Last summer, Christine spotted a hickey on her then-15-year-old daughter’s neck. When she asked where it came from, her teen turned bright red.
That’s when the girl confessed to dating a female classmate and came out to her mother as bisexual — joining a trend which, new data shows, is making Gen Z women the most openly bisexual group in society.
“I really don’t care about her sexuality,” the mom told The Post. “I mean, my sister is gay.”
But secretly Christine couldn’t help wondering: Was her teenager — living in one of California’s most affluent cities and a freshman at one of the state’s top-performing schools — just following a trend?
“It is a wealthy community, and I think these kids have a lot of guilt about their environment. I definitely think, in their mind, it’s super cool to be bi, or gay, for sure,” Christine said.
“I question whether it’s about being accepted. Because I think the pressure for these kids to fall into an oppressed category is so strong that they just want to be in some sort of group.”
Christine, who requested a pseudonym to respect her daughter’s privacy, is not alone in wondering why Gen Z young women — those born after 1997 — are coming out as bisexual in record numbers.
A new analysis of Census Bureau data reveals that between 19% and 22% of women aged 18 to 25 identify as bi.
That makes them the main driver of the shocking statistic from Gallup polling last year that 19.7% of Gen Z is LGBT.
The analysis by Dr. Jean Twenge, psychologist and author of the upcoming book “Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future, means that extrapolated across the 68 million-strong Gen Z there are 7 million bisexual girls.
Dr. Twenge used data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse research, which carries out regular surveys asking more than one million Americans about their lives each time and, unlike the decennial Census, asks about sexuality.
Over the course of the past decade, the percentage of all Americans identifying as LGBT has doubled to 7.2%. But bisexual identity has exploded: Just 6.9% of Millennials are bisexual, compared with 13.1% of Gen Z, meaning that Gen Z women are now by far the most openly bisexual part of the population.
Gen Z bisexual women include Will Smith’s daughter, singer Willow, 22. She came out as bisexual and polyamorous to her mother Jada Pinkett Smith during a 2019 episode of their “Red Table Talk” show, saying: “I love men and women equally and so I would definitely want one man, one woman.”
Riverdale actress Lili Reinhart, who, at 26 is on the cusp between a Millennial and a Gen Zer, came out as bisexual in 2020, and said, “It just didn’t seem like a big deal to me. The way I look at the world right now, I’m like isn’t everyone bisexual?”
Many have wondered what’s behind this unprecedented spike. One theory is that social media could be a motivating factor.
Headlines like “TikTok Made Me Gay,” “TikTok’s Algorithm Knew My Sexuality Better Than I Did” and “TikTok’s algorithms knew I was bi before I did. I’m not the only one” have fueled speculation that suggestible young people who may never have questioned their sexuality could be led down online rabbit holes. On TikTok, the hashtag #bisexual has 20.9 billion views.
However, Cornell developmental psychology professor Ritch Savin-Williams, who has spent four decades studying adolescent and young adult sexuality, said he believed destigmatization is allowing more and more young people to come out.
“Social media has added to this visibility that there are options that were not previously available,” he told The Post. “In a positive sense, it sort of says, ‘Hey, look, you don’t have to fit into these boxes.’”
Gen Z is the first cohort to come of age since gay marriage was legalized, and the share of Americans who agree that homosexuality should be accepted by society has jumped from 51% to 72% since 2002. Savin-Williams sees the increase of youth identifying as LGBT is a natural result.
“It’s not that the absolute number of people increased as a percentage in terms of their internal orientation,” he said. “The shift has been in the visibility and the willingness of individuals to express it and to declare it.”
Savin-Williams has also noticed a change in attitude among young people who increasingly believe that sexual preference isn’t binary — that is, simply homosexual or heterosexual — opening the door to increased identification as bisexual.
“What they’ve been able to do is say there’s a spectrum — and that has been the key word,” he explained. “It’s possible to be predominantly straight but also to have some same-sex attraction or behavior.”
In this context, most of the LGBT population’s growth has been among bisexuals — and especially women, who Savin-Williams said have a proclivity “to be more flexible, to be more introspective and to be more able to explore.”
Just 66% of women (of all ages) report being “predominantly not attracted to the same sex,” and it’s thought that around 24% have some degree of dual attraction.
Suspicions that kids “want” to be something other than straight has gotten under the skin of some young members of the LGBT community.
“There’s this trend of straight girls and straight women basically being like, ‘Oh, men suck and girls are pretty. I wish I was bisexual,’” a queer Gen Z YouTuber said in a video entitled “Wannabe TikTok bisexuals need to stop.”
“You’re straight, and you’re just wishing you were part of the club. Like shut up,” she added. “As someone who is in the club, that is so annoying, and you should not be using your straight voice to drown out queer people.”