In this essay, I examine the role of gendered rhetoric in scientific and popular representations of this controversy. Although the manufacturer of Atrazine, Syngenta, argues that the pesticide is safe, Hayes and other scientists have increasingly demonstrated a link between Atrazine and threats to public health and the environment. Hayes’s research ignited an ongoing political controversy over whether Atrazine causes “gender abnormalities”-such as hermaphroditism-in amphibians, humans, and other species.
1 He hypothesized that Atrazine works as an endocrine-disrupting chemical (EDC), converting testosterone to estrogen in frogs. Tyrone Hayes conducted a series of experiments that revealed that the most common herbicide, Atrazine, “feminized” male frogs at concentrations below that allowed in drinking water in the United States. Editor’s Note: This is the third post in the series, Succession: Queering the Environment, which centers queer people, non-humans, systems, and ideas and explores their impact within the fields of environmental history, environmental humanities, and queer ecology.