Gallup released their
annual poll on sexual identification
this week, which found the percentage of adults who identify as LGBT has more than doubled in the past decade from 3.5% in 2012 to 7.2% this year, even while overall LGBT identity has remained basically flat since 2022.
The movement toward LGBT identity was especially pronounced among the youngest Americans, with almost 20% of Generation Z claiming LGBT identity compared to just 1.7% of the Silent Generation.
People on the Left, like
Phillip Bump
, claim that more young Americans are identifying as LGBT now because the culture’s acceptance of the movement has left more young people feeling free to identify as their true selves. He compares it to the percentage of left-handed people doubling from about 6% to about 12% after schools stopped trying to force left-handed people to become right-handed.
“Maybe what Gallup is doing, then, is simply more accurately measuring reality,” Bump writes.
Maybe.
But if you dig into the numbers a little deeper, you’ll quickly see that almost all of the growth in LGBT identification is coming from young adults identifying as “bisexual,” and almost all of the growth in young Americans identifying as “bisexual”
is coming from young women
specifically.
So a more apt comparison would be if schools suddenly stopped teaching children to be right-handed and then only women revealed themselves as more likely to be left-handed.
The problems with Bump’s comparison don’t end there. When someone is left-handed, they are left-handed for life. People don’t suddenly switch between left- and right-handedness.
But that is exactly what is happening with young women who are identifying as bisexual. They are often identifying as bisexual on only a temporary basis. One
recent study
, for example, found that more than a quarter of non-heterosexual women returns to heterosexual identities in just a five-year window.
Studies
have long demonstrated that women’s sexual attractions are more fluid than men’s, often switching back and forth.
Which would be fine except there appears to be a real cost to young women when they move in and out of new sexual identities. One recent
study
found that bisexual females and females questioning their sexuality had significantly higher scores for depression, anxiety, and traumatic distress than female heterosexuals.
Also, not all women question their sexual identities equally. Another
recent study
found that attractive and highly educated women are the most likely to stay heterosexual, while those who are less attractive and have less education or more likely to question their sexual identities.
Maybe if our
popular culture didn’t denigrate marriage as a patriarchal tool of oppression
, and universities weren’t
constantly celebrating LGBT lifestyles
, fewer women would question their natural attraction to men and suffer the stress and depression of sexual uncertainty.
