The number of Americans aged 18 to 27 identifying as non-straight has more than doubled in 7 years, new polling reveals Wednesday.
A survey of 12,000 Americans by Gallup revealed that 22.3% of Generation Z now say they are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, or “other,” compared to 10% in 2017.
And 28.5% of Gen Z females say they are not straight, with 20.7% saying they are bisexual.
One expert told The Post that the reasons for the explosion in identifying as non-straight could include the effects of social media, influencers and Covid lockdowns.
But other experts said that Gen Z may simply feel more free to be public about their sexuality, particularly young women being happy to identify as bisexual.
The polling also revealed that the number of LGBTQ+ Americans has doubled over the past decade, with 7.6% of American adults identify as LGBTQ+.
The rate has exploded from 3.5% in 2012, when Gallup first began its polling, the company said in a statement released Wednesday.
“These changes have been led by younger Americans… [and] the generational differences and trends point to higher rates of LGBTQ+ identification, nationally, in the future.”
The LGBTQ+ population shrinks considerably among older generations. 9.8% of millennials, who were born between 1981 and 1996 say they are not straight.
The figure for Gen X, aged between 44 and 59, is 4.5%, while 2.3% of baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, and just 1.1% of the silent generation, those born before or during World War II, say they’re something other than straight.
According to the Gallup data, 0.9% of American adults currently identify as transgender. But Zoomers do at nearly three times that rate, coming in at 2.8%. An additional 1% of adults identify as nonbinary.
“Each younger generation is about twice as likely as the generation that preceded it to identify as LGBTQ+,” Gallup reported.
Dr. Erica Anderson, a psychologist who specializes in counseling transgender youth through transition, believes that a desire to belong to an oppressed identity might be at play.
“Great empathy for the oppressed strangely inclines some to identify with marginalized groups,” Anderson, who is herself transgender, told The Post.
She also points to a number of other factors, listing “the social isolation of the pandemic; dramatic increase in social media consumption; and the rise in a new phenomenon of ‘social influencers’ coaching young people to abandon the constraints of conventional identity and guidance by adults, including parents.”
Anderson has been a vocal critic of hasty medical intervention for the surging number of young people identifying as transgender.
“There still are trans and gay kids, but I think these are the minority of the gender questioning crowd,” she said. “And I’m worried that too many health professionals cannot see the forest for the trees.”
Other experts offered a different analysis.
“They’re feeling a lot of freedom in their generation,” Cornell psychology professor emeritus Ritch Savin-Williams told The Post. “There’s a rejection of rigid categories, like gay or lesbian or straight. They just don’t go.”
A growing number of Americans identifying as bisexual are pulling the numbers up.
Nearly 6 in 10 LGBTQ+ identifying adults say they’re bisexual, accounting for 4.4% of the US population, far outstripping gay and lesbian populations, which account for 1.4% and 1.2% of the population respectively.
Women were also considerably more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than men — at 8.5% compared with 4.7%.
Savin Williams, author of “Bi: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Nonbinary Youth,” said, “There’s always been more women identifying as bisexual than men, and I think that is because men are a lot more certain in terms of their sexuality.
“I think a lot of the increase is especially young women who maybe don’t see themselves as transgender or non-binary, but see themselves sort of in the realm of bisexual — whether that be sexual, or it could be gender, or it could be romantic.”
As the numbers continue to grow, with bisexual young women leading the pack, experts say the rate of increase in the LGBTQ+ population is likely to slow.
According to Gallup, more than 10% of the total population will likely identify as something other than straight within the next thirty years.
“We’re beginning to see a large expansion [of the LGBTQ population], but that can’t continue forever,” Savin Williams said.
