Mary Harrington

The notorious Infowars host Alex Jones once opined that he didn’t like the government ‘putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay’. CNBC called this a ‘disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theory’, and Jones is noted for wild and sometimes actionable claims. But if we read ‘gay’ in the colloquial sense, as offensive shorthand for ‘feminised male’, Jones’s assertion contains a glimmer of truth. Chemicals really are going into the water that so disrupt the endocrine systems of small aquatic creatures, including frogs, that males sometimes undergo sex reversal or adopt homosexual behaviour. It’s just that the synthetic estradiol that damages fish and amphibians isn’t being added to the water as a sinister government conspiracy.

'Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Families marching five by five Hurrah! Hurrah! Some people choose their family And they love each other so proudly And they all go marching in The Big Parade!' In June, the Journal of Medical Ethics spelled out what it means in practice to teach children that family bonds are optional. If the world is to ‘take LGBT testimony seriously,’ argued Maura Priest, a bioethicist at the Arizona State University, then ‘parents should lose veto power over most transition-related pediatric care’. In many states, this is already well-established. In 2015, Oregon passed a law giving minors the right to receive transgender medical interventions at taxpayers’ expense, and without their parents’ consent.