The percentage of Americans identifying as LGBT has risen to record highs, especially among Generation Z, a new Gallup poll released on Thursday shows, but that trend could see a departure under President Donald Trump, according to one expert, as the administration pushes back against gender treatments for minors.
The poll found that 23% of Generation Z Americans, those born between 1997 and 2006, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. For comparison, 14.2% of millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, identify the same way. Both groups identify as non-heterosexual compared to older generations, like Generation X and ‘Baby Boomers.’
The Gallup poll surveyed more than 14,000 U.S. adults last year – collected through phone interviews with adults 18 and older – and found that 9.3% identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or another non-heterosexual identity. This marks a significant increase from 2020, when the figure was about half that, and a sharp rise from 2012, when Gallup first started tracking sexual orientation and gender identity, recording only 3.5%.
‘The rate of LGBTQ+ identification is likely to continue to grow, given the generational shifts underway,’ Gallup senior editor and researcher Jeffrey M. Jones wrote in the study.
‘One reason for higher LGBTQ+ identification among younger generations of adults is that they are much more likely to consider themselves bisexual than are older people,’ Jones wrote.
The study also found differences among those with political ideologies, as people identifying as LGBT were more likely to be female, liberal, White, and live in urban areas. Among them, 21% identified as liberal, 8% as moderate, and 3% as conservative. The rate of LGBT identification has nearly tripled over more than a decade, with a growing number of Americans in their teens, 20s and 30s identifying as bisexual, particularly more women compared to men, researchers noted.
However, Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry said the findings are a snapshot in time – due to the ‘onslaught’ of the Biden administration’s rulings on sex and gender over the last four years– but will likely begin to reverse under the Trump administration’s crackdown on transgender medical procedures for minors.
‘I think now that we’re seeing this return to common sense, we are going to see fewer and fewer young people begin to identify as LGBTQ,’ Perry told Fox News Digital in an interview. ‘I would be very curious what the numbers look like four years into the future, after some of these policies have trickled down to the granular level.’
‘It was entirely unsurprising to me that it was the Generation Z who experienced the most precipitous increase, because they are the younger ones they are currently, right now, in the throes of sort of this battle between reality and cultural conformity,’ Perry said. ‘That’s exactly where these kids are, and I think it’s exactly why we’re seeing these level of increases.’
While the poll found 85.7% of respondents identified as straight, 5.2% identified as bisexual, 2.0% as gay, 1.4% as lesbian and 1.3% as transgender. Fewer than 1% of participants identified with other non-traditional LGBT labels, including pansexual, asexual or queer. Five percent of respondents declined to answer.
Trump has signed a slew of gender-related executive orders during his first 100 days in office which have already racked up multiple lawsuits. One of those orders, ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,’ mandates that federal agencies recognize gender strictly as male or female, based on biological sex, and prohibits the use of gender pronouns on federal documents. It also directs agencies to cease funding for transgender medical treatments for transgender federal inmates and to remove policies promoting radical ‘gender ideology.’