A 19st rugby player suffered a stroke while training – and discovered when he woke up that he was gay.
Chris Birch, 26, had proposed to his girlfriend and worked in a bank when he suffered a freak accident in the gym.
The rugby-loving Welshman was trying to impress his friends with a back flip but broke his neck and suffered a stroke.
He was taken to the Royal Gwent hospital where his girlfriend and family waited for news – but said: ‘I was gay when I woke up…’
Chris retrained as a hairdresser and now lives with his partner Jack Powell, 19, above the salon in which he works.
But I thought it was a “choice”?
Lysenkoism. Strokes don’t “open up” neuropathways — they kill them. Although it is documented for people to have personality changes after a stroke, this is the first I’ve heard of sexual orientation change. The obvious conclusion is that his personality change is the result of brain damage, but that would be un-pc, so we have to rewrite the whole of known neuroscience to support the idea that there is a little gay part of us that is locked away, and only a stroke can “open up” that part of the brain, which is virtually a prisoner of the “straight” brain — a little gay homonuculus that is inhabiting a neuolgoical closet that was just opened.
Positive for all the boys in boystown. Certainly not for his parents, fiancé or would-be future progeny.
“The obvious conclusion is that his personality change is the result of brain damage..”
My thoughts exactly. Seems to me that this is one story the homosexual community would not want to use as proof of their “normality”.
The comment after the article by ‘RC’ is what I was thinking. I guess if you can pick up and English or French accent, you could as easily pick up a lisp or a lilt.
I’ve read about, and seen, ‘personality’ changes after a stroke. (my mother-in-law was way more opinionated / outgoing after her stroke) And isn’t sexuality part of a person’s ‘personality’?
I know one thing, I’m not playing rugby, or doing any back flips from here on out…I LIKE chicks, and I LIKE that I LIKE them!
I’m totally sure there won’t be a rash of gay guys going over to those straight guys they have a crush on and hitting them over the head with a mallet.
PS: what I think actually happened. This guy was always gay, but was trying, for whatever reason, to conceal his proclivities. In traditional fashion he was doing this by engaging in stereotypical “straight macho guy” activities like sports and getting a girlfriend. Then he has this accident, and while lying there in the hospital realizing how close to death he had come, decided “Fuck it. I am what I am.” But he still didn’t want to deal with the fallout from revealing all his lies so he lies some more and blames the brain damage. I’m pretty sure he is brain damaged, but the evidence isn’t his “new” gayness, it’s his awful hairdo. What the hell is that thing?
What’s going on with his hair is that he was watching The Fifth Element when he had the stroke, and he thought “Faaab-ulous!” when he saw the bad guy.
Occam and I agree with Andrea.
Indeed — ‘t is a compelling argument.
I agree with Andrea. If you want to believe that gayness is caused by brain damage, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do regarding the amazing coincidence that a fairly stable percentage of the population has been consistently suffering the same brain damage symptoms for thousands (millions?) of years.
They used to dress better though. What the hell happened to gays?
a fairly stable percentage of the population has been consistently suffering the same brain damage symptoms for thousands (millions?) of years.
Do you actually have any evidence to back that up, or is this just propaganda?
The problem there is that “Person X became gay because of brain damage of just the right kind” does not mean “All gay people are gay because of brain damage”.
“X can cause Y”, in other words, is not “Y is caused, always and only, by X”. It’s not even “Y is often caused by X”.
(I can’t evaluate the likelihood of “he was always gay and in denial and this just made him stop denying it” vs. “he really did change at some fundamental level”, or some combination of the two.)
The PC position is that it’s not a choice. As Lady Gaga sings, they’re “born that way”. Although I think the scenario that Andrea suggests is plausible, it could also be that particular chemicals in the brain control our sex preference, and that brain trauma can affect the production (or non-production) of those chemicals. Some enterprising grad students ought to look into it.
I’m sure there won’t be a sudden upsurge in straight men wearing protective headgear everywhere, including the dinner table “just in case.”
Just imagine the potential lawsuits by children against parents who hit them…. “YOU MADE ME GAY!””
How do we know he’s not lying?
I think I recall hearing one time that as we grow older and our mental faculties start to degrade that our inhibitions also start to diminish. Older people will just blurt out the first thing that comes to the mind a lot of the times. Or, people will purposely degrade their nervous system with intoxicants; liquid courage in a bottle. It’s possible this stroke diminished the areas of the brain that naturally inhibit use from saying/doing risky things. It is a survival mechanism after all, sort of an error control, to check and make sure the next thing you’re about to do will not get you in trouble. That little angel on your shoulder going, “tut tut tut”, yea; he landed on and crushed his when he did the back flip.