"According to the most recent Gallup poll on the matter, 9 percent of U.S. adults now identify as LGBTQ+…

Gallup finds 9.0% of U.S. adults identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or something other than straight or heterosexual in 2025. The percentage has more than doubled since Gallup first measured LGBTQ+ identification in 2012.

That is quite a high number, but the real story is what is occurring among our young adults.

According to that same poll, 23 percent of U.S. adults under the age of 30 now identify as LGBTQ+…

Young adults are far more likely than older adults to identify as LGBTQ+. Twenty-three percent of adults under 30 and 10.4% of adults aged 30 to 49 are LGBTQ+, compared with about 2% to 3% of older Americans.

I was curious, and so I had Google create a graph that shows how this number has changed since Gallup began asking this question in 2012.

The results were staggering…

The percentage of U.S. adults under the age of 30 that identify as LGBTQ+ has nearly quadrupled since 2012.

That is not just a trend.

That is a tsunami.

And there is a huge gender gap.

Only 11.4 percent of men under the age of 30 identify as LGBTQ+, but a whopping 31.4 percent of women under the age of 30 do…

Women are nearly twice as likely as men to identify as LGBTQ+ (10.5% vs. 5.6%, respectively), a gap driven primarily by women's higher rates of bisexual identification. Gender gaps are especially pronounced in the youngest generation — 31.4% of women aged 18 to 29 versus 11.4% of men in the same age group identify as LGBTQ+, with most of these younger women saying they are bisexual.

Nearly a third of all women in the United States under the age of 30 now identify as LGBTQ+.

That may help to explain the survey results that I discussed at the beginning of this article.

And the vast majority of Americans that identify as LGBTQ+ consider themselves to be bisexual…

Bisexual adults make up the largest share of the LGBTQ+ population at 58.6%, equivalent to 5.3% of all U.S. adults. Beyond that, 17.4% of LGBTQ+ adults say they are gay, 16.0% identify as lesbian, and 12.1% say they are transgender, all ranging between 1% and 2% of U.S. adults overall.

This is a point that is often lost when people debate these issues.

Bisexual adults make up the biggest portion of the LGBTQ+ population by a very wide margin."

https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/shocking-survey-finds-that-only-35

My Take: The Great Gender-Bender Musical Chairs

Something remarkable is happening to the way young Americans describe themselves. Human biology has not undergone a revolution in a generation, but the language of sexual identity certainly has.

The latest Gallup figures make the scale of the change difficult to dismiss. Nine per cent of American adults now identify as LGBTQ+, more than double the proportion when Gallup began measuring it in 2012. Among adults under 30, the figure is 23 per cent. The most extraordinary result concerns young women: 31.4 per cent of American women aged 18 to 29 identify as LGBTQ+, compared with 11.4 per cent of young men.

Nearly one young woman in three.

Yet the most revealing statistic may be what lies underneath that headline number. This is not primarily an explosion in the number of young women identifying as lesbians. Gallup reports that the sex difference is driven principally by bisexual identification, while bisexuals now constitute 58.6 per cent of America's entire LGBTQ+ population.

That should make us curious rather than hysterical. Human beings have not undergone rapid genetic evolution since 2012. Something cultural has plainly changed, but precisely what?

Michael Snyder draws attention to the figures while also pointing to the increasingly fashionable category of "heteroflexible": essentially someone who regards himself or herself as predominantly heterosexual while allowing for some degree of same-sex attraction. Snyder cites reports of extraordinary growth in the term, although the headline claim that 15 per cent of Americans are now heteroflexible is much less firmly grounded than Gallup's survey data and should be treated cautiously.

What we can say with much greater confidence is that the vocabulary through which young people describe sexuality has expanded enormously. That raises an interesting possibility: perhaps we are measuring not merely changes in sexual behaviour but changes in the cultural importance attached to identity itself.

This distinction is essential. A woman can sincerely describe herself as bisexual while dating men, marrying a man, having children with him and never having a sexual relationship with another woman. Her self-description may accurately represent attractions she experiences, but someone looking at the statistics should not assume that bisexual identification means bisexual behaviour in equal proportions.

This is not some conservative invention. Research into sexuality has long distinguished attraction, identity and behaviour, and studies have found particularly complicated patterns among women. Australian research into same-sex-attracted young people, for example, found young women considerably more likely than young men to identify as bisexual and less likely to describe their attraction in exclusively homosexual terms.

So when Gallup discovers that almost one-third of young American women identify somewhere within the LGBTQ+ spectrum, it does not follow that almost one-third have abandoned heterosexual relationships.

That is precisely what makes the statistic sociologically fascinating. What has exploded may partly be the willingness to locate oneself somewhere other than at the endpoints of an identity spectrum.

Once upon a time the cultural questionnaire effectively offered two boxes: heterosexual or homosexual. Today the menu is much longer, the social stigma associated with selecting a non-heterosexual category is much lower, and among some young social groups possessing a more complicated identity may carry positive rather than negative cultural significance.

None of this proves that people are lying about their attractions. It demonstrates that surveys of identity inevitably measure culture as well as sexuality.

The Great Gender-Bender Musical Chairs

And here is where things become amusing. Once identity becomes infinitely subdivisible, intensely significant and potentially revisable, capitalism and bureaucracy are unlikely to leave it alone.

Imagine the logical endpoint. Why settle for the primitive categories of yesterday when tomorrow's citizen could wake each morning and consult the identity application?

Monday: Category 3,714.

Tuesday: Heteroflexible with non-binary characteristics.

Wednesday: Category 4,209, pending reassessment.

Thursday: identity maintenance day.

The great Gender-Bender Musical Chairs economy would finally have arrived.

There would be consultants to determine your identity, counsellors to affirm it, HR officers to record it, academics to theorise it, bureaucrats to regulate discrimination against it, clothing companies to dress it and software developers to ensure that the other 4,208 categories never accidentally misidentify it.

Eventually somebody would introduce Gender Premium Plus, available for $14.99 per month, with unlimited identity changes and five additional pronouns included. This is satire, of course, but satire works when it exaggerates something recognisable.

Modern affluent societies have developed an enormous institutional apparatus around identity. Universities have diversity administrations. Corporations employ consultants. Governments develop terminology guides and inclusion policies. Forms that once asked for sex increasingly contain elaborate identity questions.

The market follows culture. If consumers attach importance to something, businesses will eventually sell products and services around it. The ultimate triumph would be an economy in which GDP could increase indefinitely as everyone continually redefined everyone else.

Why waste time building another dam? There are identities to administer.

GDP of the Absurd

This points towards a broader civilisational question.

Wealthy societies can afford extraordinary levels of abstraction because generations before them solved more elementary problems. The electricity arrives. Water comes from the tap. Supermarkets contain food. Sewage disappears. Bridges remain standing. Hospitals function. Container ships cross oceans carrying the products of vast industrial systems most citizens never see.

It becomes possible under those conditions to imagine that material reality is somehow secondary to self-definition. But somebody still has to maintain the transformers. Somebody has to repair the water main at three o'clock in the morning. Somebody has to grow wheat, manufacture bearings, weld structural steel, maintain sewerage pumps and climb transmission towers during storms.

Civilisation ultimately rests upon an extraordinarily physical foundation. The danger is not that bisexual people cannot perform these tasks. Obviously they can. Sexual orientation tells us essentially nothing about whether someone can become an engineer, electrician, farmer or surgeon.

The problem arises when a culture becomes so fascinated with classification of identity that it begins treating mastery of material reality as comparatively mundane. A civilisation cannot live indefinitely by rearranging its labels.

When the Lights Go Out

Consider a prolonged electrical-grid failure. Sexual orientations would not disappear. Gay people would remain gay and bisexual people bisexual.

What would disappear remarkably quickly is the luxury of treating increasingly minute subdivisions of personal identity as urgent matters of public administration. Within hours the important categories would become rather different.

Who can repair the generator?

Who knows where the water comes from?

Who has medical training?

Who can operate machinery?

Who can restore communications?

Who knows how to produce food?

Material necessity possesses a ruthless ability to restore perspective.

Nobody standing beside a failed transformer asks whether the electrician has sufficiently interrogated the gender assumptions embedded in the transformer.

They ask whether he can get the thing working.

That does not mean civilisation needs catastrophe. Quite the opposite. A healthy civilisation should retain its awareness of material reality without first requiring reality to punch it in the face.

That brings us back to Gallup. The most intellectually interesting response to these figures isn't to declare that nearly one-third of young American women have somehow biologically transformed. It is to ask why bisexual identification has expanded so dramatically.

Greater social acceptance is undoubtedly part of the answer. People who once concealed same-sex attraction can describe it openly. That is an obvious consequence of reduced stigma.

But it may not be the whole answer. Terminology has changed. Cultural expectations have changed. The social significance of identity has changed. Younger generations have been raised in an environment that encourages extraordinarily detailed introspection concerning sexuality and identity.

And the availability of intermediate categories itself changes survey responses. Give people only two boxes and they choose between two boxes. Give them a spectrum and people who experience occasional or ambiguous attractions have somewhere else to place themselves.

The emergence of "heteroflexible" illustrates the process beautifully. Someone who might previously have called himself heterosexual while acknowledging the occasional exception can now give that exception an identity of its own. Snyder reports that the term has recently surged on at least one alternative dating platform, although that highly selected population should certainly not be mistaken for America as a whole.

Perhaps tomorrow we shall discover flexibly heteroflexible. There is always room for another chair.

The point is not that everyone adopting one of these descriptions is pretending. Nor does accepting biological sex require denying the reality of variation in human sexual attraction. Humans have displayed heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexual behaviour throughout recorded history. The real puzzle is the speed of the statistical transformation.

Gallup says LGBTQ+ identification has more than doubled since it began measuring it in 2012. Among today's under-30s it stands at 23 per cent, while among older Americans it is only around 2 to 3 per cent. Genes do not move at anything resembling that speed. Culture does.

That alone should make social scientists intensely interested in socialisation, changing terminology, reduced stigma, peer effects, political attitudes, sexual behaviour and the distinction between attraction and identity.

Unfortunately, contemporary politics makes dispassionate investigation difficult. One side is tempted to interpret every increase as evidence that liberation has finally allowed people's authentic selves to emerge. The other is tempted to interpret virtually all of it as social contagion. Reality is probably considerably messier.

Some people who would once have remained closeted are undoubtedly more willing to answer honestly. Some are using new words to describe attractions that always existed. Some identities may be temporary. Some will remain lifelong. Some young people probably are influenced by their social environment, as young people have been influenced by social environments since civilisation began. The interesting scientific question is how much each factor contributes.

There is nevertheless something characteristically late-affluent about our fascination with proliferating identity categories. Earlier generations worried about feeding enormous populations, defeating infectious disease, electrifying continents, building railways and preventing great-power wars. We increasingly worry about whether the forms have enough boxes.

Perhaps that is evidence of extraordinary success. A civilisation that can devote immense intellectual energy to microscopic questions of self-definition must have solved many larger problems. The danger comes when it starts believing those larger problems have been solved permanently. They haven't.

Energy still matters. Food still matters. Fertility still matters. Families still matter. Engineering still matters. Defence still matters. Biology still matters. Reality has not signed the social contract.

The Gallup numbers therefore tell us something more interesting than that America has suddenly become vastly more homosexual. They reveal a generation that conceptualises identity differently from every generation immediately preceding it. Whether that represents principally greater honesty, changing sexual behaviour, expanding terminology, cultural influence or some combination remains an empirical question.

But one conclusion seems safe. Human nature did not transform at breathtaking speed after 2012. The culture did. And perhaps the defining absurdity of our age is that while the foundations of Western civilisation require increasingly urgent attention, we have become extraordinarily skilled at inventing ever more elaborate descriptions of ourselves while standing upon them.

Eventually the music stops, and reality returns.

https://michaeltsnyder.substack.com/p/shocking-survey-finds-that-only-35