Coming off the pill means a lot of changes for the body – and one woman claims it changed her sexual preference.
Australian woman Amy May shared her story about how ‘coming off the contraceptive pill turned me into lesbian’ in a TikTok video.
Amy said she originally went on the pill when she was 15 but stopped this year after being on it for over a decade.
She admitted she was ‘s**t scared’ to stop the medication after 13 years but Amy decided to go ahead as she was coming out of a long-term relationship with her boyfriend of eight years.
‘So I was single and obviously wasn’t sexually active and just thought that my body could probably use a break – I had never had a break in those 13 years,’ she explained in the video.
Amy said she was nervous about some of the commonly shared side effects, like weight gain and skin changes including acne.
However, she was also curious, as she’d been told by friends and family that ‘you find who you are when you’re not on the pill.’
‘[So I thought] yeah great, I’m going to find clarity in life,’ she recalled, also confessing: ‘I didn’t think it actually would [change anything] and I definitely didn’t think I would be attracted to women.’
Australian woman Amy May shared her story about how ‘coming off the contraceptive pill turned me into lesbian’ in a TikTok video
Amy says after she first went off the medication she didn’t notice a huge change, but did note she felt ‘lighter in her mood, her energy and her thoughts.’
‘I definitely was riding the highs and lows a lot smoother if that makes sense,’ she shared.
‘I wasn’t as angry and I think I only realize that now looking back, I feel like the pill made me very tense, very angry, very, very, snappy,’ she continued.
‘I no longer feel that way.’
Around that time, after coming off the pill, Amy said she started thinking of her ex, who is a man, ‘with disgust.’
‘It could be a coincidence, could not, who knows, but it could have been a combination between me coming off the contraceptive pill and coming out of a toxic relationship, but the way I started to view my ex was kind of disgust – which again could be the person that he became,’ she reflected.
‘But it also could be the fact that I just wasn’t as attracted to men as I once was.’
In another TikTok video, Amy wrote: ‘Last December I was in a toxic relationship with a man and had never felt more alone.’
Amy said she originally went on the pill when she was 15, and stopped this year after being on it for over a decade (stock image)
She the showed a photo of herself and her girlfriend, writing: ‘This December I’m in love with a woman and gay as f**k.’
Amy’s comment section was flooded with comments from women who said they had been in similar situations.
‘Oh my God, I thought the same thing had happened to me and thought I was just imagining it!!’ one gushed.
‘This was me too at 26! I’ve not heard anyone else say this. The slow disgust towards men was wild for me too haha,’ pointed out another.
‘I (a lesbian) am now scared to stop taking the pill because what if it has the opposite effect for me,’ joked someone else.
Sarah Hill, a evolutionary psychologist, said she’s heard of other instances where women’s sexual preferences changed after going off the pill.
‘Decades of research has found that women’s sex hormones impact their attraction to specific members of one sex. Why shouldn’t it also impact their attraction between the sexes?’ she wrote in an article published to her website in 2020.
‘If we are to take seriously the idea that gender isn’t as binary as biological sex, it really isn’t wild at all,’ she pointed out.
‘It just goes to demonstrate that sex hormones are intimately involved in attraction and – for some women – the hormonal changes initiated by the birth control pill can nudge their preferences in ways that are more noticeable than they are for others.’
