The number of U.S. adults who identify as LGBTQ+ doubled in 12 years, new poll shows
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The number of American adults who identify as LGBTQ+ has more than doubled in the last 12 years, according to new polling from Gallup.
The latest results show that 7.6 percent of U.S. adults now align themselves with the LGBTQ+ community — up from 3.5 percent in 2012, when Gallup started collecting this data. Compare that to four years ago, when the figure was 5.6 percent.
The latest findings continue a trend showing that the number of LGBTQ+ American adults has increased every year the analytics company has collected such metrics.
“Increases in LGBTQ+ identification in recent years have occurred as members of Generation Z and the millennial generation have entered adulthood,” according to the study.
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“Adults in these younger generations are far more likely than those in older generations to identify as LGBTQ+.”
Each younger generation is about twice as likely as the previous generation to identify as LGBTQ+, and more than one in five Gen Z adults — age 18 to 23 during the data collection period — identify as LGBTQ+.
Gallup collected its 2023 data through telephone surveys with more than 12,000 Americans 18 or older.
Of the respondents, 85.6 percent said they were straight, 7.6 percent identified with one or more identifiers within the LGBTQ+ community, and 6.8 percent of those surveyed declined to respond, Gallup said.
The data found that bisexual adults made up the largest proportion of the LGBTQ+ community, with 4.4 percent of U.S. adults and 57.3 percent of LGBTQ+ adults reporting that they are bisexual.
Women are twice as likely as men to identify as LGBTQ+, a data point that does not account for the nonbinary population, Gallup noted.
“There are not sufficient cases to provide precise estimates of LGBTQ+ identification among nonbinary Americans for 2023 alone, but combined data from 2022 and 2023 indicate that about 80 percent of nonbinary adults identify as LGBTQ+, with one-third being bisexual and one-third transgender.”
About one in eight LGBTQ+ adults are transgender, Gallup said — or less than 1% of the total American adult population.
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