The number of U.S. adults who identify as LGBTQ+ doubled in 12 years, new poll shows
Updated March 13, 2024 at 1:22 PM ET
The number of American adults who identify as LGBTQ+ has more than doubled in the last 12 years, according to new polling from Gallup.
The latest results show that 7.6% of U.S. adults now align themselves with the LGBTQ+ community — up from 3.5% in 2012, when Gallup started collecting this data. Compare that to four years ago, when the figure was 5.6%.
The latest findings continue a trend showing that the number of LGBTQ+ American adults has increased every year the analytics company has collected such metrics.
"Increases in LGBTQ+ identification in recent years have occurred as members of Generation Z and the millennial generation have entered adulthood," according to the study.
"Adults in these younger generations are far more likely than those in older generations to identify as LGBTQ+."
Each younger generation is about twice as likely as the previous generation to identify as LGBTQ+, and more than one in five Gen Z adults — age 18 to 23 during the data collection period — identify as LGBTQ+.
Gallup collected its 2023 data through telephone surveys with more than 12,000 Americans 18 or older.
Of the respondents, 85.6% said they were straight, 7.6% identified with one or more identifiers within the LGBTQ+ community, and 6.8% of those surveyed declined to respond, Gallup said.
The data found that bisexual adults made up the largest proportion of the LGBTQ+ community, with 4.4% of U.S. adults and 57.3% of LGBTQ+ adults reporting that they are bisexual.
Women are twice as likely as men to identify as LGBTQ+, a data point that does not account for the nonbinary population, Gallup noted.
"There are not sufficient cases to provide precise estimates of LGBTQ+ identification among nonbinary Americans for 2023 alone, but combined data from 2022 and 2023 indicate that about 80% of nonbinary adults identify as LGBTQ+, with one-third being bisexual and one-third transgender."
About one in eight LGBTQ+ adults are transgender, Gallup said — or less than 1% of the total American adult population. [Copyright 2024 NPR]
