About 30 % of Generation Z people identify as LGBTQ, according to a new Gallup poll.
Had that possibly be true?
Also, the Gallup poll, which also found that 22 % of Gen Z total identifies as Gay, is no exception. A growing number of Americans identify as LGBTQ, in large part due to the large share of Gen Zers who identify that means, according to new information.
According to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in January, 28 % of Gen Zers identify as LGBTQ. However, among high school in 2021, only 74 % said they considered themselves right, according to a research released last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What is driving this great wave?
One chance is cultural understanding. The Supreme Court legalized the same-sex wedding on the national stage in 2015, the same year that former Olympic and reality TV star Bruce Jenner announced that he now identified as a girl and wanted to be known as Caitlyn.
For Gen Z adults, which Gallup defines as those 18 to 26, their children was in a time of rapid change in LGBT opinions.
Since 2012, more Americans than certainly had favored the propriety of exact- sexual relationship, according to Gallup. More Americans than not have stated that they think gay and lesbian connections are social since 2009. Even now, a significant minority ( 43 % ) of Americans claim that changing one’s gender is morally acceptable despite the fact that 55 % of Americans claim otherwise.
However, widespread societal acceptance does n’t seem to have had such a profound impact on previous generations.  , Among teenagers, about 10 % say they identify as LGBTQ. That number drops to 4.5 % for Gen X, 2.3 % for baby boomers, and 1.1 % for the Silent Generation.
This gap is intriguing and raises concerns about the innateness of LGBTQ personality. Would n’t Americans who had been keeping their identities now want to reveal it in light of contemporary social norms?
HBO’s Bill Maher, no liberal, came under fire in 2022 when he reacted to a related Gallup poll by commenting that individuals may become identifying as Gay to be” cool”. Eric Kaufmann, then a professor of politics  , at England’s University of Buckingham, tweeted that Maher was right to say that individuality was” shaped by cultural trends”.
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Kaufmann’s thorough analysis of the data on LGBTQ recognition and young people revealed a number of intriguing factors.
Second, looking at Americans under 30 in the General Social Survey, Kaufmann found that although 16 % of them identified as LGBTQ, just 8.6 % had engaged in similar- sexual behavior. In a 2022 record for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, Kaufmann stated that” [n]n 2021, 6 in 10 young woman Gay names and almost 4 in 10 female Gay young people only had lovers of the opposite sex in the previous 12 weeks.
Bisexual women form a large percentage of Gen Zers who say they identify as LGBTQ in the latest Gallup poll: 20.7 % of Gen Z women identify as bisexual, while only 5.4 % identify as lesbian and 2.1 % identify as transgender.
But these women are n’t necessarily current practitioners of bisexuality. According to Kaufmann, 54 % of bisexual women under the age of 30 claim to have only had male partners in the last five years by revisiting the General Social Survey.
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University,  , also zeroed in on bisexual women to explain the rise of the LGBTQ identity among younger Americans. ” The changes are driven almost exclusively by an increase in bisexual people, particularly bisexual women”, Twenge wrote in her 2023 book” Generations”.
Twenge cited two potential causes of the rise in female bisexuality. Citing social psychologist Roy Baumeister, Twenge wrote that “women have more’ erotic plasticity,'” meaning women were more open to a variety of sexual experiences. ” So as the culture shifted toward more acceptance of LGB sex, women’s sexuality changed the most given their erotic plasticity”, she added.
A 2021 CDC survey found that only 10 % of sexually experienced high school boys reported having had a same-sex partner, compared to a quarter of sexually experienced high school girls who had had the same sex experience.
Twenge also looked into whether pornography had influenced younger women’s sexual encounters with men. She wrote,” If boys and young men are learning about sex from porn and are turning to each other for sex, is that why girls and young women are turning to each other for sex, and that is why Gen Z boys were first exposed to porn at age 9?” Straight, straight, well-trained straight men might not understand what they’re doing when it comes to female sexual pleasure.
Or, to be sexually excited, such young men may need violent behaviors like choking a female partner or other degrading sexual behavior toward her. These young men may be desensitized by porn. It’s not surprising that young women may want to stop engaging in this behavior.
Women outnumber their male peers in many ways, which is not just bisexuality. Younger men are less likely than younger women to admit to being transgender. In the new Gallup poll, 2.1 % of Gen Z women say they identify as transgender, while only 0.9 % of men do.
In the book” Irreversible Damage,” journalist Abigail Shrier pointed out that a study by physician-scientist Lisa Littman discovered that transgender girls frequently had friendship groups with other transgender girls.
” The prevalence of transgender identification within some of the girls ‘ friend groups was, on average, more than 70 times the expected rate”, wrote Shrier in her 2020 book. In other words, do these young women really struggle with gender, or is this just something to look into that is socially acceptable?
Is Gen Z evoking a shift in how sexual identities are defined in Americans? ” If current trends continue, it is likely that the proportion of LGBTQ+ identifiers will exceed 10 % of U. S. adults at some point within the next three decades”, writes Gallup in the report.
That may happen.
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Or the more nuanced facts that underpin the data may lead to Gen Z adults adopting a more heterosexual identity as they get older.
How long will bisexual women who have sex with men be recognized as bisexual? If it’s been more than a decade, or 20 years, since their last sexual encounter with another woman, will they still consider themselves bisexual? Will the transgender girls who are currently identified with us continue to do so, or will they join Chloe Cole and other detransitioners who now claim that their gender identification was a phase and not a permanent reality?
These new numbers tell the beginning of a story—but they do n’t tell the ending. We might be seeing a fundamental change in American culture, or we might even be seeing young people who enjoy sexual experimentation. Time will tell.
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