The Brown University newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, reports a significant increase in students self-identifying as not straight. In an article titled, LGBTQ+ student self-identification has more than doubled at Brown since 2010, according to Herald polling data, the paper says:
The Herald’s Spring 2023 poll found that 38% of students do not identify as straight — over five times the national rate*. Over the past decade, LGBTQ+ identification has increased across the nation, with especially sharp growth at Brown.
(Note: *Nationally, the number has doubled from 3.5% in 2010 to 7.2% in 2022.)
People across the political spectrum will assuredly use these statistics to bolster their arguments. Liberals will use them to reinforce the belief that anti-LGBTQ laws are hurting an increasing number of Americans who are finally comfortable admitting their fundamental nature. Conservatives will use the same data to moan that perverts groom more kids to be sexual deviants.
Let us dismiss the grooming nonsense forthwith. You cannot talk a child into changing their sexuality or groom them to be a gender they are not. If it were easy to convert someone from straight to gay, then conversion therapy would be effective — and mind-benders could easily convert gays into being straight. Is that the case?
Conversion therapy, a widely debunked psychological sadism, is often thrust on teens in religious communities, whose leaders have indoctrinated the young since toddlerhood to believe that homosexuality is a sin. Presumably, many of conversion therapy's victims are ideal candidates for sexual reorientation. There is a lot of pressure on these teens to fit in with a homophobic community. And many are eager to make their fundamentalist parents happy. Yet conversion never makes gays straight — except anecdotally.
Brown students are not a representative demographic sample of the American population. They are younger, richer, smarter, significantly more Asian, less white, and far less Hispanic and Black than the average American. I have no idea how race impacts LGBTQ identification. I suspect that wealth and intelligence may have some bearing on the matter. But those determinants pale in significance compared to youth and politics.
The young and the better-educated — Brown students are both — are more likely to be liberal. As a result, they are far less likely to be hemmed in by social expectations. Also, LGBTQ identification is most prevalent among the young. Gen Z is twice as likely to identify as LGBTQ than Millenials and seven times more likely than Baby Boomers. Brown students go one step further, as they are twice as likely as the typical Gen Zer to identify as non-bigender/heterosexual.
What does all this mean? Part of the answer is clear. The young are more adventurous, experimental, and free-spirited. They are on the stereotypical voyage of self-discovery and far more willing to adopt and drop personas. As a teen, I was a henna-haired, kohl-eyed, silk-clad, androgynous wannabe glam rocker trying to vibe bi. Now I am not that person.
That is why self-identification is an imprecise metric. Declared sexual orientation can be both a social commentary and a hard-wired fact of the individual’s existence. Just as much as a gay person might say they are straight in a conservative religious community. A straight person might identify as bi-sexual to better fit the mores of a place like Brown. Or identifying as LGBTQ could just be trendy.
I have no idea what percent of people have sex with members of multiple genders. But I think it is safe to say that some people who identify as bisexual restrict their physical lovemaking to members of one gender. Polls suffer from inherent bias — people are more likely to say they will vote for a Black candidate than actually vote for a Black candidate. To put it bluntly, there is a certain cachet in some circles to say you are LGBTQ, even if you are not.
A chart enumerating the percentage of students at Brown who identify as LGBTQ illuminates this reality.
I do not have the raw data, so I am eyeballing the graph. Consider ‘homosexual’ (blue box). Over time it has increased — but not by much. Whereas ‘bisexual’ (green) has seen a definite increase. The new categories, ‘questioning’ (pink), ‘asexual’ (blue), ‘pansexual’ (red), and ‘queer’ (orange) — all of which largely replace ‘other’ (yellow), have exploded — with ‘queer’ being the largest part of that set. Although, as the Q in LGBTQ can also stand for ‘questioning’ that seems to muddy the waters.
Is this increase proof that the LGBTQ community was always 38% of the whole? Or is declaring yourself LGBTQ just fashionable? I cannot answer that question scientifically. I am not part of the Brown demographic. Nor am I an expert in the general human condition. But my experience, plus talking with my children and some of their friends, suggests that the Brown number includes young people expressing empathy for an oppressed group rather than membership.
Not that it matters. Regardless of the actual number of LGBTQ Americans, no citizen should suffer discrimination because of any of their innate qualities. Citizens should have equal access to housing, jobs, and the marketplace regardless of their sexuality and gender identification.
Religious freedom should not be an excuse to discriminate. If you believe that gay marriage is so sinful you cannot make a wedding cake for a gay couple, then do not make wedding cakes. And if you cannot make pastries for gays under any circumstances — do not be a baker.
(Note: the counter argument — “Then Jews will have to make cakes for neo-Nazi birthday parties” — is sophistry. Fascism, unlike sexuality, is a choice. One that does not have to be honored. Nor will halal butchers be forced to sell pork. A retailer can refuse to sell a product to everyone. They cannot refuse to sell an item to just some people. No one can reasonably object to a vegan restaurant refusing to serve meat.)
In short, it is probably hard to pin down how many people are LGBTQ to the core versus how many are appropriating LGBTQ culture and identity as a statement of broadmindedness and inclusion. How these Brown students answer the same survey 20 years from now would be instructive.
Regardless, wherever you are on the sexuality/gender spectrum should be as irrelevant as hair color to a person’s job, housing, and happiness prospects. As Jefferson pithily observed in a different context, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg."
Religious conservatives gainsay this tolerance on the ground that LGBTQ are rapists and child molesters. One, there is no evidence for that claim. Two, all decent citizens, cis-heterosexual or not, agree that rape committed by anyone is a crime and that the law should punish all rapists. Although, religious conservatives are OK with changing the threshold for statutory rape by lobbying to legalize marriage between minors and adults of any age.
American criminal justice punishes actions, not beliefs — despite what the religious freedom zealots claim. If you do the crime, you should do the time. However, sexual orientation and gender identification are never a crime any more than being over 6 ft tall.
