I read an article this morning that said 7.1% of Americans identify as LGBTQ, up from 5.6% in 2021 (EDIT: and ~20% of Gen Z). The article applauds this increase, and quotes multiple people who also applaud this increase, as a sign that more people are coming out of the closet.
I don’t think that anyone has made it obvious that that is what is happening.
Could being LGBTQ be fashionable? Are sexual appetites that were once considered to be preferences being redefined as identities? Are people with other bodily issues (dysmorphia etc.) being lumped in with the trans population?
Do we know? Because the two dominant positions seem to be that either more LGBTQ people are coming out of the closet (applause), or that society is decaying morally (boo).
My simple model is that it’s become less bad to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, etc. and so because it’s less bad the gradient allows those who would like to identify as LGBTQ to do so. On the ground this model doesn’t account for various individual factors in a choice to come out. For example, in a deeply conservative place where it’s only recently that you won’t literally be killed for identifying as gay, the people who most strongly want to express their gay or bisexual desires will feel able to do so (although not perhaps without a lot of anxiety, fear, struggle, etc.), but those with weaker desires will remain in the closet, perhaps even in the closet to themselves, because the cost of coming out is too high. In a very liberal place where people are actively lauded for coming out, there will be more coming out on the margin. In such a place perhaps you only feel a little bit queer, but you see lots of other people doing well who are out and you’d like to explore if that’s something you’d like to express more of. In such an environment you’re free to somewhat casual try out identifying as queer and if it turns out to not resonate for you then you can easily back off the identity with no real harm after having learned something about yourself. Among kids in very liberal places there likely are some amount of kids who will identify as LGBTQ now but may not in later life. This is not weird, though, just kids figuring out their identity, only now their options have expanded from traditional categories like mods and rockers, preps and punks, and losers and populars to include sexual identities. (Aside: I think this is a good reason to be conservative about trans kids transitioning, although not a sufficient argument to deny the right of all trans kids to medically transition, only an argument that we should consider that there might be a high base rate of kids who change their mind as they get older and regret transitioning and so can probably get better outcomes for everyone if we target slightly fewer false positives than we’d get by letting literally every kid who thinks they might be trans medically transition.) You could argue this is an LGBTQ identity being "fashionable", but I think "fashionable" is pejorative when used this way since fashion is literally just the same process: people try stuff out to see if they like it because they feel safe trying it, and if they don’t like it then they give it up or move on. People’s preferences change over time; that’s not a failing to deride but a fact of life. I’m not sure we have the ability to figure this out in fine detail without getting lost in the noise, so I prefer a simple model like this where it’s more "okay to be gay", so to speak, and this explaining the reward gradient that allows more people to come out for whatever individual reasons.
Comment
In response to your thoughts about trans kids transitioning, you might be interested in reading through this study, which, if I’m understanding it correctly, strongly indicates that the net positives of supporting (non-surgical) transition for kids outweighs the net negatives of false positive cases (Apologies for the overly-long link): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sonja-Ellis/publication/281441727_Suicide_risk_in_the_UK_Trans_population_and_the_role_of_gender_transition_in_decreasing_suicidal_ideation_and_suicide_attempt/links/55f753b908aeafc8abfed03f/Suicide-risk-in-the-UK-Trans-population-and-the-role-of-gender-transition-in-decreasing-suicidal-ideation-and-suicide-attempt.pdf
Comment
Yep, I think the policy decision here should largely follow the math. I’m not very clear from this study though how many suicides would be prevented by a policy change that might be something like "publicly funded medical transition of whatever type desired". I think we should be able to make simple QALY calculations though based on data available and use that to do a first pass analysis of what policies we expect to be best. My guess is the rate of suicide and mental health issues caused by not being able to transition or come out is not so large as to totally dominate the harms caused by transitioning and then changing one’s mind, but it probably mostly does, so the level of "not literally everyone" might just be a something as simple as asking people to go through some counseling process prior to administering any non-reversible interventions, which is something I think is largely already done, such that those who would come to later regret their transition will have a greater chance of figuring that out and backing out. There will of course always be false positives and false negative, so to me this is mostly a question about finding the most efficient policy that reaches the Pareto frontier and then making the tradeoff that produces the best outcomes (e.g. perhaps as measured my maximizing QALYs).
Comment
That seems fair to me, and I can confirm (as I have a number of trans friends who’ve interacted with the medical system) that there is a tremendous amount of screening beforehand, even more so in the UK than in the US.
Well, if you look at the study, the first thing to note is that by far the biggest increase seems to be in bisexuality, with bisexuals driving pretty much the entire increase: (This is cohort rather than longitudinal statistics, but presumably the longitudinal statistics look basically the same.) This seems to immediately rule out "Are people with other bodily issues (dysmorphia etc.) being lumped in with the trans population?" as a significant explanation for the increase, because that would require the increase to be driven by trans people, not bisexuals. I’m not sure what the distinction between "sexual appetites that were once considered to be preferences being redefined as identities" and "more people are coming out of the closet" is; they both seem to be rather vaguely getting at the same thing, that the sexuality was always present and is not getting openly labelled.
My suspicion is that it’s a similar factor to ‘increases’ in autism diagnosis that have nothing to do with an increase in autistic neurology, and may have factors other than the relative safety of ‘coming out of the closet’.1: More people who are on the spectrum are realizing it and feeling comfortable identifying it. It is surprisingly easy for an autistic, bisexual or trans person to go through life not putting a finger on what’s up, exactly, until there’s enough language of shared experience for them to say: oh, hey, that’s me.2: A broadening community. Asexual people welcomed in when we realized they could use some support, where they might not have felt part of it previously, which could easily account for a less than 2% increase in and of itself. Bisexual ‘invisibility’ fading as identities separate from specific practices gain more traction as a concept, yes.The fact that bisexuals are called out in the article makes me strongly suspect both of these, as a bi person myself. There’s plenty of anecdata about people realizing they fall into this camp quite late in life.
More than a decade ago you had https://www.webmd.com/sex/news/20060918/many-straight-men-have-gay-sex :
Comment
when you announce an identity, it’s useful primarily for signaling. even if i’m receptive to sexual acts with either sex, the IRL driver of most of these things for me today is romantic partnership. and when it comes to long-term romantic partnerships i have a strong preference toward the opposite sex, so i’m likely going to identify as "straight" in most situations to avoid giving off misleading signals, but it’s important to understand that the answer is context-dependent. it shouldn’t surprise anyone if my advertised orientation on a dating app like Hinge varies from my orientation on a hookup app like Tinder.
a simple "are you L/G/B/T" survey question is way too detached from context, it’s sort of meaningless. with enough control (cohorting, etc), maybe you can claim that "today’s generation thinks about sexuality differently than the previous generation" or "individual’s thoughts toward sexuality change as they age", both of which seem too trivial to merit asking the question in the first place. i think we lose a lot of the actual substance by treating these things as (context-free) identity.
Endocrine disruptors in the environment?