Is birth control turning women bi?
That’s the question that popped up on my TikTok for you page this morning and has already been reported on by The Daily Mail.
According to the video, women are coming forward to discuss how hormonal birth control influences their sexual orientation. “A girl friend of mine who is a mostly lesbian bisexual [...] said ‘one of the thing[s] I noticed when I came off the pill was that for one week out of every month, I was straight again,” podcaster Chris Williamson tells us, before asking Dr Sarah Hill if she’s ever heard of anything like this. “I can’t tell you how many women I’ve heard that from!” she confirms, before going on to describe how many bisexual women tell her that they get “nudged one way or the other depending on where they are in the cycle.”
Dr Hill has indeed written a lot about hormonal birth control and how it affects women’s (Dr Hill only ever refers to people who take hormonal birth control as women) sexuality. In a post entitled ‘The pill and… sexual orientation?’, Dr Hill claims that; “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”. To be fair to Dr Hill, she does acknowledge in this post the possibility that gender is more complicated than binary sex, and that fixed notions of the self might be a little male-centric. But her conceptualisation of bisexuality is one which relies on the old stereotype that we are ‘half gay and half straight’, allowing one to be ‘nudged’ in one direction or the other by hormonal changes.
While I couldn’t find much about her personal views, as someone who studies the far-right, this rhetoric felt instantly familiar. In part due to the ongoing trans moral panic, hormones have become a bogeyman to the right. We see this in the vitriol around puberty blockers for trans teens, the hyper-visibility of detransitioners discussing how they feel hormones have ‘ruined’ their bodies, and more recently, increasing fear-mongering about hormonal birth control. “TikTok influencers who are fearmongering about birth control are also playing into the hands of the right, who seem to be very keen on forcing everyone to start using natural family planning,” wrote journalist Arwa Mahdawi, about the #naturalbirthcontrol trend which took off on the app earlier this year.
Being able to blame hormones for the growing number of young women identifying as bisexual on birth control - as opposed to say, growing acceptance and understanding around sexuality - would feed straight into the right’s narrative about both hormone treatments and queerness being ills of the modern world. This isn’t a new idea, either; Alex Jones famously claimed that hormones in the water might be responsible for turning the fricking frogs gay.
Beyond this, Dr Hill is an ‘evolutionary social psychologist’ which is ‘the study of behaviour, thought, and feeling as viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology’. The right loves evolutionary psychology. For them, it provides a framework to argue that things like gender roles are a result of evolution rather than social constructs. Jordan Peterson, once the boyprince of the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, considers himself an ‘evolutionary biologist’ and uses this framework to explain, for example, why women are more attracted to arseholes than nice guys. Useful.
She is also a professor at Texas Christian University. TCU is a private university whose ‘historic covenant with the Disciples of Christ informs our roots as a liberal arts college’. None of this is of course to say that Dr Hill purposely trying to further right-wing rhetoric, more that her recent discussions about hormones and queerness feed seamlessly into existing right-wing narratives.
So can the pill turn you GAY as the Daily Mail so calmly asks? Well, maybe. There’s as little evidence to show that hormones have no effect on sexual orientation as there is to show that they do. I think what’s more important to ask is, what is the implication of this discussion? Sexologists and psychologists have long had an antagonistic relationship with bisexuality. There’s a myriad of now-infamous studies trying to disprove the existence of bisexuality, especially in men. Bisexuals are troublemakers; we make it harder to consider sexual orientation through an essentialist lens, one that is necessary to create the hierarchal in-groups and out-groups that the hetero-patriarchy relies on.
Similarly, there is a long history of scientists, doctors, and phycologists pathologising queerness, diagnosing it as a medical issue, or trying to locate a biological explanation for it. “[T]here’s no guarantee that today’s search for a gay genome will support queer liberation. Believing sexuality to be biologically innate might lead some to see LGBTQ+ people as biologically unfit. [...] But for every person who uses “born this way” to win legal battles for gay rights, we know there is someone else who uses it to paint gay people as bad seeds of the human race,” write Helen Zhao and Meg Perret. The implication of Dr Hill’s study and the reporting around it is the same as the quest to find the ‘gay gene’; if our sexuality is reliant on biology alone - whether genetic or hormonal - it can be studied, quantified, and ultimately, fixed.
As violence against LGBTQ+ people continues to skyrocket along with legal attacks on our rights, buoyed up by the rising tide of the far-right, it’s imperative that we continue to push back against the drive to pathologise and medicalise queerness. What queerness is, and where it comes from matters far less than our freedom to express and cherish it as an extension of our bodily autonomy.