What's Behind the Rapid Rise in LGBTQ Identity?

Nearly one in three young women are LGBTQ

Since 2012, Gallup has tracked the size of America’s LGBTQ population. For the first few years, there was not much news to report. The percentage of Americans who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer was relatively low and inching up slowly year over year. Recently, the pace has sped up. Gallup’s newest report recorded the single largest one-year increase in LGBTQ identity. In 2024, nearly one in ten (9.3 percent) Americans identify as LGBTQ.

The steady rise in LGBTQ identity among the public is worth noting, but it’s not the most important part of the story. Most of the uptick in LGBTQ identity over the past decade is due to a dramatic increase among young adults, particularly young women. In less than a decade, the percentage of young women who identify as LGBTQ has more than tripled.

The gender gap in LGBTQ identity has exploded as well. A decade earlier, young women were only slightly more likely to identify as LGBTQ than young men. For instance, in 2015, 10 percent of young women and six percent of young men identified as LGBTQ. Over the next nine years, LGBTQ identity increased by 21 points among young women and only six points among young men. There is now a nearly 20-point gap in the sexual identity of young women and men.

As someone who studies cultural and social trends for a living, this is simply remarkable. There are a few explanations worth considering.

Is it Rising Social Acceptance?

For a very long time, many gay or lesbian people felt compelled to hide who they were to avoid public condemnation, social stigma and even violence. But American society has changed a lot over the last few decades, and views of LGBTQ people have become far less negative than they once were. In 2024, 67 percent of US adults said that homosexuality should be accepted by society, up from 50 percent in 2007.

This argument is based on the idea that natural sexual preferences and identities were culturally repressed. Ross Douthat explained this argument is akin to the rise in left-handedness, which increased rapidly after schools stopped prohibiting it: “Just as, for example, we discovered that left-handedness is much more common once we stopped trying to train kids out of it.” Once we stopped suppressing intrinsic sexual diversity, it quickly flourished.

Increasing social acceptance of homosexuality does not explain why the rise in LGBTQ identity is primarily occurring among young liberal women—are they uniquely tolerant or supportive? If anything, the views of older Americans on LGBTQ issues have shifted more dramatically than young adults, but they are not demonstrating the same rise in LGBTQ identity. In fact, there is little change among older cohorts.

What’s more, the growth in LGBTQ identity is primarily being driven by an increase of bisexuality, it’s not due to more gay and lesbian people coming out. The number of Americans who identify as bisexual has exploded, especially among young women. The Gallup data shows that nearly one-quarter of young women identify as bisexual.

But bisexual identity does not neatly align with behavior. Even as sexual identities are shifting, it’s less clear if they reflect underlying changes in sexual practices. In our research, most Americans who report fluid sexual preferences still generally prefer one gender. A past study by the Pew Research Center found that nearly nine in ten partnered-bisexual people are currently dating someone of the opposite sex.

Is it Social Media?

Another possible explanation for why women have experienced the most dramatic growth in LGBTQ identity is social media. Young women are significantly more active on social media than young men, and given gendered habits online, they are more likely to be exposed to accounts that feature LGBTQ topics. Our research also shows that young women who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or queer are much more active on social media platforms than women of the same age who are straight.

For me, this is a compelling explanation. The dramatic uptick in LGBTQ identity among young women during the pandemic makes some sense too.

After the COVID-19 pandemic restricted in-person socializing, social media became a refuge for many teens and young adults, and the use of platforms like TikTok spiked. A 2022 Business Insider article describes how some young women exposed to social media algorithms expressed greater openness to identifying as LGBTQ:

“The women said they joined TikTok to escape pandemic boredom or despair, only to find themselves drawn to videos of women kissing, dancing sexily in thirst traps, or discussing compulsory heterosexuality — the idea that women are socialized to assume they must like and be in relationships with men.”

“As their ‘For You’ pages filled with queer content, the women began to question the years they spent solely pursuing relationships with men. Three have since come out as lesbians, and one as queer. All said their time on the app was an earth-shaking experience, as they discovered an alternative to popular culture that rarely shows women loving other women romantically.”

Since the earliest days of the Internet, online communities served as critical spaces for people from marginalized groups to connect with others who shared their experiences or identity. But these early virtual communities required people to actively seek out these affirming spaces, while modern social media algorithms excel at sending affirmations directly to us. LGBTQ content creators play a central role in defining what’s trendy across the platform. Throughout the past five years—particularly in 2024—LGBTQ pop culture, especially lesbian culture, has hit peak popularity.

Research backs up these anecdotal accounts. One recent study found that repeated exposure to information describing “sexual orientation existing on a continuum” led respondents to adopt more fluid sexual identities or to express greater uncertainty about their sexual orientation.

Is it About Wokeness?

Another intriguing possibility is that LGBTQ identity, especially for young women, has become a point of pride or a mark of social status. In We Have Never Been Woke, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi argues that being associated with or identifying as a member of a marginalized social group can confer social benefits in certain contexts.

He writes: “identifying with the umbrella term (LGBTQ) allows those who are relatively advantaged to portray themselves as the opposite—often by appealing to statistics that are driven heavily by adverse outcomes among those who are quite sociologically distant from themselves. The more elite the space, the more pronounced these tendencies become.”

According to this theory, a young women might be more inclined to identify as bisexual because it offers some offers advantages in her peer group. Her ideas might be afforded more respect, her mistakes might be more easily forgiven, and she might avoid criticism of her behavior. This occurs because, as al-Gharbi writes, “the widespread notion that people who are most oppressed can understand society most clearly... and should be given more deference and respect.”

It’s a provocative theory, and it may help explain how our current culture has altered social incentives. However, there’s not much compelling evidence that LGBTQ people are overrepresented among elites at the national level. Musa al-Gharbi notes that students at Ivy League colleges are more likely to identify as LGBTQ students than young adults overall. For instance, as of 2023, nearly four in ten (38 percent) students at Brown University identify as LGBTQ. But students at Ivy League schools tend to be demographically distinct in any number of ways. They also tend to be overrepresented among atheists and virgins. At least in the Gallup data, there are not pronounced differences in LGBTQ identity across lines of education, income or race. Three attributes strongly predict LGBTQ identity: gender, generation and politics.

If you are liberal, young and biologically female your odds of also identifying as LGBTQ are very high. Most young adults who are “very liberal” are LGBTQ; among young women who are very liberal, six in ten are LGBTQ. Importantly, politics appear to be a much stronger predictor of LGBTQ identity among young adults—very few older Americans across the political spectrum identify as LGTBQ. The overwhelming majority of conservative, moderate and liberal seniors are straight.

It would be a mistake to assume that any current trend in sexual identity or preference is destined to continue. Human sexuality as it is manifested in modern society is not necessarily an immutable state of being or preference. Rather, sexual identity may more closely resemble political identity—something that evolves through adolescence and early adulthood. In a recent survey, we found that Americans who identify as bisexual are more likely than those who identify as gay, lesbian or straight to express uncertainty about who they are.

In our report, we wrote:

“Two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans who identify as bisexual say in the past 12 months they have sometimes felt unsure about who they were supposed to be. Close to half of gay and lesbian adults (48 percent) report feeling this way as often. Americans who identify as straight or heterosexual are far less likely to feel unsure about who they are; 29 percent report this feeling within the past year.”

For most of us, these personal doubts and questions are not permanent. Through living we learn a lot about ourselves and the type of person we aspire to be. As we age, our social context also changes, which alters the type of people and places that influence our behavior and beliefs. Current polling shows us a snapshot of who we are at this specific moment in time, not who we will inevitably become.