Currents

"The Rainbow Mafia has infiltrated and hijacked our youngest generation.” Or so claims Fox News host Tomi Lahren. We are living through a cultural sea change, one that has skeptics grasping for explanations that run the gamut from the unproven to the nefarious. In the past dozen years, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who identify as LGBT has climbed from 3.5% in 2012 to 7.2% in 2023 — and about 20% for Generation Z. A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that in 2024, 28% of Gen Z now identify as LGBT, likely the largest single-year jump on record. Lahren ascribes these developments to “social conditioning and rainbow indoctrination”, asserting that “Young people are constantly bombarded with this propaganda.” She’s not alone. While the hard right promulgates conspiracy theories and moral panics about LGBT people “grooming” children into changing their sexuality or gender identity, the more common explanation skeptics across the political spectrum reach for is “social contagion.”

An established concept in psychology, social contagion describes the phenomena where particular behaviors or feelings spread throughout social groups in an infectious manner — the real-life version of “going viral.” From imaginary illnesses causing psychosomatic symptoms among dozens of factory workers to eating disorders spreading from school to school in the 1980s, documented examples of social contagion demonstrate just how suggestible the human mind can be. But is that what’s going on with the big rise in LGBT people? Are young adults mistakenly identifying as LGBT by the millions simply because it’s trendy or because their peers are doing it? This question cannot be satisfyingly answered without first unpacking its many layers and the surrounding data landscape.

LGBT advocates have long maintained that the more open-minded, tolerant, and accepting society becomes, the more LGBT people will come out of the closet. That a more pro-LGBT society will be one in which fewer hide their sexuality or gender identity is common sense, but to a growing number of people, this explanation alone seems insufficient to explain the numbers we’re seeing. To many, the staggering 28% of Zoomers identifying as LGBT and the eightfold increase compared to 2012 can’t simply be attributed to more welcoming social attitudes. As the liberal comedian Bill Maher joked in 2022 and again in 2024, “At this rate, America will all be completely gay by 2054.” Similarly, the comment sections of every other news story reporting on this PRRI poll are filled with readers expressing, in so many words, that what we’re seeing are kids swept up by the latest fad jumping onto the rainbow bandwagon. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinician specializing in gender and sexuality and a trans woman herself, appears to think there’s an element of social contagion at play.

The first knot to untangle is the fact that “LGBT” lumps together many categories that are not always best understood as a monolith. Most of the commentary and rhetoric surrounding social contagion in recent years, such as Abigail Shrier’s widely discussed Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020), has been directed specifically at transgender people. But trans is a minority within the LGBT community. According to the PRRI survey, 15% of Gen Z are bisexual, 5% are gay or lesbian, and 8% are “something else”, an umbrella that encompasses anything respondents want to say that isn’t “straight”, including transgender, non-binary, queer-identified, asexual, and questioning, among others.

Even setting aside the “something else” cohort, 71% of LGBT Gen Zers are LGB — 20% of all Gen Z. If you’re going to make a case for social contagion, it can’t just be a narrow critique of the transgender movement, or of chronically-online teens adopting queer identity labels despite being straight. Bi people alone have consistently comprised a majority of the LGBT community, both among Gen Z and all age groups combined. Put another way, when we talk about LGBT as a whole, we are mostly talking about bi people. (It also stands to reason that a large percentage of people under the “questioning” category may be bi and figuring themselves out.) Any argument that the rise in LGBT identification is the product of social contagion must also make a case that the state of bi identification is also the product of social contagion — and anyone arguing that certainly has their work cut out for them.

Writing for the nonprofit Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, political scientist Eric Kaufmann penned one of the only scholarly arguments for bisexual social contagion in a 2022 report on “The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Political Identity.” In the report, Kaufmann notes that bi identification is more common among women than men. He also notes that the percentage of bisexual women under 30 who have only had male partners in the previous five years has increased over time. Combining these two data points, he deduced that more women are coming out as bi, but fewer of these women are having sex with other women. He concludes that this may indicate a rise in people adopting the bi label not out of authenticity but under the influence of social trends.

Kaufmann’s conclusion belies a fundamental misunderstanding of what bisexuality actually is. Bisexuality encompasses any combination of same-sex and opposite-sex attractions. Anyone who holds both types of attractions — to any degree — is, by definition, bisexual. They are bisexual whether they are “homoflexible” or whether they are “mostly straight.” And they are bisexual whether they act upon their attractions or not. It bears emphasizing: sexual orientation cannot be determined solely from sexual behavior. A gay man who lives his whole life going through the motions of heterosexuality and repressing his true feelings is still gay despite never consummating his desires. A celibate monk can go a lifetime without ever having sex but still have a sexual orientation. So, too, a bi person who does not act on their attractions — whether because they are already happily in a monogamous opposite-sex relationship at the time they come out, or for any other reason — is still, by definition, bisexual. The grasping at straws for alternate explanations we see from skeptics points to a more deeply rooted disbelief in the data we’ve been seeing.

In the 2013 National Health Interview Survey, 0.7% of respondents identified as bisexual. Compare that to the 15% of Gen Z today, and the casual observer might struggle to make sense of this shift. But data going back nearly a century shines an illuminating light. In the 1930s and 40s, sex researcher Li Shiu Tong found that 40% of his interview subjects reported bisexual behavior. A few years later, the famous Kinsey Reports found that 37% of males had engaged in homosexual or bisexual behavior. Around the same time, anthropologist Clellan S. Ford and ethologist Frank A. Beach found same-sex behavior to be common among the 76 tribal societies they studied. From 1989 to 2021, the General Social Survey showed that the number of people reporting both male and female partners more than tripled from 3.1% to 9.6%. We’re not witnessing an epidemic of straight folks pretending to be bi, we’re finally seeing what sex researchers have known all along.

The unspoken and perhaps even unconscious assumption behind the popular incredulity over rising rates of LGBT identification is that same-sex behavior must naturally be uncommon. After all, nothing two males or two females could do in a bedroom can ever result in offspring. As it happens, however, that is too simplistic a lens. Throughout both the mammalian world generally and our primate cousins in particular, bisexuality is widespread. What’s more, recent human genetic research shows that the genetic variants associated with bisexual behavior correlate with having more kids. Bisexuality hasn’t just always been more common than the public thought, it’s advantageous for survival.

One particular aspect of the data found in recent LGBT surveys that critics almost universally seize upon is the clear observable generational divides. In Gallup and PRRI, as elsewhere, the percentage of people who identify as LGBT is smallest among the Silent Generation, and increases with every subsequent age cohort. Doesn’t this demonstrate some kind of trend among young people?

First, the fact that each successive generation has higher rates of LGBT identification is hardly surprising. Once people emerge from the crucible of adolescence and its afterglow in young adulthood, the rate of self-reinvention slows down. People’s sense of self sets in and becomes cemented. Again, consider the older data referenced above. Research in the mid-20th century found that more than a third of people were engaging in same-sex behavior. And yet, according to PRRI, only 3% of the Silent Generation — those born from 1928 to 1945 — identify as LGBT. This disconnect resolves itself when we account for the fact that the Silent Generation grew up in a profoundly homophobic society where living openly as a gay, lesbian, or bisexual person invited ostracism, discrimination, and even violence (not to mention the effects of the AIDS epidemic). The way many Silents identified as young adults hardened into a lifelong sense of self. Even so, while generational disparities persist, there has been considerable movement within the generations.

From 2023 to 2024, there were increases in LGBT identification across all generations. The Silent Generation nearly doubled from 1.7% to 3%. Baby Boomers rose from 2.7% to 4% (there are now more openly LGBT Boomers than total openly LGBT people in 2012). Gen X more than doubled from 3.3% to 7%. And Millennials jumped from 11% to 16%. This is rather inconvenient for the social contagion hypothesis unless we’re to suppose that gaggles of 50-somethings are all coming out as LGBT because their classmates or favorite TikToker did it.

All of this said, of course people are influenced by culture, society, and those around them. I don’t doubt that we can find individual cases of people who erroneously thought they were LGBT due to social influences, just as we can find cases of gay, lesbian, or bisexual people who thought they were straight due to social influences. We know social contagion is a real phenomenon. It is possible that social contagion is a factor, to one degree or another, in LGBT identification. The evidence we have, however, is mostly circumstantial, largely anecdotal, and primarily narrowly focused on adolescent females who come out as trans or non-binary. This doesn’t come close to explaining what’s going on with gay, lesbian, and bi people in every age group. It doesn’t account for all of the data demonstrating significant rates of same-sex attraction and behavior going back generations, nor the documented evidence from nature, nor the genetic evidence.

What skeptics, I think, need to wrap their minds around, is the very real possibility that while there may be a handful of people faking it, the sea change we’ve been witnessing might be not only genuine, but only the beginning. As I’ve previously covered, given how many straight-identified people acknowledge bisexual attractions, express a willingness to engage in bisexual behavior, or admit to having already done so, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to suppose that the true number of bisexual people may, in the end, turn out to be a plurality if not an outright majority of humans. If bi folks going from 0.7% to 15% of the population in a little over a decade seems like an unbelievable leap, stay tuned — this isn’t even their final form.

Published Feb 2, 2024
Updated Feb 5, 2024