Just over half of LGBTQ people in the United States identify as bisexual or queer — and the overwhelming majority of them are young women. Meanwhile, relatively few young women identify as lesbians.
That’s according to a new survey conducted by Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News, taken by 880 LGBTQ Americans across the country. The survey, one of the most comprehensive of its kind, found that 46% of LGBTQ Americans identify as bisexual and 5% identify as queer or prefer to self-describe. (The margin of error overall is plus or minus 3.3%.)
Bisexual women outnumbered bisexual men four to one — 78% to 19%. Three percent said they are genderqueer, nonbinary, or prefer to self-describe.
Nearly half of this group is between the ages of 18 and 29 — 46% of them. Thirty-eight percent of bisexual Americans are also nonwhite, greater than the number of gay or lesbian respondents of color (24% and 26%, respectively). Those who identify as queer are 40% nonwhite.
Although young, bisexual women of color make up a large portion of the LGBTQ American population, they aren’t necessarily reflected in popular cultural conceptions of LGBTQ people, which still tend to be dominated primarily by white gay men and women.
The majority of those who identified their sexual orientation as queer are also young — 55% are between 18 and 29 — and either female (39%), genderqueer/nonbinary (31%), agender (11%), or prefer to self-describe (9%).
These results are in line with previously reported trends regarding younger generations and sexual identity: Millennials and Gen Z'ers are more likely to identify as queer, no labels, or not 100% straight. LGBTQ people are more likely to be female in general (55% women, 41% men, and 4% nonbinary), and women, in particular, have long been presumed to consider themselves more sexually fluid — which this new data seems to confirm. What the survey also makes clear, however, is that while young women are now more likely to identify as queer or bisexual, they’re much less likely to identify as lesbians.
There are many potential reasons why. One is that, for some young queer people, labels like “gay” or “lesbian,” which imply binary-gender sexual orientations, can seem stale and old-fashioned in a world where we’ve begun to think beyond the binary. Young people aren’t only more likely to identify as bisexual, queer, fluid, or otherwise open to multiple genders — they’re more likely to identify outside of the gender binary themselves. For some assigned-female queer people, identifying as a lesbian might not make sense when their potential dating pool could include not only cis women, but trans women, nonbinary people, and transmasculine people. In short: For some, “lesbian” is not inclusive enough (though there are also self-identified lesbians who date beyond the binary, and are expanding the potential for what their identity can mean).
But that doesn’t explain why young men haven’t been identifying as queer, bisexual, or fluid at similarly high rates. Read more via Buzzfeed