The Push for Queer-Inclusive Studies of Toxicants

Critical Toxicity Studies calls for the scientifically rigorous study of toxicants that handles all bodies and identities with care.

My favorite meme about so-called gay frogs鈥攆eared to be feminized by toxic chemicals鈥攊s captioned 鈥淵ou have to be male or female!鈥� Directly beneath this exclamation is a cartoon drawing of a clinic-blue gloved human hand holding a green frog, whose legs dangle passively under their suspended body.

The frog appears to be calmly responding, or at least thinking, 鈥淏ro, relax, I am literally just attractive.鈥� Underneath this image and text is a scene from the gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain, showing Heath Ledger鈥檚 character, Ennis, hugging Jake Gyllenhaal鈥檚 character, Jack, from behind.

Mediatized panic over the specter of gay frogs, including queer mockery of this panic, has a more traceable history. Beginning in the 1990s, scientists began sounding the alarm over synthetic substances called endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which interfere with naturally occurring hormones and thus interfere with all kinds of bodily functions and organ development, including but not limited to reproductive organs.

While these environmental health scientists meant well, and hormone-interfering chemicals do appear to cause serious health issues, including cancer and diabetes, the science and advocacy around these chemicals almost exclusively focused on their reportedly feminizing effects, in terms of reproductive organs as well as what鈥檚 understood as sexual behavior.

One 2008 documentary lamented the 鈥渄isappearing male,鈥� for instance, and a , publicly endorsed by famed environmental activist Erin Brockovich, despaired over the threats that 鈥減lummeting sperm counts鈥� and 鈥渟hrinking penises鈥� posed to humanity.

Frogs, meanwhile, have been a model organism for laboratory science for as long as laboratory science has existed. And frogs make sense to study in the context of toxic environmental exposures because they spend so much of their lives in the water, where so much chemical pollution circulates.

Scientists studying the effects of EDCs on frogs widely reported that individual frogs exposed to these chemicals displayed same-sex sexual behavior, exhibited both female- and male-marked phenotypes, and tadpoles changed sex during development, resulting in what researchers and journalists variously called 鈥済ay,鈥� 鈥渋ntersex,鈥� or 鈥渢ransgender鈥� frogs (with 鈥渟ad sex lives鈥� to boot). Queerness was thus characterized as a bad outcome of toxic exposure, and media outlets鈥攂oth mainstream and fringe鈥攚ere quick to jump directly from frog to human bodies and behaviors.

Framing same-sex sexual behavior, transness, or intersex conditions as both unnatural and undesirable has a long and ugly history that continues to rear its head, as demonstrated by recent and proliferating statewide bans on gender-affirming care and sexuality education. But labeling frogs as harmed by toxicants because toxicants 鈥渕ake them gay鈥� is not only socially wrong, it鈥檚 also biologically wrong.

Frogs, among many other animal species, engage in same-sex sexual behaviors in the wild all the time. And tadpoles, it turns out, change sex all the time, irrespective of chemical exposure. Intersex frogs, meanwhile, can still successfully mate to produce offspring.

Scientists overwhelmingly assumed that intersex frogs and male-male frog sex鈥攏obody seemed concerned about female-female frog sex鈥攄emonstrated evidence of chemical harm because that鈥檚 what biological sciences like toxicology have taught them. I hope my work helps correct this scientific and popular miseducation, for the sake of stamping out stigma as well as injustice.

Toxic environmental pollution, as environmental researchers and activists have amply documented, is indeed demonstrably harmful, while its demonstrable harms are vastly and unevenly deployed. The challenge I offer鈥攁nd rise to鈥攊s how to organize effective political action against the poisoners without stigmatizing the poisoned. I am pushing people to ask not simply what makes a poison, but rather who?

Toward Critical Toxicity Studies

The scientific elites who codified toxicology occupied particular gender-, race-, and class-privileged social locations, positions that empowered them to grant themselves the authority to define what makes a toxicant safe (and measurable), what chemical risks are acceptable (and to whom), and how much of an exposure is tolerable (where, for whom, and for what).

I show that despite toxicologists鈥� best intentions, toxicology鈥檚 inherent biases undermine the usefulness of toxicological findings for environmental justice struggles by focusing on the environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology of EDCs, which is the sub-field fretting about feminized frogs.

The challenge for critical feminists and EDC toxicologists, including those who identify as both, is to communicate the urgency of reducing toxic pollution鈥攂y both better regulating chemicals and reining in corporate power鈥攚ithout resorting to eugenicist and masculinist tropes of deformity, low intelligence, queerness, or weakness.

I do not mean to sound flippant; EDCs are a class of toxicants that have become ubiquitous throughout our environments, being constitutive components of such commonplace objects as plastic bottles, receipt paper, or body lotion, among many other items. EDCs are particularly alarming to scientists and other environmental health advocates because they have been shown to interfere with our bodies鈥� hormonal processes via the endocrine system.

Hormonal disturbances, in turn, can adversely affect fundamental aspects of physiological development and function, leading to a range of serious health issues, including different cancers and cardiovascular and metabolic failures. Moreover, because EDCs either mimic or override bodies鈥� naturally occurring hormone signals and hormone receptors, these particular toxicants may be more harmful at lower doses than at higher doses, upending the core tenet of toxicology: 鈥淭he dose makes the poison.鈥�

My work does not question the urgency of attending to EDC contamination, but rather how EDC toxicology inadvertently鈥攐r by design鈥攔eviles the poisoned more than the poisoner.

As mentioned, decades of EDC research on frogs in particular has been built on the homophobic and ableist assumptions that same-sex sexual behavior is abnormal, that frog sex changes are unnatural, and that intersex frogs cannot produce offspring.

The violent histories that EDC research unwittingly recites by deploying such terms as 鈥渄emasculinization鈥� and 鈥渃hemical castration鈥� is a form of violence in and of itself. By assuming and perpetuating the white supremacist and heteropatriarchal ideologies that queer, transgender, intersex, neurodivergent, and disabled bodies are somehow aberrant (read: abhorrent), the work of prominent EDC researchers and anti-toxics advocates reinforces social stigma as well as judicial, material, and biomedical inequity.

Social science scholars and activists have well documented the unjust ways that people who are marked as queer, trans, disabled, nonwhite, and foreign struggle disproportionately more to receive the medical care they need, safely access transportation and public restrooms, survive bullying and other forms of violence in schools and sports, and so on.

Put another way, feminist critique of EDC research and advocacy is not simply about problematic language or social stigma on a conceptual level, it鈥檚 about how scientific theories can be complicit in prejudicial mistreatment on an undeniably material, visceral level鈥攁nd sometimes fatally so.

Critical Toxicity Studies calls for a queer, ecofeminist study of toxicants that explicitly, carefully situates toxicants in their sociohistorical contexts, while simultaneously prefiguring a world where all bodies and identities鈥攚hether female, male, trans, intersex, disabled, queer, melanated, more-than-human, microbial, weedy, fungal, fishy, fat, young, old, sick, and so on鈥攁re fiercely, generously, handled with care.

This excerpt, adapted from by Melina Packer (New York University Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.

Melina Packer is an assistant professor of race, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse. She is coauthor, with Ambika Kamath, of Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior.