicals in the environment—the food, the water, the air—and especially a class of chemicals known as “endocrine disruptors.”
Many endocrine disruptors mimic the “female” hormone estrogen, upsetting the body’s sensitive endocrine (i.e., hormonal) balance and triggering a cascade of negative effects ranging from reproductive issues and birth defects to obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Our exposure to these chemicals has grown enormously with the progress of the industrial age. While a great number of endocrine disruptors are associated with plastics and their manufacture, they are also widely present among herbicides, pesticides, medicines, food additives, flame retardants, and a whole host of other products, without which modern life would indeed be very different. The simple, scary truth is that it’s now impossible to avoid these chemicals at any stage of life, from gestation to working in the remotest parts of the planet. Three thousand tons of microplastics are estimated to fall over Switzerland each year in snow.
Although he didn’t mention it directly during his rant, Jones was pointing towards a study that had received considerable attention from the scientific community and the popular press, including National Geographic and Science magazines, five years earlier, in 2010. The study showed that exposure to the popular herbicide atrazine at levels typical of US waterways was enough to castrate male frogs and even make them change their gender. Researchers exposed African clawed frog larvae to atrazine in a laboratory and found that fully 10% of the larvae became “atrazine-induced females” that developed into “completely feminized” adults. These transgender frogs would then go on to mate with males from the control group that had not been exposed to atrazine, and they were even able to produce viable eggs. Atrazine does this because it causes the “male” hormone testosterone to be converted into estrogen.
Could endocrine disruptors make humans change their gender too, just like the African clawed frogs? That was obviously what Jones was suggesting, and it’s a claim he’s repeated many times in the years since. This is a much fuller and, of course, more controversial claim than saying endocrine disruptors affect fertility and sexual development, which is far beyond the realms of dispute at this point.
On the face of things, that stronger claim is totally plausible. Our biology isn’t so different from a frog’s, and a rough correlation between exposure to harmful chemicals and increasing rates of transgenderism could be plotted without much difficulty. Correlation isn’t causation, as we well know, but there’s an enormous body of evidence to substantiate both the crucial role of hormones in sexual development and the devastating negative effects of endocrine disruptors. Together, they make a compelling case that transgenderism could be one extreme result of exposure to endocrine disruptors at crucial points in the human lifecycle.
With transgenderism, we are clearly dealing with a complicated issue that goes beyond reduced testosterone levels or sperm counts to touch the deepest aspect of a person’s being: their sense of self, of who and what they are or should be. Many people seem to doubt the ability of hormones to affect a person this deeply, but the truth is, hormones make us who and what we are, and that includes our self-perception. Any woman who has taken a contraceptive pill will know this, and so too, in all probability, will her boyfriend or husband. All of a sudden, you’re no longer Kate but Kate-who’s-trapped-somewhere-in-the-luteal-phase-of-her-cycle-all-month, and she’s a very different person altogether. Of course, this is why hormone therapy is an integral part of the process of medical transition from one gender to the other: estrogen therapy for male-to-female and testosterone therapy for female-to-male. And it’s why, when access to prescribed hormones is scarce, male transgenders have been known to boil plastic bags and drink the resulting plasticiser-rich liquid as a substitute for estrogen.
The problem, however, is that there simply aren’t any studies that directly examine the link between exposure to harmful chemicals and transgenderism. It’s not hard to imagine why that might be the case. I hardly need to tell you how controversial the topic of transgenderism has become. While there have been a handful of studies that attempt to explain the growth of transgenderism as something other than an organic phenomenon—and by that, I mean something other than a stable population finally being able to reveal themselves as society becomes more tolerant and inclusive—these few studies have focused on social factors, like children having friends who claim to be transgender, or psychological factors like having one or more mental illnesses. Nobody seems to be willing to make the chemical connection.
Until now, that is. Now there’s a study that directly links exposure to endocrine disruptors to transgenderism. The study is published in the Journal of Xenobiotics, and it considers the effects of exposure to the chemical diethylstilbestrol (DES) on the rate of transgenderism among French boys. The study’s authors discovered that boys exposed to DES in utero were perhaps as much as 100 times more likely to become male-to-female transgender than the highest reported background rate across Europe. Reliable figures for the number of transgender people as a percentage of the population vary wildly, so the actual increase in risk due to exposure to DES could be even higher.
Although DES has been banned in the US since the year 2000, it was used for decades to treat a wide variety of women’s ailments, from vaginitis to menopause, and, most importantly, it was given during pregnancy to a large number of women with a history of miscarriage to reduce the risk of further complications. It’s estimated that between 1938 and 1971, four million pregnant women were given DES in the US alone. DES was also given to livestock to fatten them for market, and it was even used as a form of chemical castration to “treat” homosexuality, its most famous victim in that regard being the cryptographer Alan Turing, who was forced to take DES not long before his death in suspicious circumstances.
The first comprehensive evidence of the drug’s harmful effects came in the early 1970s, when it was shown to cause rare forms of vaginal tumors in girls exposed to the drug in utero. In 1971, the FDA withdrew approval for its use as a treatment for pregnant women. DES has now been widely linked to reproductive abnormalities in both sexes, ranging from epidydimal cysts, undescended testicles (cryptorchidism), and micropenises in boys to ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, premature births, and various forms of cancer in girls, including breast cancer and the rare cancers mentioned earlier. DES exposure is also linked to psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolarism, eating disorders, and suicidal behavior. Exposure is believed to have multigenerational and transgenerational effects, meaning that the effects of exposure ramify down the generations even when only a single generation has been exposed. We’re now discovering that many harmful chemicals have these kinds of effects; the weedkiller glyphosate, for example, can cause the great-grandchildren of rats exposed to it to become obese.
The new French study looks at a cohort of 1200 mothers who were given DES while pregnant and their nearly 2000 offspring. Importantly, the study includes children these mothers gave birth to before they were exposed to DES. This allows the establishment of a comparable rate between sons born with and without exposure to the drug.
The results show that none of the 148 boys who avoided exposure ended up becoming transgender, whereas four out of 253 boys exposed to DES in the womb ended up becoming transgender.
As the study’s authors note, exposure to DES increased the risk of becoming transgender enormously.
If we consider the highest prevalence of transgender women reported in the literature (1/17,000), the prevalence we observed in our study (1.58%) is 10- to 100-fold higher. Moreover, the prevalence of female transgender identity was 0% among the 148 elder non-exposed sons in the same informative families.
The study does have limitations, principally the size of the sample. As I said earlier, millions of women in the US alone were exposed to DES while pregnant, so there’s potential for a much larger-scale investigation to confirm the results of this study. And, of course, there are many, many other endocrine-disrupting chemicals whose relationship with transgenderism—in both sexes—could and should be investigated. This is just the start.
Even so, this new French study represents a stunning vindication of Alex Jones’s basic claim about harmful chemicals and gender trouble. No longer do we need to make inferences from studies of African clawed frogs or any other animal that isn’t a human, nor do we need to lay out a prima facie case on the basis of other data about the human effects of endocrine disruptors and what we know about the role of hormones in human sexual development.
We now have direct evidence that exposure to a potent estrogenic chemical at a crucial stage of early development appears to have lifelong effects on a person’s sense of gender identity, that it can lead them to consider themselves transgender, and that it might even lead them to seek gender-reassignment surgery. We now have a clear, non-political mandate to investigate the matter urgently with the rigor only genuine science, at its best, can provide.
To do so is right. It’s compassionate. That’s one thing that also stands out from this new French study. Among the dry scientific data and discussion of methodology are four moving personal testimonies: biographies of the four boys and then men who ended up becoming transgender after being exposed to DES. Here’s one of them.
Currently a composer (guitar and vocals), S. was born in 1969 after in utero exposure to DES. At birth, S. had male genitalia with unilateral cryptorchidism. S. started to question the assigned male gender at the age of 4 years: “I remember very clearly that when I was 3–4 years old, one day I went with my mother to a hairdressing salon and having looked at all the ladies, I thought: ‘When I grow up this is what I will do: I will be a woman.’”
During adolescence, S. felt he was a woman and had severe psychological disorders, particularly depression and suicidal ideation… As an adult, S. married and had two children. These two girls had prolactinoma, and one has Asperger’s syndrome, androgyny and ovarian cysts. S. began the transition with male to female gender reassignment surgery, in Brighton, United Kingdom (UK), in November 2015. Since then, S. has been receiving GAHT and is followed by the doctor who managed the transition. According to the UK Gender Recognition Act, S. could change their sex recorded on their birth certificate (male to female) and now, she lives in Scotland. Her elder sister, also exposed to DES in utero after her mother’s miscarriage, died due to vaginal adenocarcinoma during adolescence.
It’s easy to forget, amid all the rancor, the back-and-forth accusations, and even the threats and physical violence that are now all-too common in the transgenderism debate, that there are real people at the heart of this issue—people who are suffering terribly. For every headline-grabbing male swimmer or fighter exercising their unfair, irreversible physical advantages in the realm of women’s sports and for every former special-forces soldier indulging his autogynephilic fantasies, there are likely to be far more people like S., whose lives, through no fault of their own, have been blighted by the toxic legacy of medical science and modern industry and who have been forced to the extremes of human experience to deal with their sense of belonging in the wrong body. For the sake of them and to spare others their fate, we need to know the truth, however painful it may be. And the truth, it seems, is that Alex Jones was right.