Chris Birch: 'Stroke Turned Me Gay'
A former rugby player from England has suffered a stroke in a freak accident which he now claims turned him gay.
Chris Birch suffered the stroke while he was rolling down a hill in 2011. The onset of the stroke occurred due to the oxygen supply to his brain being temporality blocked as he rolled forward down the hillside. Birch regained consciousness when he was in the hospital.
At the time he was engaged to his former girlfriend, but soon began to experience feelings that would change the life that he had lived thus far.
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"The Chris I knew had gone and a new Chris sort of came along. I came to the realization that the stroke had turned me gay," according to the Daily Mail.
Birch is currently the focus of a BBC3 documentary which has been following him to document how he makes sense of his new life.
However, Birch has already made the switch, he left his job at a bank and become a hairdresser. He also moved out of his house and started meeting men.
"It was a weird experience…You walk into somewhere and you go from liking that girl to liking that boy," Birch told the film crew.
Birch stated that he is the happiest that he has ever been and he even has a new fiancé Jak Powell.
"People grow up not knowing they are gay and have families and then they realize they are gay, but they don't have a stroke to realize it," Powell told the BBC. "I think eventually if you hadn't had the stroke it would have happened anyway."
Some scientists believe it is possible that during the recovery period following a stroke that a patient could discover a new skill or accent. However, they are skeptical to state that personality changes brought on due to a stroke can bring on homosexuality. They explain that there are no documented cases of a stroke changing a person's sexuality.
