Meredith Elliot says she was ‘boy crazy’ as a schoolgirl. All she ever wanted was a boyfriend — in fact, she had ‘too many to count’ in her teens. It’s safe to say that at no point did she ever question her sexuality.
She went on to marry at 32 and was planning on starting a family with her husband when she experienced a sudden, dramatic turnaround.
‘I started to notice women in the street,’ says Meredith, a 43-year-old events organiser from London. ‘To be frank, I began to experience overwhelming fantasies about wanting to have sex with them.
‘These feelings stirred inside me within the space of 24 hours, like someone had flipped a switch regarding my sexuality.’
So strong were these feelings, she confessed them to her husband and they went on to divorce. She is now happily ensconced in a four-year relationship with another woman.
After divorcing her first husband, Meredith Elliot (pictured) is now happily ensconced in a four-year relationship with another woman
‘I’m so gay now and I love it!’ she says. ‘People think it’s strange that I didn’t realise my true sexuality until my late 30s. I was as shocked as they are.’
But Meredith has an intriguing theory as to why it took her so long to work this out. The revelations, she says, closely followed her coming off the contraceptive Pill, after 20 years of taking it.
‘I was 36 when I stopped taking the Pill,’ she explains. ‘Two weeks later, I started noticing that I was suddenly very strongly attracted to women — I’d never had that feeling before.’
Ironically, she had stopped taking oral contraception in order to start a family with her husband — yet it triggered an about-turn which sent her in an entirely different direction.
‘After a few months of feeling like this, I felt that something was intrinsically missing from my life and I needed to explore those desires — even though I was, until that point, happily married and planning a family,’ she explains.
‘It was actually a naturopath [someone who specialises in herbal medicine] who suggested that the change in hormones from coming off the Pill was responsible for my change in outlook — and what I desired in life generally.’
So can the Pill — and the synthetic hormones it contains — really influence a woman’s sexual preferences?
There is little research in this area, but the internet is awash with anecdotal evidence. On one social media thread, women post about discovering ‘part of [them] has been asleep for years’.
One TikTok, influencer, Tess Bona, recently revealed that within a month of coming off the Pill, she was no longer attracted to men. She is now having a relationship with a woman.
And this may not be as implausible as it sounds. The contraceptive Pill has a long list of possible side-effects — from weight gain and nausea, to breast tenderness and menstrual cycle changes.
Experts in the field of evolutionary psychology have long held that changes in women’s sex hormones play an important role in what a woman looks for in a mate.
Social psychologist Dr Sarah Hill, author of How The Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain On Birth Control, has researched it widely.
‘The way that our hormones affect our brain is by nudging our preferences or behaviour this way or that way,’ she says.
‘Sometimes it might nudge you into a direction that wouldn’t necessarily agree with what your brain would do outside of that.’
She adds that several studies have shown how the type of man women are attracted to varies during their menstrual cycle, and that taking the Pill can affect this.
Research suggests that women who take the Pill have a continued preference for less masculine men — while women who don’t take it experience a preference for more masculine men at the most fertile period of their natural cycle, and less masculine men during the second half of their cycle, when levels of the hormone progesterone are high.
Eloise Le Santo (pictured), a former barrister turned personal trainer and yoga teacher, believes taking the Pill on and off for 15 years played an important role in making her feel more attracted to men than she naturally was
Vic Patterson, a hypnotherapist and life coach, works with women affected by contraception or HRT, and says sadly we are rarely told about these possible side-effects.
She explains: ‘Once women come off the Pill, ovulation resumes — and there’s a really interesting study that shows women who were on the Pill and then stop taking it are more interested in changing to [what the study called] ‘more suitable’ mates.
‘This study was carried out on women looking at men, rather than gay relationships, but it certainly suggests that what a woman sees as a good partner when they are on the combined Pill changes when they come off it.
‘Both the combined Pill and the mini Pill contain synthetic versions of progesterone, known collectively as progestogen.
‘There are lots of different ‘types’ of progestogen (for instance, desogestrel). Progestogen is often linked to mood changes and depression, and (somewhat ironically) a decreased sex drive.
‘So it’s also possible that coming off the Pill means a woman might feel more able to explore who she really is, be less depressed and more open to new experiences.
‘Tie this into potentially feeling less attracted to their current partner, finding feminine faces more attractive, and there is the possibility that a woman might feel free to explore other aspects to her sexuality.’
Meredith told her husband about her lesbian feelings straight away. ‘Even though it was devastating for both of us, he gave me six months to explore these feelings,’ she says.
She didn’t date, but joined chat groups online and sought the help of a therapist and psychoanalyst.
When it became ‘obvious my feelings weren’t going away’, her husband moved out of their home.
Meredith says her initial reaction to her sexuality was one of annoyance. Her plan for a husband and a home full of children was suddenly off the table. ‘It was a trajectory I’d always been on, and until then I never stopped to question it,’ she says. ‘We’d been together for three-and-a-half years and we even referred to our second bedroom as the baby’s room.
‘I was as shocked as anyone that my feelings had changed so radically and that my future was in jeopardy. Coming off the Pill wreaked havoc on my periods, too. I experienced irregular bleeding; intense, debilitating pain and terrible mood swings.’
She adds: ‘Eventually, I went for tests and it turned out I wasn’t ovulating. No further investigations were done because the last thing I wanted was to have a child with my life upside down.
‘I wonder now if I ever was fertile. If that’s true, then I was on birth control for two decades for no reason. I’m not interested in having children at all now.
‘I’m sad for the old me who really wanted a family with my husband. But that former self doesn’t exist any more.’
Meanwhile, Meredith was terrified of being rejected by her loved ones when she told them about her sexuality. Thankfully, her dad was ‘so used to me being a free spirit, he was fine with it’.
Her mum, however, ‘thinks I just have an issue with men’.
‘She’ll come around eventually,’ says Meredith. ‘As for me, it was like going through puberty again.’ In 2019, Meredith met her current partner, Lea, who was an old school friend, at Gay Pride while on holiday in Canada.
‘I was visiting an old friend over there and I shared some photos on Facebook. Lea saw them and commented: ‘Come see me in Vancouver for Pride!’
‘By the end of the evening, we’d booked into a hotel together.’
Yet Meredith remains friends with her ex-husband, who is now remarried and has a son.
‘This was a happy ending for both of us,’ she says. ‘I know he believes I’ve found ‘my person’, too.’
As for her view regarding the Pill’s contribution to all this, Meredith says: ‘I’m curious about what would have happened if I’d not gone on it — would I have come out sooner?’
Mother-of-two Eloise Le Santo is another who had been married —and then divorced — to a man and was dating men when she had her sexual awakening.
She can pinpoint the moment she realised she was first attracted to another woman.
‘I went to a friend’s parents’ house in Devon with some others. We were drinking and having a nice time together when life changed in a moment and we started kissing.’
And this also happened shortly after she had come off the Pill. Was it just a coincidence or is there something more to it?
Emily J. Kuipers (pictured) was 26 when she went on her first date with a woman
Eloise, 40, says: ‘Recently I came across a woman talking about the link between her sexuality and taking the Pill on TikTok. When she took it, she was attracted to men and when she didn’t, she preferred women.
‘Curious, I did the maths about the change in my own sexuality, and suddenly everything made so much sense. I came off it aged 30 and within a few months was in a lesbian relationship.’
Eloise, a former barrister turned personal trainer and yoga teacher, believes taking the Pill on and off for 15 years played an important role in making her feel more attracted to men than she naturally was.
Before she started taking it at 15 to help with heavy periods, Eloise says she had felt flickers of attraction to women: ‘As a teenager, I found women’s bodies more attractive and beautiful but I just thought: ‘Everyone thinks like that.’ If you’d asked me then who I was attracted to, I would have told you, on autopilot, men. I think the Pill may have suppressed my interest in women.’
But this only came to light when, as part of reassessing her overall wellbeing and lifestyle, Eloise stopped taking contraception.
‘I’d started to go to the gym to look after my mental and physical health. I realised I should focus on my health and how I could improve things hormonally without relying on the contraceptive Pill as a fix.’
Then came her sudden attraction to women.
‘It wasn’t that I was living a lie before, but I can now understand why my relationship with my ex-husband didn’t work. It took a while for me to come to terms with it because I was thinking: ‘How did I miss this for so long?’ It’s fair to say that I’m no longer attracted to men.
‘I have been lucky that my family and friends are extremely supportive. At the moment I’m working on a masters degree about adapting exercise to the menstrual cycle.
‘I do now notice the wax and wane of my hormones each month, and I talk about it with my clients, too. It wouldn’t surprise me at all that taking the Pill suppressed my sexuality.’
Florist and nanny Emily Kuipers, 36, from South-West London, began taking the Pill at 16, after her mother and family doctor put her on it to trigger the start of her periods.
‘I’d started seeing boys in my early teens, but the relationships weren’t that serious,’ she says.
‘I was 14 when I was first really in love with a boy. He was very kind, we’d kiss and cycle together and do the things you do when you’re in your teens.
‘I come from a very straight family. My grandparents, parents, aunt and uncle all met when they were very young. They got married, bought the house, the dog and had children. I was raised in that environment, it stands to reason that I was expected to do the same.’
While Emily dated men during her teens and early 20s, she always felt that something was missing.
‘I was 25 when I told my then boyfriend something in our relationship wasn’t right — that there was something that he could not give me but that I couldn’t explain what it was,’ she says.
When they split up, she stopped taking the Pill — and discovered that her sexual preferences had changed.
‘Looking back, I realised I’d had an interest and feelings for women since childhood, but had pushed it to the back of my mind,’ she says.
‘I think, maybe, that the Pill suppressed those feelings and kept me on the straight and narrow, as it were, so the desire and emotional and physical pull and yearning to be with a woman wasn’t there.
‘After stopping taking it, however, I started dating women. Coming out of the closet, I have never been more certain that this is what makes me happy.’
Emily was 26 when she went on her first date with a woman.
‘When I kissed a woman for the first time, I was sober and knew for sure that this is who I am,’ she says. ‘I woke up the next day and felt fireworks. Before, when I made love with a man, it was always under the influence of alcohol.
‘I told my friends and colleagues, family members and then my parents last.
‘They aren’t comfortable about my choice. But I feel like myself now — proud and grateful to have found what I was looking for.
‘Being with a woman is not always easy. It has challenged me in ways I could never imagine. Even in those complicated days and difficult moments, however, I do not question whether a man is the answer — I can’t go back.’
Emily has since been in three relationships with women, one of which lasted six years.
Looking back, she says: ‘I do wish I hadn’t taken the Pill. I’d have preferred for my body, feelings and emotions to have developed naturally. Besides, if it can change something as fundamental as your sexual preference, who knows what else I might have found out about myself?’
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