Anything written by the British tabloids is subject to suspicion. And the Daily Mail’s story last week about a youth who claims he woke up gay after breaking his neck, being unconscious and having a stroke was a bit much to swallow.
But writer Tracy Clark-Flory of Salon.com decided to do some research and talk to some experts to determine if the Daily Mail’s story could possibly be true. And it’s a good read.
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/08/can_a_stroke_turn_you_gay/singleton/
The Daily Mail tabloid story told the tale of 26-year-old heterosexual Chris Birch, who was 266 pounds, played sports and had just proposed to his girlfriend. Like a lot of macho young men, Birch liked to show off. He was demonstrating a back flip in a gym when he had an accident, and wound up breaking his neck and having a stroke.
He was unconscious, but the story did not say for how long. When he woke up, Birch said he “felt different.” He was no longer atracted to women. He said he was gay. He slimmed down to 154 pounds, became a hairdresser and now lives with his boyfriend.
In her skeptical look at this story, Clark-Flory wrote that this would not be the first case where “someone has claimed that a brain injury changed their sexual orientation.”
She noted that Salon had once run a story by a woman whose son came out of the closet after suffering brain trauma.
There are many documented cases offering proof that strokes and traumatic brain injury can result in major changes in a person’s sexual behavior and personality, according to Clark-Flory. Some people lose their sex drive, and others see an increase in drive. She even notes that there are a few cases where heterosexual men became pedophiles.
There was a case where a man began hoarding child pornography and molested his stepdaughter. As it turns out, the man had developed a major brain tumor, and once it was removed his pedophilia ended.
Clark-Flory also cited a report in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinicial Neurosciences, about a man who went from homosexual to heterosexual after having a stroke.
She also consulted with Richard Wassersug, a neurobiology professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. In his research he has found that when some men are deprived of androgens, namely steroid hormones such as testosterone, their sexual orientation can change.
That could be the explanation of what happened in Birch’s case.
“By extenson, if a stroke knocks out certain centers in the brain with androgen receptors, it is not a big jump to consider it possible for a stroke to alter sexual orientation,” Wassersug told Clark-Flory.
In ending, the writer said that one study had suggested that changes in sexual preference linked to brain lesions may mean that there are parts of the brain that control sexual orientation.
So Birch’s story, about turning gay after having a stroke, may not be so crazy after all.
