What’s Behind the Rapid Rise in LGBTQ Identity?
Daniel A. Cox, Jae Grace, Avery Shields
Since 2012, Gallup has tracked the size of America’s LGBTQ population. The percentage of Americans who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, slowly year over year or queer was relatively low and inching up. In 2024, nearly one in ten (9.3 percent) Americans identify as LGBTQ. Gallup’s newest report recorded the single largest one-year increase in LGBTQ identity. Recently, the pace up has sped. For the first few years, there was not much news to report.
The steady rise in LGBTQ identity among the public is worth noting, but it’s not the most important part of the story. In less than a decade, the percentage of young women who identify as LGBTQ has more than tripled. Most of the uptick in LGBTQ identity over the past 10 years will be due to a dramatic increase among young adults, young women particularly.
The gender gap in LGBTQ identity has exploded as well. There is now a nearly 20-point distance in the sexual identity of young women and men. A decade earlier, younger women were just extra probable to identify as LGBTQ than fresh men slightly. Over the next nine years, LGBTQ individuality increased by 21 points among young women and only six points among young men. For instance, in 2015, 10 percent of young women and six percent of young men identified as LGBTQ.
As someone who studies cultural and social trends for a living, this is remarkable simply. There are a few explanations worth considering.
Is it Rising Social Acceptance?
For a very long time, several lesbian or homosexual people experienced forced to hide who they have been to keep away from open public condemnation, sociable stigma and also violence. But American society has changed a lot over the last few decades, and landscapes of LGBTQ people possess come to be less damaging than they once had been far. In 2024, 67 percent of US adults said that homosexuality should be accepted by society, up from 50 per-cent in 2007.
This argument is based on the idea that natural sexual preferences and identities were culturally repressed. Ross Douthat explained thwill be debate is akin to the rcan end up beinge in left-handedness, which increased rapidly after schools stopped prohibiting it: "Just as, for example, we discovered that left-handedness is much more common once we stopped trying to train kids out of it." After we ceased controlling intrinsic intimate variety, it flourished quickly.
Increasing social acceptance of homosexuality does not explain why the rise in LGBTQ identity is primarily occurring among young liberal women-are they uniquely tolerant or supportive? In fact, there is little change among older cohorts. If anything, the views of older Americans on LGBTQ issues have shifted more dramatically than young adults, but they are not demonstrating the same rise in LGBTQ identity.
What’s more, the progress in LGBTQ identification can be getting influenced by an increase of bisexuality mostly, it’s not due to extra gay and lesbian people coming out. The Gallup files presents that practically one-quarter of fresh females discover as bisexual. The genuine amount of People in the usa who determine as bisexual possesses exploded, among young women especially.
But bisexual identity does not neatly align with behavior. In our research, nearly all People in the usa who report smooth sexual preferences usually prefer 1 gender nevertheless. A past study by the Pew Research Center found that nearly nine in ten partnered-bisexual people are currently dating someone of the opposite sex. Even as sexual identities are shifting, it’s less clear if they reflect underlying changes in sexual practices.
Is it Social Media?
Another possible explanation for why women have experienced the most dramatic growth in LGBTQ identity is social media. Our exploration presents that youthful ladies who discover as homosexual as well, lesbian, bisexual or queer are much more active on social media platforms than women of the same age who will be straight. Youthful girls are usually considerably more energetic on cultural press than younger males drastically, and given gendered habits online, they are more likely to be exposed to accounts that feature LGBTQ topics.
For me, free lesbians this is a compelling explanation. The dramatic uptick in LGBTQ identity among young women during the pandemic makes some sense too.
After the COVID-19 pandemic restricted in-person socializing, social media became a refuge for many teens and young adults, and the use of platforms like TikTok spiked. A 2022 Business Insider article describes how some young women exposed to social media algorithms expressed greater openness to identifying as LGBTQ:
"The women said they joined TikTok to escape pandemic boredom or despair, only to find themselves drawn to videos of women kissing, grooving in thirst contains sexily, or discussing compulsory heterosexuality - the idea that women are socialized to assume they must like and be in relationships with men."
"As their ‘For You’ pages filled with queer content, the women began to question the years they spent pursuing relationships with men solely. Three have since come out as free lesbians, and one as queer. All said their time on the app was an earth-shaking experience, as they found out an option to famous traditions that hardly ever exhibits girls adoring various other girls romantically."
Since the earliest days of the Internet, online communities served as critical spaces for people from marginalized groups to connect with others who shared their experiences or identity. But these earlier electronic neighborhoods needed individuals to positively seek out out these re-inifocing areas, while contemporary community multimedia algorithms excel at transmitting affirmations to us directly. Throughout the past five years-particularly in 2024-LGBTQ pop culture, lesbian culture especially, has hit peak popularity. LGBTQ content creators play a central role in defining what’s trendy across the platform.
Research backs up these anecdotal accounts. One recent study found that repeated exposure to information describing "sexual orientation existing on a continuum" led respondents to adopt more fluid sexual identities or to express greater uncertainty about their sexual orientation.
Is it About Wokeness?
Another intriguing possibility is that LGBTQ identity, especially for young women, features become a new a fact level of pleasure or perhaps a new draw of friendly reputation. In We Possess Been Woke In no way, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi argues that being associated with or identifying as a member of a marginalized social group can confer social benefits in certain contexts.
He writes: "identifying with the umbrella term (LGBTQ) allows those who are relatively advantaged to portray themselves as the opposite-often by appealing to statistics that are driven heavily by adverse outcomes among those who are quite sociologically distant from themselves. The more elite the space, the more pronounced these tendencies become."
According to this theory, a young women might be more inclined to identify as bisexual because it offers some offers advantages in her peer group. and should end up being granted more esteem and deference. " Her thoughts may become given extra admiration, her faults might end up being considerably more pardoned simply, and she might avoid criticism of her habits. This occurs because, as al-Gharbi writes, "the widespread notion that people who are most oppressed can understand society most clearly…
It’s a provocative theory, and it might support describe how our current culture provides altered community incentives. But pupils at Ivy Little league universities have a tendency to get demographically distinctive in any variety of methods. Three attributes strongly predict LGBTQ identity: gender, politics and generation. For instance, as of 2023, nearly four in ten (38 percent) students at Brown University identify as LGBTQ. Musa al-Gharbi notes that students at Ivy League colleges are more likely to discover as LGBTQ students than young adults overall. At least in the Gallup data, there are not pronounced differences in LGBTQ identity across lines of education, race or income. However, there’s not much compelling evidence that LGBTQ people will be overrepresented among elites at the national level. They tend to be overrepresented among atheists and virgins also.
If you are liberal, young and biologically female your odds of also identifying as LGBTQ are usually very high. The overwhelming majority of conservative, average and liberal golden-agers happen to be right. Importantly, politics appear to be a much stronger predictor of LGBTQ identity among young adults-very few older Americans across the political spectrum identify as LGTBQ. Most young adults who are "very liberal" are LGBTQ; among young women who are very liberal, six in ten are LGBTQ.
It would be a mistake to assume that any current trend in sexual identity or preference is destined to continue. Rather, erotic identity may extra resemble politics identity-something that evolves through adolescence and earlier adulthood closely. In a recent survey, we found that Americans who identify as bwill beexual are more likely than those who identify as gay, in a straight line or perhaps lesbian to exhibit uncertainty about who they will be. Human sexuality as it is manifested in modern society will be not necessarily an immutable state of being or preference.
In our report, we wrote:
"Two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans who identify as bisexual say in the past 12 months they have sometimes felt unsure about who they were supposed to be. Close to half of gay and lesbian adults (48 percent) report feeling this way as often. Americans who distinguish as straight or heterosexual are less likely to feel unsure about who they are far; 29 percent report this feeling within the pseeing thatt year."
For most of us, these personal uncertainties and inquiries are usually not necessarily permanent. As we age, our cultural circumstance furthermore modifications, which alters the type of places and people that influence our behavior and beliefs. Through existing we learn a total lot about ourselves and the type of person we aspire to be. Current polling shows us a snapshot of who we are at this specific moment in time, definitely not who we will become often.
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