20% of Gen Z is LGBT
There’s a conservative talking point that modern society is making all the kids gay and transgender. As evidence, they point out that a full 20% of people in Generation Z identify as LGBT. That’s much higher than any previous generation:
Here’s Jordan Peterson worrying that the trend will continue, and Elliot Page will make all the kids transgender:
Bill Maher makes a similar argument. He notes that more people are identifying as LGBT in every generation and jokes that, in a few generations, everyone will be gay:
Maher claims that this is a social epidemic. More kids in California identify as LGBT than in Ohio. As he puts it,
“either Ohio is shaming trans kids or California is creating them”
What’s actually going on? Does California make children gay? Has modern society turned all the kids gay? Are people today just free to express their identity, in a way that previous generations were not?
One LGBT group makes up most of the increase
When you dig into the numbers, you find something different than Peterson describes.
It’s true that more people in Gen Z identify as LGBT than any previous generation:
But, broken down by category, the main increase comes from people identifying as bisexual, and it’s mostly bisexual women:
2.5% of Gen Z identifies as gay. Or, in other words, 5% of Gen Z men identify as gay. That has increased only slightly, from 4.4% in the previous generation.
4% of Gen Z women identify as lesbians.
The number of transgender people doubled, but it only went from 1% to 2%.
The big increase is among bisexuals — that category has gone from 2% in Gen X to 15% in Gen Z.
The number of bisexual women in Gen Z isn’t listed, but we can infer that it’s about 25%. And we can confirm that number from other polls.
Bill Maher says that people are becoming transgender because it’s trendy. But the only thing that’s trending is young women identifying as bi.
How many men are actually gay?
Surveys tell you one thing, but we can get an idea of people’s actual preferences from looking at porn searches.
On average, people search for “gay porn” about 4–5% as often as “porn”:
That’s surprisingly close to the 4–5% of young men that identify as gay.
It seems like a silly way to measure it, I’m kind of surprised that this works. I’ve never typed “porn” into Google. But, apparently a lot of people do that, it’s more common than searching for any of the top porn sites:
We can also look at the search trends, state by state:
People search for gay porn in every state, but there are some hotspots. Bill Maher pinpointed California as the state with the most gay people, but it doesn’t even make it into the top 5. Surprisingly, West Virginia has the highest “gay porn” searches per capita.
This still isn’t quite right — people also watch more straight porn in some states than others:
People in Utah watch the least porn. West Virginia is near the top of the list, only beaten by Mississippi.
So, maybe both gay and straight people are just hornier in West Virginia. I’m not sure why, but here’s one theory:
We could instead look at the ratios, and make a list of the 5 states with the most gay porn searches and the most straight porn searches:
West Virginia is still in the top 5, but 4 other states come up with a higher ratio of gay porn searches. Wyoming tops the list for straightest states. California still doesn’t make the top 5 gayest, but Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New York are known as tolerant places.
We can also try comparing this to the number of people that identify as gay, in various states. More people come out in some states than others:
We can graph the number that identify as LGBT against the number watching gay porn, for each state. This is not a perfect comparison, since it’s “percent of people identifying as LGBT” not “percent of men identifying as gay”. But, let’s see how it lines up:
Washington DC is a big outlier, at about 10% gay and 10% watching. Take that out and the graph gets easier to read:
There’s a decent correlation (R² = .33), but it’s not perfect. Compare some states — Idaho and Washington both watch the same amount of gay porn, but twice as many people in Washington identify as LGBT. North Dakota and California watch the same amount, but people are more than twice as likely to come out, in California.
I think this maybe supports the idea that there are plenty of gay people everywhere, they’re just more free to be open about that identity in some states than others.
It answers Bill Maher’s question — people in California watch gay porn at the same rate as in Ohio, but more come out in California. It doesn’t look like California is creating gay people, it looks like Ohio is shaming them. West Virginia and North Dakota are even more heavily in denial.
Since 5% of men in Gen Z now identify as gay, that just means that most of them are free to come out, since the actual number of gay men is somewhere around 5%. In the next generation, you’d expect it to still be somewhere around 5%.
How many men are bisexual?
These are all just anonymous porn searches, so we can’t tell how often men are searching for both gay and straight porn.
Some experimenters have tried a different approach to answer this question — they showed men both gay and straight porn videos and measured what they were aroused by.
A New York Times article from 2005 describes one experiment:
In the experiment, psychologists at Northwestern University and the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto used advertisements in gay and alternative newspapers to recruit 101 young adult men. Thirty-three of the men identified themselves as bisexual, 30 as straight and 38 as homosexual.
The researchers asked the men about their sexual desires and rated them on a scale from 0 to 6 on sexual orientation, with 0 to 1 indicating heterosexuality, and 5 to 6 indicating homosexuality. Bisexuality was measured by scores in the middle range.
Seated alone in a laboratory room, the men then watched a series of erotic movies, some involving only women, others involving only men.
Using a sensor to monitor sexual arousal, the researchers found what they expected: gay men showed arousal to images of men and little arousal to images of women, and heterosexual men showed arousal to women but not to men.
But the men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women. Instead, about three-quarters of the group had arousal patterns identical to those of gay men; the rest were indistinguishable from heterosexuals.
Some gay men used this research as proof that no one is actually bisexual. In the gay community, there’s a view that many men call themselves bisexual because they’re confused or afraid to come out. A common saying among gay men is that, “You’re either gay, straight or lying.”
On the other hand, some bisexual activists got offended by the study and asked the researcher to look further. A few years later, he ran the same experiment on a group of bisexual men who had been selected differently:
Bailey did a second study in which he used more stringent criteria to find bisexual-identified test subjects. Instead of advertising in an alternative newspaper and gay magazines, Bailey’s team recruited men who placed online ads seeking sex with both members of a mixed-gender couple. The men also needed to have had romantic relationships with both men and women.
To Bailey’s surprise, the new study — published in 2011 and called “Sexual Arousal Patterns of Bisexual Men Revisited” — found that the bisexual men did in fact demonstrate “bisexual patterns of both subjective and genital arousal.” Their arousal pattern matched their professed orientation
So, apparently, some men really are attracted to both genders. But, since it was hard for researchers to find that subset, you still have to think that this is rare — most guys who call themselves bisexual are just questioning their sexuality.
Also, those studies only measured physical arousal. Some people might have psychological reasons for having relationships with both genders. What you’re mentally attracted to might not be the same as what you’re physically aroused by.
Surveys put the number of bisexual men around 2%. We can guess that many, but not all, of those men will later settle down as gay or straight.
The same types of experiments have been done on women, to measure their arousal. But the results were a lot more complicated.
How many women are bisexual?
We can’t use porn searches to say anything about women. We could look at how often people watch lesbian porn. West Virginia is still in the lead:
But lesbians aren’t the main consumers of lesbian porn. These trends just tell us more about men’s porn preferences.
A 2009 New York Times article called “What Do Women Want?” describes attempts to measure women’s arousal. The article leaves me wondering whether the New York Times would publish the same thing today — it talks about everything from brain scans of transwomen to ciswomen having rape fantasies.
The article starts with a researcher who created a variety of different pornographic films and showed them to both men and women:
Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. She is a 36-year-old psychology professor at Queen’s University in the small city of Kingston, Ontario, a highly regarded scientist and a member of the editorial board of the world’s leading journal of sexual research, Archives of Sexual Behavior. The bonobo film was part of a series of related experiments she has carried out over the past several years. She found footage of bonobos, a species of ape, as they mated, and then, because the accompanying sounds were dull — “bonobos don’t seem to make much noise in sex,” she told me, “though the females give a kind of pleasure grin and make chirpy sounds” — she dubbed in some animated chimpanzee hooting and screeching. She showed the short movie to men and women, straight and gay. To the same subjects, she also showed clips of heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude.
She hooked up equipment to measure how aroused each person was, both physically and psychologically:
The genitals of the volunteers were connected to plethysmographs — for the men, an apparatus that fits over the penis and gauges its swelling; for the women, a little plastic probe that sits in the vagina and, by bouncing light off the vaginal walls, measures genital blood flow. An engorgement of blood spurs a lubricating process called vaginal transudation: the seeping of moisture through the walls. The participants were also given a keypad so that they could rate how aroused they felt.
Men reacted exactly how you would expect:
The men, on average, responded genitally in what Chivers terms “category specific” ways. Males who identified themselves as straight swelled while gazing at heterosexual or lesbian sex and while watching the masturbating and exercising women. They were mostly unmoved when the screen displayed only men. Gay males were aroused in the opposite categorical pattern. Any expectation that the animal sex would speak to something primitive within the men seemed to be mistaken; neither straights nor gays were stirred by the bonobos. And for the male participants, the subjective ratings on the keypad matched the readings of the plethysmograph. The men’s minds and genitals were in agreement.
But women’s responses were more mysterious:
All was different with the women. No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men. They responded objectively much more to the exercising woman than to the strolling man, and their blood flow rose quickly — and markedly, though to a lesser degree than during all the human scenes except the footage of the ambling, strapping man — as they watched the apes. And with the women, especially the straight women, mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person. The readings from the plethysmograph and the keypad weren’t in much accord. During shots of lesbian coupling, heterosexual women reported less excitement than their vaginas indicated; watching gay men, they reported a great deal less; and viewing heterosexual intercourse, they reported much more. Among the lesbian volunteers, the two readings converged when women appeared on the screen. But when the films featured only men, the lesbians reported less engagement than the plethysmograph recorded. Whether straight or gay, the women claimed almost no arousal whatsoever while staring at the bonobos.
It’s hard to interpret this if you’re asking what women actually want.
When investigating men, researchers decided they were gay or straight, or very rarely bi, based on arousal. By the same criteria, you would have to say that all women are bisexual, because they’re physically aroused by images of men and women.
But women’s psychological attraction doesn’t match their physical attraction, so that doesn’t sound right.
The article goes on to come up with many possible explanations for women’s odd sexual responses.
Researchers considered the idea that men are more inhibited than women in freely expressing sexuality. But brain scans disagreed. For instance, there was no sign of inhibition when straight men were watching gay pornography — the guys simply weren’t interested in it.
Another theory held that women are physically aroused by any suggestion that sex is going to happen soon, maybe as a protective mechanism against rape.
Another researcher followed famous bisexual women, and concluded that women’s attraction is mostly mental:
In 1997, the actress Anne Heche began a widely publicized romantic relationship with the openly lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres after having had no prior same-sex attractions or relationships. The relationship with DeGeneres ended after two years, and Heche went on to marry a man.” So begins Diamond’s book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire,” published by Harvard University Press last winter. She continues: “Julie Cypher left a heterosexual marriage for the musician Melissa Etheridge in 1988. After 12 years together, the pair separated and Cypher — like Heche — has returned to heterosexual relationships.” She catalogs the shifting sexual directions of several other somewhat notable women, then asks, “What’s going on?” Among her answers, based partly on her own research and on her analysis of animal mating and women’s sexuality, is that female desire may be dictated — even more than popular perception would have it — by intimacy, by emotional connection.
She found that women’s sexual identity was fluid:
Among the women in her group who called themselves lesbian, to take one bit of the evidence she assembles to back her ideas, just one-third reported attraction solely to women as her research unfolded. And with the other two-thirds, the explanation for their periodic attraction to men was not a cultural pressure to conform but rather a genuine desire.
She theorized that this was not a societal thing, but an innate hormonal difference between women and men:
Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement “I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender.” For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden. This may not always affect women’s behavior — the overriding may not frequently impel heterosexual women into lesbian relationships — but it can redirect erotic attraction. One reason for this phenomenon, she suggests, may be found in oxytocin, a neurotransmitter unique to mammalian brains. The chemical’s release has been shown, in humans, to facilitate feelings of trust and well-being, and in female prairie voles, a monogamous species of rodent, to connect the act of sex to the formation of faithful attachments. Judging by experiments in animals, and by the transmitter’s importance in human childbirth and breast feeding, the oxytocin system, which relies on estrogen, is much more extensive in the female brain. For Diamond, all of this helps to explain why, in women, the link between intimacy and desire is especially potent.
This theory almost makes sense. Except that, some women also lose sexual desire in stable relationships that should satisfy this sense of emotional closeness. A third researcher found that:
“Female desire,” Meana said, “is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s.” She finished a small qualitative study last year consisting of long interviews with 20 women in marriages that were sexually troubled. Although bad relationships often kill desire, she argued, good ones don’t guarantee it. She quoted from one participant’s representative response: “We kiss. We hug. I tell him, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ We have a great relationship. It’s just that one area” — the area of her bed, the place desolated by her loss of lust.
She even found that some women are more aroused by fantasies about sex with strangers, or even about non-consensual sex:
We talked about erotic — as opposed to aversive — fantasies of rape. According to an analysis of relevant studies published last year in The Journal of Sex Research, an analysis that defines rape as involving “the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will,” between one-third and more than one-half of women have entertained such fantasies, often during intercourse, with at least 1 in 10 women fantasizing about sexual assault at least once per month in a pleasurable way.
The appeal is, above all, paradoxical, Meana pointed out: rape means having no control, while fantasy is a domain manipulated by the self. She stressed the vast difference between the pleasures of the imagined and the terrors of the real. “I hate the term ‘rape fantasies,’ ” she went on. “They’re really fantasies of submission.” She spoke about the thrill of being wanted so much that the aggressor is willing to overpower, to take. “But ‘aggression,’ ‘dominance,’ I have to find better words. ‘Submission’ isn’t even a good word” — it didn’t reflect the woman’s imagining of an ultimately willing surrender.
A symbolic scene ran through Meana’s talk of female lust: a woman pinned against an alley wall, being ravished. Here, in Meana’s vision, was an emblem of female heat. The ravisher is so overcome by a craving focused on this particular woman that he cannot contain himself; he transgresses societal codes in order to seize her, and she, feeling herself to be the unique object of his desire, is electrified by her own reactive charge and surrenders. Meana apologized for the regressive, anti-feminist sound of the scene.
There’s some contradiction between what women lust for, and what they want in a relationship:
Yet while Meana minimized the role of relationships in stoking desire, she didn’t dispense with the sexual relevance, for women, of being cared for and protected. “What women want is a real dilemma,” she said. Earlier, she showed me, as a joke, a photograph of two control panels, one representing the workings of male desire, the second, female, the first with only a simple on-off switch, the second with countless knobs. “Women want to be thrown up against a wall but not truly endangered. Women want a caveman and caring.
In popular culture, maybe this turns into things like the Twilight series, where a woman is both threatened and protected by men.
So, 25% of women in Gen Z identify as bisexual.
From the surveys, you could come to the conclusion that this is too low, because all women are bisexual, to some degree.
Or you could say it’s too high, because most women from Gen Z will likely still end up settling down with men.
There’s no biological reason why it should be one or the other.
How many people are trans?
Researchers ran the same experiments on transwomen, having them watch the same pornographic videos that other men and women had watched.
They found that some transwomen are aroused like straight men and others are aroused like gay men. None of them seem to react like women:
These trans women, both those who were heterosexual and those who were homosexual, responded genitally and subjectively in categorical ways. They responded like men. This seemed to point to an inborn system of arousal. Yet it wasn’t hard to argue that cultural lessons had taken permanent hold within these subjects long before their emergence as females could have altered the culture’s influence.
In some sense, you could use those numbers to argue that no one is actually trans, and they’re all confused.
But this isn’t really a conclusive experiment, because the experiments are measuring sexual arousal, not anything else in the brain.
You could argue that being trans is about identity, or gender dysphoria, and has nothing to do with sexual preference. If you read interviews with transwomen, you’ll find many saying that transitioning or going on hormone therapy relieved dysphoria and made them feel normal.
In that case, there’s no easy way to know how many people feel dysphoria, short of just asking them.
In any case, only 2% of Gen Z identifies as trans. It’s worth talking about, but it’s not exactly an epidemic that’s harming all the children.
There’s no reason for Jordan Peterson’s incel fans to be afraid.
Jordan Peterson presented this whole thing as a moral panic — Elliot Page is encouraging young women to change their gender. He claims that this will harm a thousand people for every one it helps.
Peterson implies this is a crisis, he says that he has no idea “how bad things could get”.
The actual research makes things a lot clearer. About 5% of men are gay, a smaller number of people are trans, lots of young women identify as bisexual. For all we know, the number of bisexual women could get even higher.
Peterson’s fans freak out about societal decay. But the reality is that most of his fans are sitting at home, watching porn in between Peterson’s Youtube videos. Here’s what they’re searching for:
“Lesbian” is the 2nd most popular porn search. “Threesome” comes in at #7.
And even the men who are in relationships are dreaming about that threesome becoming a reality.
A world with more bisexual women is an upgrade for everyone.
Young women are free to explore their sexuality. Men are ever so slightly more likely to experience that elusive threesome they’ve always dreamed of. The incels get a little bit more porn to enjoy. And people can go about their lives identifying however they want, without some authoritarian Youtube star telling them how to live.
