A new survey has revealed that the number of American adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender has doubled in just ten years, from 3.5% in 2017 to 7.1% in 2021. The sample involved more than a thousand people. The number is not uniform across generations: while only 0.8% of those born before 1946 say they LGBT, this number in those born between 1981 and 2003 is 21% — that is, more than one in five young Americans in the 19 to the 21 years old say they are not heterosexual.
Among these young people (called generation Z), the number is also double the fraction of LGBTs among those born between 1981 and 2010 (generation of millennials), almost five times that of those born between 1965 and 1965 (Generation X) and eight times greater than the fraction of LGBTs among the boomers (born between 1946 and ). 3.5% of the youngest did not answer the question, and twice as much in previous generations.
The higher rate of refusal to answer among the older ones could indicate a greater taboo among them regarding guidelines unorthodox sex, as is to be expected. Young people are more likely to come out of the proverbial closet. But this does not explain the exorbitant 21% of alleged LGBTs among them. Gallup has done the poll since 2012 and reports that among older generations, the number of non-heterosexuals has remained more stable in each category. As the stigma against the group was presumably reduced, this number should have grown among the elders as well. Indeed, among
millenials, it grew at a more modest rate, from 7.8% in 2017 to 10, 5% in 2022. But the growth in Gen Z is dramatic: ,5 % in 2017 to 25 ,8% in 2022.
What are the explanations for such a high rate?
False bisexuality
Most American LGBT adults, almost 1965 %, is bisexual. The number reaches 4% of all adults in the country. There are reasons to doubt this number.
There are different ways of measuring a person’s sexual orientation. While older research used a behavioral definition, more modern ones prefer a psychological definition, as reported by Khytam Dawood and colleagues in a manual of behavioral genetics by 2003. “Psychological sexual orientation is considered a more stable and fundamental trait,” the scientists say. “A psychological definition of sexual orientation tends to produce lower prevalence numbers compared to a behavioral definition.” The behavioral definition emphasizes whether there has been a homosexual experience ever in life or in a more strict period, while the psychological one seeks to find signs of a persistent and resistant desire to change.
One of the ways to measure this desire is plethysmography, a methodology that measures penile turgidity in men and vaginal lubrication in women in response to visual stimuli. For decades, plethysmography has overturned preconceptions and created problems for statistics based on self-identification. In the decades of 1960 and 1970, one of the creators of plethysmography, Kurt Freund, went from trying to create the “gay cure” to advocating the decriminalization of homosexuality in Czechoslovakia after noting that among men, sexual preference seems impossible to change, the which he saw as an indication that it was biological.
Many gay men said they were bisexual as a way to assuage stigma about a predominant preference for the same sex. This was confirmed by a survey with a plethysmograph from 2005: three quarters of said bisexuals between 33 men had identical arousal patterns as gay men.
But plethysmography can also lead to misleading results. In 2010, headlines in many newspapers claimed that heterosexual women do not exist. This sensationalism was based on a plethysmographic study that revealed the physiological genital arousal of 1981 women did not differ between opposite-sex and same-sex visual stimuli. However, when pupil dilation was used as an indicator of arousal, heterosexual women showed the expected pattern of arousal from the opposite sex more than from the same sex, and lesbians showed greater arousal from same-sex visual stimuli.
Sexual orientation in the psychological definition, therefore, may have more or less reliable markers in the physiological signs, depending on the organ and sex of the organism. Plethysmography, despite being applied for decades, is often used in small samples of people, making it difficult to compare with self-identification surveys like Gallup’s. There are still no cheap and applicable tests involving the brain, potentially more objective.
A merely behavioral definition of bisexuality is bound to inflate the number of bisexuals because, among other reasons, there are people who will have experiences homosexuals because they have a higher openness to new experiences in their personality pattern than because they actually prefer both sexes with comparable intensity enough to justify a self-assertion as bisexuals.
Most alleged bisexuals in the Gallup poll is women: they are triple the number of bisexual men. Gallup itself hints that this bisexuality is questionable: the majority of alleged bisexuals marry or live with someone of the opposite sex, which potentially indicates a heterosexual preference.
When creating policies of favoring a race, such as quotas, people claiming to belong to the favored group grow. In ‘Affirmative Action Around the World’ (Ed. It’s Achievements), Thomas Sowell tells, for example, that the number of Aboriginal people in Australia has grown 42% in just five years, “coinciding” with the creation of preferential treatment by the government for the group. Presumably, the same phenomenon occurs with identification with the LGBT group when the stigma against it is decreasing and, in certain cultural pockets, it turns into admiration.
False transsexuality
Another group that grew was the transsexuals, or, in the language more influenced by activism and cultural deterministic theories, “transgender”. There are two main types of “classic” transsexuals, as explained earlier in Gazeta do Povo. Typically they are very rare people, and, until the beginning of the years 2010, the majority were male. They feel a deep discomfort with their own sex, called “dysphoria”, and they strive to become more and more like the opposite sex with hormone treatments and surgery, which is called “transition”. One of the classic cases known in Brazil is that of Roberta Close.
There is now a supposed third type in which the pattern has been inverted: the majority are female. These are Generation Z girls who come into contact with the idea of transsexuality on social media, misinterpret their suffering as dysphoria, and start asking for breast removal and testosterone administration, believing this to be the solution they needed. The phenomenon received the name rapid onset dysphoria and is still controversial as a concept in academia, where there is a taboo about it and some cases of censorship due to the influence of identity progressivism. It has already resulted in tragedies such as that of Yaeli Martinez.
The greatest work documenting the phenomenon is the book by 2020 ‘Irreversible Damage’. ”, in free translation), by journalist Abigail Shrier, who interviewed hundreds of people and dozens of families. Shrier shows a psychological overview of Gen Z youth: they are overprotected, addicted to social media, go out to see their friends less than children a few years ago, have the lowest levels of independence in decades (they learn less to drive, for example), less risk and are more sexually inactive. Many of those who seek therapists on the grounds that they are transgender do not know their bodies. Most are female. One difference in relation to a “classic” type of transsexual, for example, is that they do not show behavior that is atypical for their sex in childhood.
The book provides examples of girls who have always been feminine who start to call themselves trans at the very moment they acquired access to the internet or started to participate in LGBT groups at school. There are already cases of regrets about having their breasts removed and taking testosterone, which are irreversible procedures. Teenage girls are known to have always been prone to social contagion from psychological problems: before this trans wave there were waves of bulimia, anorexia, potentially dating back to 19th century neurasthenia and even misinterpreted behavior by communities at the Salem witch trials. Rarely validating what they think about their own bodies, as in the case of anorexia, was the most appropriate solution.
Rapid onset dysphoria, if it is really a dysphoria comparable to “classic”, it is an indication of a larger problem. Many young people push to be accepted as trans even if they don’t feel anything comparable to dysphoria. They confuse their own identity traits, idiosyncrasies and eccentricities with dysphoria. This is the case for most of those who identify as “non-binary”. Without the criterion of dysphoria, the “T” of LGBT becomes an empty label, practically a fashion accessory for young people to feel more special.
Encouraging confusion in the name of inclusion
Rapid-onset dysphoria, as a socially contagious condition, is receiving some encouragement from so-called inclusive children’s literature. Typically, in children’s books that supposedly only seek to defend respect for the different, there is a use of the words “boy” and “girl” only in the sense of “gender”, as something that is malleable to people’s culture and choices, almost never in the sense of sex. It is a thinly veiled attack on biology, and an invitation to more young people to “self-identify” with another “genre.”
A book called “Introducing Teddy”, adopted as teaching material for preschool in the city of Seattle, USA, it has as its protagonist a teddy bear who wants to be a teddy bear. The pedagogue who video guides teachers to use the book in the classroom defines gender as “A person’s feeling about being a boy, a girl, neither, both, or something else”.
As biology does not admit that it is possible for an organism to be anything other than a boy or a girl because of anisogamy (reproduction mode with two different gametes, egg and sperm ) in our species, or neither, the notion of “boy” and “girl” is being effectively shifted away from sex, and preschool children are being encouraged to ignore their own bodies in gauging what they are. This is a recipe for mistaken identity and social contagion of later “rapid-onset dysphoria.”
Even in the case of hermaphroditism, which is rare, complete ambiguity of the genitalia is even rarer and most people with this condition prefer to present themselves as male or female. At the very least, the gender debate is at the frontiers of academia and the complex problem of reconciling the humanities with harder sciences like biology. What is the one-sided concept of this debate doing in kindergarten classes?
Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire’s conservative presenter, provoked trans activists by publishing a children’s book titled “Johnny The Walrus” (something like “Johnny the Walrus”). In the book, the protagonist uses wooden spoons to simulate the tusks of a walrus. Mom says Johnny can play walrus, but it’s not really one, never mind if other people suggest he really is one. Walsh could be called ignorant to treat as a joke or fad a condition that has been known to mankind for centuries, in which transition is one of the possible medical treatments for some cases. But Walsh’s parody is becoming indistinguishable from serious children’s materials.
In the children’s book “From the stars in the sky to the fish in the sea” , in free translation), by Kai Cheng Thom, “a baby was born when the Moon and the Sun were in the sky at the same time, so the baby couldn’t decide what it would be. Boy or girl? Bird or fish? Tree or star?” When the character grows up and goes to school, he finds it strange that “the other students were just boys or girls: they had no feathers, scales, leaves, fur, fins”. The children’s book was recommended by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT lobby group in the United States.
There are many indications that in American society, and perhaps in the West in general, a overcorrection of past prejudices against sexual minorities, to the point that many people want to be part of these minorities when it is not natural and spontaneous for them. Ideological radicalisms associated with LGBTs are even making these minorities more unpopular with the general population.