Recent survey data showing a purported rise in LGBTQ self-identification should be taken with many grains of salt.
Recent survey data showing a purported rise in LGBTQ self-identification should be taken with many grains of salt.
‘E veryone will be gay in 2054,” quipped Bill Maher acerbically on a recent segment of his show. “No one will be straight anymore,” in four or five generations, Marjorie Taylor Greene warned recently on her MTG: Live broadcast. Both drew on Gallup surveys showing that the share of Gen-Z (currently ages 18–25) identifying as LGBTQ has doubled in the past five years to more than a fifth of young people. Maher claimed that much of the increase is owing to the fact that it’s trendy for young people to identify as something other than heterosexual. Why, he wondered, are young people in Ohio less gay than their counterparts in California?
A close look at the data shows that Maher is right.
Maher’s clip on YouTube has racked up more than 2 million views, and the growing awareness of the LGBT explosion among youth is providing the mood music for an increasingly heated political battle. Ross Douthat identifies a new “LGBTQ Culture War” between alarmed social conservatives and excited progressives that revolves around the sharp rise in non-heterosexual identity among young Americans. If a fifth of young Americans are opting out of heterosexuality, what will happen to family formation and the Republican vote?
The trans issue is especially urgent. Abigail Shrier observed in her book Irreversible Damage that transgender and “nonbinary” identification has soared by almost 1,000 percent since 2010. If the number of trans kids continues to rise, how much more gender-reassignment surgery will be performed on young people? Only in this context can we understand Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay bill and the new attention to sexual “grooming” in schools.
But what if the numbers are inflated? What if the rise is, as Maher asserts, mainly a pose rather than a genuine change in sexual behavior and lifestyle? What is missing in this debate is the less sexy story that emerges from my new report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI): that the rise is both overstated and less consequential than we think.
This doesn’t mean the Gallup findings are unimportant. Survey data show a strong correlation between three things: LGBT identity, extreme liberalism, and poor mental health. Derek Thompson reported in the Atlantic that upwards of three-quarters of LGBT teens now say they feel persistently sad or hopeless. This is not to say that the rise in LGBT identity has produced the youth mental-health crisis, but evidence in my report suggests that LGBT identification has risen most rapidly among the anxious and depressed, as well as among the very liberal. The standard view that this is a result of discrimination sits awkwardly with the rise in tolerance toward LGBT people since 2008, when a measure banning same-sex marriage passed even in deep-blue California. Have the changes that increased LGBT identity also led to deteriorating mental health? So far, researchers have not explored this possibility.
Let’s get to the bottom of the data. Those on both the left and the right who see the changes as transformational are right to trust established survey firms with sound survey methods. The questionnaire that Gallup fielded, for instance, reached more than 12,000 Americans. Other surveys used in my report find similar or higher levels of non-heterosexual identity among young people. Given this powerful evidence, and the fact that attitudes crystallized in young adulthood often endure for life, how can these changes be anything other than transformational — portending a less “heteronormative,” more liberal, America?
First, the rise in LGBTQ sexual behavior is considerably less dramatic than the rise in non-heterosexual identity. In the General Social Survey, which has asked about both since 2008, the rise in same-sex behavior among the under-30s since 2008 is around four points whereas the rise in LGBTQ identity is eleven points. The four-point rise in behavior is actually even lower because it ignores the 20 percent of young people with no sexual partners.
The fastest growth category has been bisexuality, especially among women. Yet the divergence between LGBT behavior and identity helps explain why the share of bisexual women who report having only male sexual partners in the previous five years rose from around 20 percent during 2008–12 to nearly 60 percent in 2021. Scholars distinguish between those with incidental same-sex attraction and those with persistent and strong attraction. The data suggest that much of the rise in LGBTQ identity among young people has, as Maher suggested, taken place among those with conventional sexual behavior who have incidental rather than persistent same-sex attraction.
Second, the increase in transgender or “nonbinary” identification appears to have peaked in 2020 and declined in 2021. While it is difficult to be certain about such a small population, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) 2020 and 2021 surveys of a combined 57,000 undergraduates at leading American universities show that the weighted proportion identifying as “nonbinary” declined significantly within a set of 50 schools, from 1.5 percent in 2020 to 0.85 percent in 2021. Across 150 campuses, students under 20 were significantly less likely to identify as “nonbinary” in 2021 than students over 20 were. This dovetails with Canada’s recent census data, which show that the share of transgender or “nonbinary” individuals rises in every age group as we move from old to young but peaks at 0.85 percent among the 20 to 24s before declining to 0.73 percent among the 15 to 19s. In a similar vein, British data show that referrals for potential gender-reassignment surgery rose from 136 in 2010–11 to a peak of around 2,750 in both 2018–19 and 2019–20 before falling to 2,383 in 202021.
Third, the politically radical potential of the LGBT rise is blunted considerably by the fact that non-heterosexual growth seems to have disproportionately taken place among those who identify as “very liberal” on a five-point ideology scale, a group that’s no more than a fifth of young people. In the General Social Survey, the LGBTQ share of “very liberal” young people rose from 11 percent in 2008–10 to 34 percent in 2021. Among “slight liberals,” moderates and conservatives, it increased from 3 to just 9 percent. Though LGBTQ young people lean Democratic at similar rates as in the past, the rise in LGBTQ share has not translated into Democratic gains: The partisan balance among young people has changed very little since 2008, with young people shifting more Democratic in the Obama years, then falling back somewhat thereafter. It seems that LGBTQ growth among twentysomethings has been relatively concentrated within the very liberal minority.
Fourth, schools appear to have less influence over sexual identity than some believe. In the FIRE undergraduate data, about a quarter of students who attended public, private, or parochial schools, or who were homeschooled, identified as LGBTQ. There is no significant difference between those with a more religious education and others. While it is possible that LGBTQ parochial and homeschool students disproportionately select into the 150 research-intensive and state-flagship universities at higher rates than their public and private school counterparts do, these results suggest that schools influence sexual identity less than some believe.
Fifth, on a less dramatic note, it is possible that young people who are high in psychological openness or other characteristics associated with non-heterosexual identity may be more likely to complete surveys. In Britain, YouGov finds that a quarter of the 5,407 18- to 20-year-olds in its panel in 2022 identified as LGBTQ, with no clear difference by age. However, the 2019 official Office of National Statistics figures, using a similar question on a 320,000 national sample, finds that only 7.6 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds identified as LGBTQ in its most recent release, in 2019. This suggests that the share of sexual minorities could be overstated in surveys by a factor of 2 or 3. And if we compare the 0.8 percent transgender and “nonbinary” share of Gen-Z in the 2021 Canadian census with Gallup’s 2.1 percent Gen-Z estimate for the United States in the same year, it seems plausible that the transgender share is less than half of what surveys suggest.
A final point concerns the relationship between LGBT identity and mental health. The surveys I looked at show that “very liberal” young people are twice as likely as moderates and conservatives to report being sad or anxious most of the time. LGBT young people are two to three times more likely to have such emotional problems than heterosexuals are. One major study showed that mental health declined markedly faster among LGBT teens than others between 2012 and 2018. I find something similar for people under 30 in the General Social Survey: in 2002–12, 7 percent of unhappy people and 5.5 percent of very happy people were LGBT. By 2018–21, LGBT individuals made up 22 percent of unhappy people and 11 percent of very happy people, a wider gap. The change is only partly explained by social-media use, thus may stem more from the psychological correlates of sexuality and ideology, interacting with a more transgressive youth culture.
If the LGBTQ surge among young people is only half as large as reported, if it concerns identity more than behavior, if it’s concentrated among those who are already very liberal and is unaffected by schooling, then it will not revolutionize family life or partisanship. But the increasingly woke youth culture that is stimulating LGBT identity could also be affecting people’s mental health. In which case, it’s time we had a more honest discussion about this culture and its effect on young people.