Chris Lange, FISM News
The number of U.S. adults that identify as LGBTQ has reached an all-time high. According to a new Gallup poll, 7.1% of Americans consider themselves LGBTQ, doubling the amount in 2012. The biggest increase comes from those born between 1987 and 2003, representing the Gen Z population, with 21% saying they identify as LGBTQ. Among millennials, ages 26 to 41, 10.5% identify as LGBTQ, up from 5.8% in 2012.
Gallup Senior Editor Jeff Jones said the numbers are significant and reflect a major shift in society’s acceptance of non-traditional sexual preferences once considered taboo.
“I think it speaks to society changing in terms of acceptance of people with different sexual orientations and gender identities and people’s willingness to identify that way,” Jones told USA Today, adding that he expects the numbers will continue to rise.
“It’s not going to be too much longer before (LGBTQ identification) is in double digits in the U.S. population.”
Advocates say this is a sign of increasing LGBTQ rights and representation. National LGBTQ Task Force Communications Director Cathy Renna praised “young people for leading the way in staking out their identity” in response to the report.
“If anything, this generation is getting more engaged, increasingly with family support,” she said.
Few are likely to suggest that the fact that such a large swath of the population has chosen to reject both their biological anatomy and the biblical definition of gender and sexuality in recent years was unpredictable. There has been significant pressure in recent years to not only condone but embrace alternative lifestyles in the name of equity. Those who don’t face being labeled as “transphobic” or, worse, find themselves the subject of harassment.
Americans are, in fact, continually bombarded with progressive gender ideology from multiple fronts.
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) recently announced the findings of its annual Where We Are on TV report. The study, which looks at television and streaming entertainment to analyze how well the LGBTQ community is represented, found that in the 2021-22 season ending in May, nearly 12% of regularly appearing characters across all broadcast networks are members of the LGBTQ community, up 2.8 percentage points from last year’s record-shattering number.
Gender ideology has also been widely embraced by progressive Democratic politicians, going all the way up to the White House. The Biden administration made it a matter of policy with the release of its National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, described as “a roadmap to help our nation close pernicious gender gaps and propel us toward a world with equal opportunity for all people” including “[t]he transgender athlete who dreams of the chance to compete free from discrimination.” The strategy lists “LGBTQI+ people” as among Americans “whose lives are affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”
One of the most aggressive purveyors of gender ideology are American schools, with devastating consequences. A transgender boy was recently convicted for assaulting two female students, one of whom he raped in an ungendered bathroom. A California mother is suing her daughter’s public school for allegedly coercing her 11-year-old daughter to explore transgenderism and withholding information about those efforts, which included persuading the girl to join an “equality club,” from the girl’s mother. More recently, a California father lost legal custody of his son for opposing his child’s decision to identify as a female.
“From the youngest age, students are being brainwashed with gender ideology,” wrote Betsy McCaughey in a December New York Post op-ed. “Children — as young as 5 — are being encouraged to disregard their anatomy and choose their gender based on their feelings.”
Brown University professor Lisa Littman explored the growing phenomenon of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 study, which found that “unprecedented numbers of adolescent girls are now identifying as transgender, despite never having questioned their gender identity in the past.”
The aggressive transgender ideology push has also resulted in an alarming increase in the number of young people seeking harmful gender reassignment surgeries. The number of adolescent girls who have undergone gender reassignment treatment has risen by 4,000% in the U.K. in the past decade, according to an article published by the Edwin J. Feulner Institute in March of 2021.
“This new trend is particularly alarming because, historically, transgender identification was extremely rare and was found predominantly among biological males,” said the study’s author, Melissa Moschella, PhD.
“This ‘gender-affirming ‘ treatment protocol causes serious and irreversible medical harms,” Moschella wrote. “The American College of Pediatricians reports that puberty blockers not only prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, but also “arrest bone growth, decrease bone accretion, prevent the sex-steroid dependent organization and maturation of the adolescent brain, and inhibit fertility by preventing the development of gonadal tissue and mature gametes for the duration of treatment.”