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Shocking CDC report finds that one in four HS students identify as LBGTQ+ or are gender confused

April 28, 2023 | | Print Article

According to a new study released this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at least one in four high school students identify as LGBT.

Seen here courtesy of the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) report, the data shows that in 2021, 75.5 percent of high school students identified as straight, whereas 24.5 percent identified as LGBT.

Broken down, 12.2 percent identified as bisexual, 5.2 percent identified as “questioning,” 3.2 percent identified as gay or lesbian, and the final 1.8 percent (not included in the 24.5 percent) said they didn’t understand the question.

What’s notable about these numbers is that the 24.5 percent represents a jump of 13.5 percentage points from the 11 percent that was recorded in 2015.

What explains this dramatic jump? Conservatives believe it’s all the purposeful pro-LGBT social conditioning now seen in America’s core institutions (its schools, its corporations, its media, etc.).

The CDC for its part says the reason for the uptick might be because of the change in the wording of the questions.

“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,’” according to the agency.

But speaking with the New York Post, Ritch Savin-Williams, a developmental psychology professor at Cornell, seemed to attribute the uptick to social media.

“Social media has added to this visibility that there are options that were not previously available. In a positive sense, it sort of says, ‘Hey, look, you don’t have to fit into these boxes,’” he said.

He also dismissed the idea that being LGBT is a fad.

“Despite arguments that being queer is a passing fad, Savin-Williams noted that it’s ‘not that the absolute number of people’ who identify as non-heterosexual has grown, it’s that more people are willing to express and ‘declare’ it,” according to the Post.

The release of the CDC’s study comes two months after the release of a Gallup poll that found that young Americans are identifying as LGBT at rates exponentially higher than their older peers:

The same poll found that 7.2 percent of all U.S. adults identify as LGBT. That’s more than double what it was a decade ago when Gallup “found just 3.5% of the U.S. population identified as something other than heterosexual in 2012,” according to NBC News.

Specifically, the poll found that as of 2022, 19.7 percent (or one in five) of Gen Z adults identify as LGBT. Conversely, only 11.2 percent of Millennials, 3.3 percent of Gen X, and 2.7 percent of Baby Boomers identify similarly.

Responding to this particular poll, critics again pointed to social conditioning:

Vivek Saxena
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