Every year around this time, Gallup releases the results of its annual report on sexual and gender identity in the US; a report it first started doing in 2012*. And in the time that I personally started paying attention to this annual event, it has always been accompanied by a flurry of press noting that a) Gen Z is way more (openly) queer than previous cohorts and b) a lot of both Gen Z and millennials are bi.
The way Gallup breaks down its data is a little weird: “gay” and “lesbian” are each their own separate category, but “bisexual” and “transgender” bundle everyone of every gender together (except in the gendered breakdown, which interestingly shows that men are equally likely to be gay or bi (2.1% in each group) but women way more likely to be bisexual than lesbian (5.7% compared to 2.0%)). So you could be forgiven if, perhaps, you initially assume that the seeming bisexual dominance is just a matter of how the data is presented: among Gen X, for instance, 1.9% identifies as bisexual compared to 0.7% lesbian and 1.3% gay, which seems like a lot of bisexuals until you remember that 0.7 + 1.3 = 2, which, for those of you who are bad at math, is more than 1.9.
But that breaks down once we get to the Millennials (my generation!), where the 1.3% who are lesbians plus the 1.6% who are gay only add up to 2.9% of the cohort — less than half of the 5.9% of us who are bisexual.
And when we get to Gen Z, well.
According to Gallup, of the 22.3% of Gen Zers who identify as LGBTQ+, 3% are lesbian, 2.6% are gay, and 15.3% are bisexual. I don’t need to do the math for you to know that that’s not just a issue of how the data is being presented. Gen Z is really strongly bi-identified.
I think it goes without saying that we’re seeing more openly queer young people because young people have grown up in a more queer friendly world; a world where marriage equality and queer representation are, if not a given, nowhere near as fraught as they were just twenty years ago (let alone earlier).
Yet at the same time, I feel deeply aware that a society that is more queer friendly is not automatically a society that is more bi friendly. And a part of me wonders what happens when an unprecedentedly openly bisexual generation crashes into a society that has yet to truly, authentically unpack its biphobia.
We’re seeing some of it already. The fact that many of these bisexual Gen Zers are female has, predictably, led to assertions that this increase is just young women who want to feel special and oppressed. And I don’t think that that’s going to just magically disappear simply because more and more young people identify as bi. Sheer numbers alone do not eradicate a backlash — if anything, they inspire it. We’re almost ten years out from Time‘s “transgender tipping point” article; in the decade since, we’ve seen both more openly trans people and more violent, transphobic legislation and anti-trans hate crimes (Nex Benedict deserved so much better).
And, look, there’s obviously no direct bisexual corollary to gender confirmation surgery bans. And I’m not even saying that anti-bi backlash is going to appear in the form of legislation (not least because I truly don’t know what anti-bi legislation would even look like).
But I do think that we can’t just expect biphobia to magically go away, just because more of us feel comfortable being out. Defeating bigotry doesn’t work that way. We’re going to need more of a plan.
* Though IIRC, the early surveys just bundled all LGBTQ+ people together in one bucket; I may be wrong — and I’m too lazy to look it up — but something in my brain is telling me that it was only in 2020 that the survey started distinguishing between the Ls, Gs, Bs, and Ts.
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