One In Four American High School Students Identify As Part Of LGBT Community: Study
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In their latest Centers for Disease Control (CDC) annual report, in the US about 1 in 4 high school students identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
Collected from a 2021 survey conducted with 17,508 students between the ages of 14 to 10, 75.5 per cent identified as heterosexual.
12 per cent identified themselves as bisexual, 9 per cent as ‘other’ which covers those who see themselves as pansexual, asexual, or questioning and just over 3 per cent identify as gay or lesbian.
According to the CDC, the number of students who identify as LGBTQ+ has risen from 11 per cent in 2015 to 26 per cent in 2021.
Q Is for Questioning
One of the potential reasons for the increase could be due to their wording around students who are questioning their sexuality, according to the CDC.
“Increases in the percentage of LGBQ+ students in YRBSS 2021 might be a result of changes in question-wording to include students identifying as questioning, ‘I am not sure about my sexual identity (questioning),’ or other, ‘I describe my sexual identity in some other way,” the report states.
Among the 17,508 students surveyed in the 152 across the US, 57 per cent have not been sexually active in their lives. 34.6 per cent said that they have been sexually active with someone of the opposite sex.
Around six per cent have been sexually active with both sexes while 2.4 per cent have said that they’ve been sexually active with the same sex.
