Currents

In survey after survey over the past decade, the percentage of society who identifies as LGBTQ+ increased by the year. According to a new Gallup poll, 7.6% of all American adults now identify as LGBT, up from 7.2% last year. Among Generation Z in particular, that figure is 22.3%. Covering these sorts of reports has become part of my beat as a writer and editor in this space, and I see the many strains of skepticism or outright hostility that surrounds this subject every time a new survey is released — some of them I’ve directly addressed. I’ve written about the mistaken notion that this rise in LGBT identification is the result of young people jumping on a social bandwagon, or the idea that the “rainbow mafia” is trying to turn everyone gay.

One of the most common attitudes I encounter, not only on social media but also among the responses my own articles have generated, is the pervasive belief that the growth of the LGBTQ+ community is, in fact, the growth of TQ+ in particular. Across public discourse, people confidently assert that LGB is a relatively stable cohort whose numbers do not change much, and that we’re witnessing a tidal influx of trans people, straight folks calling themselves “queer”, and young people adopting Tumblr-identities like “sapiosexual.” But there’s a big problem: it isn’t true. This claim makes almost no contact with the actual data. The breadth of this disconnect with reality would be amusing if it weren’t the source of such colossal confusion, and so it’s worth setting the record straight here.

Innumeracy and ignorance about demographics are nothing new. Polling going back generations shows that the public generally has no clue how large or small various demographics are, and they tend to massively overestimate the size of minority groups. In 1990, the average American guessed that 32% of the country was black. At the time, the actual figure was 12.1%. In a 2022 YouGov survey, Americans thought 27% of the country was Muslim. In reality, it's 1%. Similarly, they thought 30% were Jewish (the true figure is 2%), 33% atheist (3%), 41% Catholic (22%), and 58% Christian (70%). If you’re keeping count, those figures add up to a comical 189%. The same poll found that folks thought 30% of the US were gay or lesbian, 29% bisexual, and 21% transgender. That’s 80%! A Queer Majority indeed. As a reminder, according to the latest polls, 7.6% of the US is LGBT.

In such an ignorance-riddled landscape, coupled with the distorting effects of press coverage and the culture wars, it’s no surprise so many people assume the TQ+ crowd is descending upon society in Xerxes-like multitudes that blot out the sun. Log onto social media, and the volume of TQ+ discourse is dialed up to a permanent 11. Let’s look at what the data actually shows.

In the aforementioned Gallup survey, bisexual, lesbian, and gay people make up 90.5% of the LGBTQ+ population. Bi folks alone are about 60%. Trans people make up 11.8% of the LGBT community — less than 1% of society. (These numbers add up to more than 100% simply because some people are both LGB and trans.) 1.1% of LGBT people identify as “other.” That accounts for the T and the “+.” What about the “Q”, the supposed epidemic of straight folks enigmatically calling themselves “queer” as some kind of radical political identity? They comprise a whopping 0.1%. Not 0.1% of all American adults, 0.1% of the LGBT community.

As a sidebar, at Queer Majority, we discuss the concept of queerness in its most universalist sense — as an umbrella that covers not merely LGBT people but anyone who does not fully conform to their society’s norms surrounding sex, sexuality, gender, romance, or relationships. Queerness, as we see it, is a celebration of individuality, a reminder that we are all unique in our own ways and that being different is something we all have in common. But the brand of queerness employed by extremists on one side of the political spectrum and endlessly scaremongered about by the extremists on the other side — “queerness as a radical, deconstructive identity” — is truly scarce. Indeed, there are so few of these types of “queer” people that the pollsters at Gallup didn’t even bother asking their respondents about them. Less than 0.1% of people volunteered it when asked about their sexuality.

It is true that, over the past 15 years, the number of trans-identified people has risen as a percentage of society and that there are more identity labels than ever before. However, the perception of LGB as this static and persistently tiny population and TQ+ as an exploding cohort of people is based entirely on perception and anecdotes, not data. Not only do LGB people, and bi folks in particular, account for the vast majority of LGBT people today, but they also account for the vast majority of the increase in LGBT identification over recent years.

In 2011, UCLA’s Williams Institute combined all of the available data at the time to estimate that 3.5% of the US were gay, lesbian, or bi, and 0.3% were trans. 10 years later, in 2021, the first year in which Gallup began breaking down the LGBT community by subsets, they found that 5.2% of Americans were LGB, 0.6% were trans, and 0.2% were “other.” In the new 2024 data, LGB people are 7% of the US (with bi at 4.4% on its own), trans at 0.9%, and asexual, “queer”, and “other” combined for about 0.2%. In absolute terms, LGB identification has grown by 3.5 percentage points in the past 13 years, compared to a 0.8-point rise in trans, queer, and the rest. In other words, the LGBT community, and the increase in LGBT identification, is, and always has been, driven primarily by bisexual people and to a lesser extent, gays and lesbians.

The reason behind the “rise” of LGB, as I have discussed in previous pieces, is the increasing acceptance of same-sex relations in society. Even while the average person estimates that LGBT people are 80% of society, they simultaneously assume that same-sex behavior must be naturally rare, which we know not to be the case. Bisexual attractions and behavior have been prevalent as far back as sex researchers have been studying them, and additional evidence from the animal kingdom, primates, and human genetics shows that same-sex behavior is linked to reproductive and evolutionary advantages. In light of everything we know, therefore, there is good reason to attribute the growth in LGB identification not to more people being same-sex attracted compared to the past, but to more people feeling able to explore such attractions openly.

Of course, just because trans folks are not driving the increase in LGBT identification, and just because they remain a small minority within the LGBT umbrella, is not to say that trans people or issues don’t matter. Like all people, trans folks deserve equal rights, legal protections, social acceptance, courtesy, and dignity. And it’s clear to me as someone who covers LGBT issues for a living that the drive among critics and skeptics to blow the TQ+ cohort out of proportion is not merely the product of statistical ignorance, but of pervasive bigotry. For many of an “anti-woke” persuasion, there is no group trendier to smear, ridicule, or demonize than trans people. They have become the nail that every mouth-breather with a Maslowian hammer wants to see sticking out of everything they find unfamiliar and scary. Inflating the scope of something one is trying to demonize is demagoguery 101.

It’s probably unrealistic to expect the same public who thinks that 30% of Americans are vegetarians or vegans (I wish!) to get up to speed on the true size of the LGBT community. Faith in humanity does not survive long when watching “man on the street” interviews. But it is nevertheless important for those interested in the truth — which includes you, if you’re reading this — to correct the record when it is misrepresented, especially when done for the purposes of denigrating others. Whether as a matter of moral principle or simply as a matter of fact, let’s make an effort to refute the misconceptions about the LGBT community.

Published Apr 9, 2024