What do these apparent societal shifts mean then for the identities of lesbian, gay and bisexual? These are, by definition, usually understood as fairly fixed categories and are also often linked to an assumption of biological sex, with ‘lesbian’ commonly understood as referring to the same-sex preferences of females and ‘gay’ referring to the same-sex preferences of males. On sexuality, just over half, 52%, stated that they did not define as exclusively heterosexual (Innovation Group, 2016).

In a 2015 survey of 1000 13-20 year olds by a US marketing intelligence firm, their findings on gender identities were widely publicised, as 56% of the youth respondents reported that they knew someone who used gender-neutral pronouns such as ‘ze’, and 81% agreed that gender does not define a person as much as it used to. Indeed, this cohort of digital natives, those born approximately between 19, often labelled in marketing as ‘Generation Z’ appear to be embracing sex, sexual and gender diversity in even greater number than the older Millennials. Online surveying of 1006 13-26 year olds in the UK and the US by anti-bullying group ‘Ditch The Label’ relayed that more than half (57%) did not identify themselves under the category ‘straight’ and 76% stated that sexuality labels are no longer important (2017).

A 2017 report in the US by the national LGBTQ organisation GLAAD, found that 20% of the 2037 18-34yr olds surveyed openly identified themselves as being part of the LGBTQ community and 12% did not use traditional gender/sex identities or pronouns, using terms such as non-binary instead. Recent surveys and commentary, mainly from the US, but also from here in the UK, suggest that younger generations have an increasingly fluid conceptualisation of their sexual and gender identities and are less likely to identify rigidly as either straight or gay, or as either men or women.

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