How Many People Are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender?
Question: How Many People Are Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Transgender?
A lot of teens wonder how many people are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Here is what the most recent research says.
Answer:
One of the most common questions about the GLBT community is how many people are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. For a long time the answer has been that around 10% of the population identifies as gay.
That number came from studies done in the 1940s by a zoologist named Alfred Kinsey at the University of Indiana.
Other studies have found slightly lower or slightly higher numbers. Now the most recent study is putting the number at 7%. However that isn't the whole story.
Also done out of the University of Indiana and conducted by the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior in 2010, the study found that although only 7% of men and of women identified themselves gay, lesbian or bisexual, many more reported ever having had sex with a member of the same sex.
There are a lot of reasons that this might occur:
As to how many people are transgender, the answer varies depending on who you ask. Many medical and psychiatric bodies believe that about of 1 in 30,000 people identifies as a male to female transexual and 1 in 100,000 as a female to male transexual.
Others have put the number at closer to 1 in 500 to account for all the different shapes that the transgender experience can take, including being genderqueer, a cross-dresser and so on.
A lot of teens wonder how many people are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Here is what the most recent research says.
Answer:
One of the most common questions about the GLBT community is how many people are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. For a long time the answer has been that around 10% of the population identifies as gay.
That number came from studies done in the 1940s by a zoologist named Alfred Kinsey at the University of Indiana.
Other studies have found slightly lower or slightly higher numbers. Now the most recent study is putting the number at 7%. However that isn't the whole story.
Also done out of the University of Indiana and conducted by the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior in 2010, the study found that although only 7% of men and of women identified themselves gay, lesbian or bisexual, many more reported ever having had sex with a member of the same sex.
There are a lot of reasons that this might occur:
- Many people experiment sexually with the same sex even if they are heterosexual.
- Some people don't like to label themselves.
- For a lot of people sexuality is fluid and shifts over time.
- Some people who are gay are not comfortable acknowledging this, even on an anonymous survey.
As to how many people are transgender, the answer varies depending on who you ask. Many medical and psychiatric bodies believe that about of 1 in 30,000 people identifies as a male to female transexual and 1 in 100,000 as a female to male transexual.
Others have put the number at closer to 1 in 500 to account for all the different shapes that the transgender experience can take, including being genderqueer, a cross-dresser and so on.
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