LGBT Social Contagion: A Failed Hypothesis
Rumors of young people identifying as LGBT to be trendy have been greatly exaggerated.
This essay is an alternate and expanded version of a new piece I wrote for Queer Majority. You can read the original here.
In the comparatively quaint days of 2012, a Gallup poll found that 3.5 percent of US adults identified as LGBT. By 2023, that figure had more than doubled, and for the adults of Generation Z (those born after 1997), it stood at a whopping 20 percent. A new 2024 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) now shows that 28 percent of Gen Z identifies as LGBT — the largest one-year jump I could find in the history of LGBT polling. The public reaction to this news has mostly been a mix of disbelief and ridicule. “At this rate,” joked Bill Maher, “America will all be completely gay by 2054.” Fox News blonde Tomi Lahren chalked it up to “social conditioning and rainbow indoctrination.” Comment sections across the web teem with readers confident that this is all just confused young people latching onto the latest trend. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist who specializes in gender and sexuality, and a trans woman herself, appears to think something smells fishy here.
The long-standing company line from LGBT advocates is that as society becomes more accepting of LGBT people, more will come out of the closet. That sounds perfectly logical, but to many, it seems profoundly unsatisfying as an explanation for numbers this high. Sure, a more tolerant society will be one in which more people feel comfortable being themselves, but how could it possibly be the case that one in three people are LGBT? The explanation most skeptics seem to favor is “social contagion”, a known psychological phenomenon where behaviors or attitudes spread spontaneously through social groups. In other words, skeptics believe that 28 percent of Gen Z are not actually LGBT — most of them are simply influenced by social incentives and copy-catting their peers. It’s an understandable hypothesis, at a glance. But a greater understanding of the full data landscape casts this issue in an entirely new light.
When I started working for the magazine Queer Majority in December 2021, I knew very little about LGBT issues. If you’d have asked me what Stonewall was, I’d have assumed you meant Stonewall Jackson. Now, I’m the Managing Editor of Queer Majority, and a Contributing Editor to its sister publication, Bi.org. After two years spent covering LGBT issues, reporting on new studies and stories, researching data, interviewing people ranging from scientists to US state politicians, and editing hundreds of articles, it’s not an exaggeration to say that I’m becoming something of an expert. I would never have believed it three years ago, but LGBT issues in general, and bisexual issues in particular, have become one of my major beats outside of American Dreaming. And, as someone who’s never been an activist in this space, isn’t politically far-left, and isn’t LGBT, I’m refreshingly free from most of the biases and blind spots one finds in LGBT media. Having been on both sides of these issues, I recognize the public reaction to this new PRRI poll because it’s exactly how I would have reacted a few years ago. But in time since, I’ve been steeped in the data, and it’s eye-opening.
The first thing people get wrong about LGBT issues is that they often don’t realize the breakdown of the LGBT community. Over the past decade, there has been a hyperfocus on transgender politics. From there, it becomes all too easy for careless (or reckless) commentators to make the leap from discussing trans to generalizing about LGBT in its entirety. This is, in part, what’s going on when we see the backlash against radical trans activism make the jump into old-school homophobia.1 When it comes to the discourse surrounding social contagion, there has been a fixation on trans people in particular, and more specifically on adolescent females identifying as trans or non-binary. Perhaps the most visible example of this is Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.2 What gets lost in the noise is that trans people are a minority of LGBT people.
According to the recent PRRI poll, 15 percent of Gen Z identify as bisexual, five percent as gay or lesbian, and eight percent as “something else”, which basically means anything respondents could possibly say that wasn’t “straight”, “bisexual”, “gay”, or “lesbian.” This includes transgender, as well as non-binary, but can also include queer, asexual, intersex, questioning, etc. The most recent survey done by a major pollster to delineate trans as its own group was the aforementioned 2023 Gallup poll, which had trans at two percent of Gen Z (and 0.6 percent of all adults).
Returning to PRRI’s findings, of the 28 percent of Gen Z who identify as LGBT, 71 percent are LGB — that’s 20 percent overall, most of whom are bisexual. The “B” in LGBTQQIP2SAAR2D2 is larger than all the other letters put together, both among Gen Z and all age groups combined, as poll after poll has shown over the past decade. Every time we talk about LGBT people, we are mostly talking about bi folks. And yet, amid all the culture warring, the hypothesis that the rise in trans identification is in large part the product of social contagion has morphed into a catch-all explanation for the increasing rates of LGBT identification as a whole. This is where the wheels fall off. If you’re going to make this broader case for “LGBT social contagion”, it can’t just be a narrow critique of the transgender movement, or of Tumblr-addicted teens calling themselves “queer” or “sapiosexual” despite being straight. You must also be prepared to argue that the rise of bi identification is the product of social contagion as well. Very few serious people have even attempted to do this, for reasons that will become clear.
The only academic to take a crack at applying social contagion to bisexuality is the political scientist Eric Kaufmann. In a 2022 report for the Center for Study of Partisanship and Ideology titled “Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Political Identity”, Kaufmann makes two observations. First, he cites research indicating first that women are more likely to identify as bisexual than men. Then he notes that the percentage of bi-identified women under 30 who report having had no recent same-sex partners has increased. From there he connects the dots and make a deductive leap, arguing, in so many words, that this could indicate a rise in young women falsely claiming to be bi for social clout.
Three years ago, I wouldn’t have thought Kaufmann was making a logical leap, because three years ago, I, like Kaufmann, didn’t understand what bisexuality actually was. I used to think, as most people do, that someone was bisexual if their attractions were roughly 50/50 male/female, and more specifically, if they actually slept with both men and women. This is a misconception. Bisexuality, as a concept in academic psychology and sex research, has been around for 130 years. In that time, it has only ever referred to people with any level of both same-sex and opposite-sex attraction. Anyone who holds both of these attractions — to any degree — is, by definition, bisexual. And they are bisexual whether they act upon their attractions or not. A gay man who goes through the motions of heterosexuality and represses his true feelings is still gay despite not 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. But these are just word games, right?
The popular incredulity and the impulse to grasp at straws for alternate explanations for the rise of LGBT identification points to the unspoken assumption many people have: 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. And so to see such high percentages of people identifying as LGBT, something just has to be wrong, doesn’t it?
Except, data going back nearly a century shows that same-sex attraction and behavior has always been far more prevalent than popularly believed. In the 1930s and ’40s, sex researcher Li Shiu Tong found that 40 percent of his interview subjects engaged in bisexual behavior. The Kinsey Reports of the late ’40s and early ’50s showed that 37 percent of males had “some overt homosexual experience to orgasm.” Research spanning 76 tribal societies in the mid-20th century found same-sex behavior to be common. From 1989 to 2021, the General Social Survey showed that the number of people reporting both male and female sexual partners more than tripled from 3.1 percent to 9.6 percent. And a 2022 study of straight-identified young adults found that 31.5 percent of women and 13.2 percent of men reported having bisexual attractions.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we also have abundant evidence from both the animal kingdom in general and our primate cousins in particular that bisexuality is widespread in nature (homosexuality is quite rare). What’s more, a recent study titled “Genetic variants underlying human bisexual behavior are reproductively advantageous” shows that said genes were correlated with having more kids. The assumption that “real” same-sex attraction or behavior must be uncommon or evolutionarily disadvantageous simply doesn’t accord with the data. We’re not witnessing an epidemic of straight folks pretending to be bi, or “becoming” bi — we’re just now seeing what sex researchers have known all along.
One aspect of recent LGBT survey data almost universally seized upon by critics are the generational divides. 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? It’s worth digging into the details. From the 2023 Gallup poll to the 2024 PRRI survey, LGBT identification rose across all age cohorts. The Silent Generation went from 1.7 percent LGBT to three percent, Baby Boomers from 2.7 percent to four percent, Gen X from 3.3 percent to seven percent, and Millennials from 11 percent to 16 percent. Put another way, in the span of a year, the percentage of LGBT Silents and Gen Xers doubled, and the percentage of openly LGBT Boomers now exceeds the percentage of total LGBT adults in 2012. 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.
Of course, we are all influenced by culture, society, and those around us. It surprises no one that fewer people come out as LGBT in societies that put them to death versus societies that have LGBT rights. It’s also true that in many parts of the Western world (though not all), queerness has become aspirational. Last year, I wrote a piece for Queer Majority essentially coming out as straight. I recalled that, as a high schooler in 2003, I was dismayed at rumors that I was bisexual. Fast forward 20 years, and people once again assume I’m gay, bi, or queer-identified because of the publications I work for. Only now, it doesn’t bother me at all. In part, because I’m not an insecure 17-year-old anymore, but also because our culture has changed. Today, outside of hard-line religious communities, there is a kind of social prestige that comes along with being LGBT. There has never been a better time for people to come out of the closet — and so they are. As Jianzhi Zhang, the senior author of the previously mentioned human genetics study, told me by email, “I believe that the recent increase in bisexual identification is due to [...] the openness of society to sexual minorities.”
I don’t doubt that we can find individual cases of straight people claiming to be 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. Social contagion is a real psychological 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 within a light year of explaining what’s going on with gay, lesbian, and bi people among every age group. It doesn’t account for all of the data demonstrating significant rates same-sex attraction and behavior going back generations, nor the documented evidence from nature, nor the genetic evidence.
In this era of institutional capture, sensationalist headlines, and relentless culture warring, the skeptical impulse is perfectly understandable. But scientific skepticism means following the evidence, wherever it may lead. And the evidence suggests that social contagion, as an explanation for the increase of overall LGBT identification, is a failed hypothesis.
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I'll admit I'm sympathetic to the contagion argument at some level because my personal kink is explanations that are really fucking boring and have broad applicability. There's been a long-standing historical trend of finding out that things we thought were special are actually very ordinary, especially when that special thing has to do with us as a species.
I wasn't born speaking English. I was born with a brain that was predisposed to learning spoken language (compare the difficulty involved in teaching children written language). But the English words themselves aren't things that originated in my head. They are an infectious bit of information with a lot of good hosts available, and much like a virus they often mutate within hosts and spread new variants. This view, largely popularized in The Selfish Gene, applies to nearly everything social. I didn't invent French toast; I learned it from my mother. I adapted it, because you should definitely be adding a touch of honey and a pinch of salt to your eggs. That contagious idea has mutated and infected my daughter, who now knows my recipe.
So my main response to the theory of the social contagion of LBGT identification is "So what? So is everything else!" You can find ancient cultures that didn't even have words for sexual orientation. Was Alexander the Great gay? He was maybe in love with another man, but no. "Gay" didn't exist. In as much as being queer is a social contagion, so is a traditional marriage where the mom stays home and does the laundry while dad goes to make pocket watches or something. You didn't invent that; you learned it. It's like people who say "chemicals" as if it's automatically bad. Water is a chemical. With too little or too much of it I die. It's like people who say "natural" as if it's automatically good. Skin cancer is natural. The Sun gives it to you because you went outside too much.
So I mostly view it as a non-argument that says very little, applies to almost everything, and breaks down the moment you look back in time or across cultures.
It's been a couple of years since I read Shrier's book, but I don't recall her, nor any critics of trans ideology arguing the LGB portion of LGBTQIA+ was also spreading due to social contagion (SC). (Side note, found Joyce's book to far more polished)
Proponents of the SC hypothesis I thought were pretty clear it was 'eight percent as “something else”' which seems to spread through friend groups, clusters, etc. Even the most conservative mainstream voices seem to have finally agreed with David Cross that the LGB segment was "born this way". [1]
I don't recall if you have children, but my skepticism towards Littman et al's "ROGD" hypothesis has evaporated in recent years because I have seen the T (particularly the non-committal, non-binary section of "T") sweep through schools and friend groups, only to be forgotten about over summer. As a close friend who's a beloved high school teacher explained to me, for many of these kids it's like being "goth" - one week a bunch of kids will come up to him asking him to use new pronouns, names, to which he compassionately agrees to - the next week, they sheepishly ask him to "forget about all of that".
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[1] (I fucking love this whole album. Got me through the Bush Years)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEKpufAeTi0