Number of US adults who identify as LGBTQ+ has doubled since 2012: NPR

People participate in the New York City Pride Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York on June 26, 2022.

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Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

People participate in the New York City Pride Parade on Fifth Avenue in New York on June 26, 2022.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The number of US adults who identify as LGBTQ+ has more than doubled in the past 12 years, according to new Gallup poll.

The latest results prove it 7.6% of American adults now identify with the LGBTQ+ community, up from 3.5% in 2012, when Gallup began 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 these metrics.

“Increases in LGBTQ+ identification in recent years have occurred as members of Generation Z and millennials have entered adulthood,” according to the study.

“Adults in these younger generations are much more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than those in older generations.”

Every younger generation is about Twice as likely as the previous generation to identify as LGBTQ+, and more than one in five Gen Z adults (aged 18-23 during the data collection period) identify as LGBTQ+.

Gallup collected its 2023 data through telephone surveys of more than 12,000 Americans age 18 and older.

Of the respondents, 85.6 percent said they were straight, 7.6 percent identified with one or more identifiers within the LGBTQ+ community, and 6.8 percent of respondents declined to answer, Gallup said.

The data found that bisexual adults made up the largest share of the LGBTQ+ community, with 4.4% of American adults and 57.3% of LGBTQ+ adults reporting that they are bisexual.

Women are twice as likely as men to identify like LGBTQ+, a data point that doesn't account for the non-binary population, Gallup pointed out.

“There are insufficient cases to provide accurate estimates of LGBTQ+ identification among non-binary Americans for 2023 alone, but combined data from 2022 and 2023 indicate that about 80% of non-binary adults identify as to LGBTQ+, with a third bisexual and a third transgender.

Approximately one in eight LGBTQ+ adults is transgender, Gallup said – or less than 1% of the total American adult population.