Landmark Studies Confirm Nearly 1.3 Billion People Are LGBT2SQIA+

     The recent study showing that 7.1 percent of Americans identify as LGBT2SQIA+ has conservative Christian groups freaking out. According to their version of math, that means EVERYONE IN AMERICA WILL BE GAY BY 2047!!! That's so wrong on so many levels. Yes, the number of LGBT2SQIA+ people in the United States has doubled in the past decade. Not all of these people are new community members: in 2012, gay marriage was a 50-50 split issue, while American support for gay marriage currently sits at nearly 85 percent. People overwhelmingly feel more comfortable coming out to friends and family. If you ask theocracies in the Middle East that punish homosexuality with death, they'll tell you they have no gay people there; I know personally that that's not true. Bisexuality was the fastest-growing sector of the LGBT2SQIA+ community, with four percent of Americans identifying as bisexual. Honestly, the real percentage of Americans who are bisexual has to be close to triple that. Having a college boyfriend or girlfriend is synonymous with having a same-sex partner in one of America's worst-kept inside jokes. If you "experimented" in college, you are bisexual whether you'd care to admit it or not.

     The percentage of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, two-spirit, queer, intersex, asexual, and other gender and sexual groups in the United States is at three percent for Baby Boomers and a whopping 21 percent for the late Millennial/early Gen Z age group, progressively increasing among each generation in between. With this in mind, it is safe to say that one in six Americans are LGBT2SQIA+. That's the same number that a survey of Indian citizens got in 2021. 

     This is a pretty consistent rate that, if applied across the world, means that there are likely nearly 1.3 billion people who identify as LGBT2SQIA+. That's a huge number of people, and it is concrete proof that rights for gender and sexual groups are among the most important causes related to social justice and human rights on the face of the Earth.