(LifeSiteNews) — Earlier this week, I noted in an essay that as we see skyrocketing rates of young people identifying as LGBT and a corresponding downward trend of those who identify as Christian, we are witnessing a migration from one cultural power source to another. Polls over the last couple of years have shown that up to a quarter of Gen Z – those born between 1996 and 2010 – identify as somewhere on the ever-expanding LGBT spectrum.
A recent Gallup poll shows that trend accelerating rapidly. Back in 2016, when my first book The Culture War was published, under 3 percent of people identified as anywhere on the LGBT spectrum. Last year, that number hit a staggering 7.6 percent. The Gallup survey of 12,000 people aged 18 and up also found that the majority of the growth comes from young women, who were twice as likely as men to identify as LGBT.
READ: STIs continue to skyrocket after decades of so-called ‘sex education’
According to Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, “Almost 30% of Gen Z women identify as LGBTQ+, most as bisexual. That’s where a lot of the growth seems to be happening. It’s important how much the LGBTQ community is bisexual, and that’s definitely something we see among the younger generations.” Across the board, 8.5 percent of women now identify as LGBT and 4.7 percent of men, which is also a steep increase. According to NBC:
Parsing each generation, the gender story gets more interesting. In the three younger generations surveyed – Generation Z, millennials and Generation X – women are more likely than men to identify as LGBTQ. However, in the two oldest generations – baby boomers and the Silent Generation – it is reversed. (The gender breakdown does not account for nonbinary respondents, who represented about 1% of those surveyed.)
The group most likely to identify as LGBTQ, by far, was Generation Z women (ages 18 to 26), 28.5% of whom identified as LGBTQ in the survey. The lion’s share of them, of all Gen Z women surveyed, 20.7%, identified as bisexual, followed by 5.4% who identified as lesbians. Gen Z women were nearly three times more likely than Gen Z men to identify as LGBTQ. Bisexuals made up the highest percentage of LGBTQ respondents, at 57.3% – or 4.4% of all adults surveyed. Gay men represented 18.1% of LGBTQ respondents, lesbians 15.1% and transgender people 11.8%, the survey found.
What does this mean? As I’ve noted before about similar data showing similar trends, this highlights the fact that many are identifying on the LGBT spectrum for cultural reasons, adopting the label rather than the lifestyle. Commentators such as Andrew Sullivan (and others) have noted that while the rates of those who identify as LGBT continue to go up, the rates of same-sex behavior have not gone up. In short, it is now cool to be LGBT, and with the growing number of available labels, you don’t actually have to change your sexual preferences to call yourself “queer.” Your identify can be fluid even while you consistently date the opposite sex. For example, Jones observed that plenty of respondents wrote that they were “pansexual” or “asexual” – 3 percent of LGBT respondents.
READ: Biden uses gender-confused teenager’s suicide to promote radical LGBT ideology
The Gallup report concluded: “Overall, each younger generation is about twice as likely as the generation that preceded it to identify as LGBTQ+. More than one-in-five Gen Z adults, ranging in age from 18 to 26 in 2023, identify as LGBTQ+, as do nearly one in 10 millennials (age 27-42).” Of the Silent Generation, who are now in their late 70s or older, only 1 percent identify as LGBT. Gallup assumes that these trends will continue, with the percentage of Americans who identify as LGBT hitting 10 percent sometime in the next few decades.
The cultural victory of the LGBT movement has been almost unbelievably successful – and as the number of available genders and sexual identities continues to grow, so will those who opt in to this powerful movement.
