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Are a Quarter of Young Americans Actually LGBTQ (etc.)? Don’t Bet on It

People wave rainbow flags during the 2018 New York City Pride
Parade(Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
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By WILFRED REILLY
May 2, 2023 6:30 AM

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Why the surge in LGBT identity deserves a closer look
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Last month, in an NRO column jocularly titled “We Need a Return of the
Jocks,” I mentioned that around 20 percent of young Americans now
identify as gay — or, more specifically, as members of the “increasingly
broad and alphabetically lengthening LGBTQIA etc. community.”
Apparently, I spoke too soon and underestimated this figure. According
to new data reported in The Hill, the actual percentage of LGBT young
Americans is closer to 25–26 percent. For rather obvious reasons, this
is worth discussing.

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First, let’s review the numbers themselves. According to figures
originally sourced from the Orwellian-sounding Youth Risk Behavior
Surveillance System (YRBSS) administered by the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, only 75 percent or so of American high-school
students now identify as heterosexual. Roughly 3 percent — combined — ID
as gay and lesbian, while 12.2 percent identify as bisexual, 5.2 percent
as “questioning,” and 3.9 percent as “other” (trans, nonbinary, etc.
would presumably fall here). In what may be a measure of reading
comprehension rather than sexual openness, fully 1.8 percent of
responding young scholars said that they could not understand the
question. Overall, “the number of LGBTQ students went from 11% in 2015
to 26% in 2021.”

Several things are notable here. Obviously, there is simply no genetic
or biological explanation for a surge like this one. The percentage of
Baby Boomers who identify as LGBT is 2.7 percent, and the main change in
the “stock” of the United States since the 1960s and 1970s has been
large-scale in-migration of Latinos from some of the world’s more
conservative Catholic societies.

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Popular “culturalist” explanations like “increased social tolerance for
gays” or “more exposure to pornography” also basically fail. It seems
wildly unlikely that either of those variables has shifted upward by 240
percent since 2015 (not 1966) alongside the growth of the non-straight
population. Further, and importantly, mass rates of LGBT identification
seem confined almost entirely to young folx — while one would expect a
simple response to greater tolerance to involve citizens of every age.

One clue about what’s going on here is provided by the fact that a lot
of today’s “queer youth” don’t seem to be very gay in practice. As noted
above, only 3.2 percent of today’s young people say they are primarily
same-sex attracted — a figure very much on par with many recorded in the
past. That group is outnumbered about four to one by the self-declared
bisexuals. For that matter, a surprisingly large chunk of today’s
heavily female cohort of “bisexuals” seems to be spaghetti-straight in
practice. According to data from the Center for the Study of
Partisanship and Ideology, 55 percent of self-declared bisexual women
under age 30 have had only heterosexual sex (if sometimes quite a lot of
it) in the recent past.

This 55 percent figure represents a 412 percent increase in — if you
will — bisexual heterosexuality since just 2010, when the “men only”
figure recorded for the identical cohort of women was only 13.3 percent.
Further complicating this picture is the fact that sexually active
people of any kind are rapidly becoming a minority among the young.
According to the 2021 YRBSS report, the percentage of American
high-school students who have ever had sex fell from almost 60 percent
in 1991 to 30 percent in 2021.

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The percentage who are regularly sexually active is now 21 percent.
Likely, many high-school and college students describing themselves with
terms like “gleefully poly-queer” have never even French-kissed anyone,
of any sex. Indeed, entire fairly popular modern identities — “asexual,”
“demisexual” — are based around the theme of never or rarely having sex.

So, what are we to make of all this? Responding to a viral Twitter drop
of the CPSI data by the popular social-media account the Rabbit Hole
(which focuses on statistics), Andrew Sullivan, the well-known gay
columnist, gave one logical answer: “The most plausible explanation is
that everyone wants to be ‘LGBTQ+’ now — so why not lie and be cool?
Only problem is that this makes the ‘LGBTQ+’ community majority
straight.” Sullivan was blunt and even a little harsh, but his point is
clear. If we all set politics aside and simply look at the data, it
seems empirically obvious that the best explanation for today’s patterns
of sexual identification is what my fellow big-domes often call social
contagion.

Not only is there already significant evidence of contagion (“rapid
onset gender dysphoria,” etc.) occurring specifically within the context
of “gender” and sexual identity, this is obviously also something our
society and others witnessed during the growth of the great youth
“scenes” such as goth and rave, the spread of negative social trends
like anorexia, and even the post-1960s popularization and acceptance of
teen sex itself. I’m only partly joking when I say that a 400 percent
surge in the number of virgins with boyfriends who identify as “totes
bisexual” appears to fit some previous patterns to a T.

And, dead seriously, there is a rather obvious reason why we would be
seeing this pattern now. In an era when multiple major left-wing
organizations use the “progressive stack” ranking of victimization to
decide which speakers to prioritize, and I myself was able to write a
best-selling book about people who seek notoriety by faking racial
crimes, large premiums often attach to being considered unique (or
different) and even “oppressed.” At such a moment, it isn’t hard to see
why students and other young people, when given the option to move away
from mundane middle-class white status and identify as something à la
“enby x ace” (look it up), often do so. (In the U.S. and U.K., the
demographics of atypical gender and sexual orientation seem to perfectly
match this scenario. For example, in a recent study of young people who
identified as transgender, nonbinary, gender queer, etc., 34 of 36
respondents were white, 80 percent were female, and almost all seem to
have been middle-class.) The rapid spread of “Gender Unicorn”–style
public-school lessons detailing the full range of possible sexual
orientations and “genders” has likely not slowed this trend down.

What’s a parent to do about these trends? At the most basic and surface
level of analysis, not much. There’s nothing wildly wrong with being
bisexual (demisexual might well be the dream of fathers of girls), and a
huge number of the kids claiming these edgy-sounding identities aren’t
actually saying much — the percentage of people who truly are
preferentially gay likely hasn’t changed at all. Speaking as a cynic,
I’d say probably the worst way to prevent your teenage daughter or son
from participating in a trend you aren’t thrilled about is to get
hysterical enough about it to make it seem rebelliously cool.

At a deeper level, two tips do come to mind. First — and this applies
more in the context of gender than of sexuality but is important — it is
a hellaciously bad idea to let any minor child make permanent physical
changes to his or her body on the basis of an identity that,
statistically, the kid will very likely not hold in ten years. Second,
there is a lot to be said for normalizing normalcy inside your home.
Tell your kids that you’ll love them in any case, but also that
postmodern ideas are almost invariably bullsh**, and that — as I said in
my column mentioned above — there’s nothing wrong with being a boring,
well-adjusted, middle-class kid from [insert name of boring city here].

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WILFRED REILLY is an associate professor of political science at
Kentucky State University and the author of Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t
Talk About.

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