# As Congress prepares to vote on Equality Act, the share of Americans identifying as LGBT rises

The 2020 survey question allowed people to specify their sexual orientation and gender identity: A majority of LGBT respondents (54.6%) said they were bisexual, while 24.5% said they were gay, 11.7% said they were lesbian, 11.3% said they were transgender, and 3.3% marked “other,” such as same-gender-loving or queer.

About one in six adults in Generation Z — that is, people born between 1997 and 2002 — identifies as LGBT, Gallup found. “One of the main reasons LGBT identification has been increasing over time is that younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual,” the report said.

Gallup didn’t regularly measure this question in 2018 or 2019, but when it asked a yes-or-no question about LGBT identification in previous years, the share of adults identifying as such steadily inched up from 3.5% in 2012 to 4.5% in 2017. During those years, about 5% said they had no opinion.

House to vote on Equality Act

The report came the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote again Wednesday on the Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in education, employment, public accommodations and facilities, housing, credit and other areas. 

The bill’s expanded definition of “public accommodations” includes “places or establishments that provide (1) exhibitions, recreation, exercise, amusement, gatherings, or displays; (2) goods, services, or programs; and (3) transportation services.”

The House previously passed the Equality Act in 2019, but the legislation stalled in the then GOP-controlled Senate. The newly introduced bill has support from Democrats and President Biden, who last week urged Congress to pass the legislation, arguing it represented “a critical step toward ensuring that America lives up to our foundational values of equality and freedom for all.”

Republicans have voiced opposition, including over concerns that the bill would fail to protect religious freedom.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision last June that federal civil-rights laws prohibiting workplace discrimination based on gender also apply to gender identity and sexual orientation.

LGBT adults more likely to experience poverty

Despite that victory, LGBT Americans still face substantial challenges, including on the economic front: Studies show that LGBTQ people tend to earn less money than their non-LGBTQ counterparts, for example, and can face barriers to housing access and higher unemployment rates. Transgender people have a particularly high jobless rate.

A Human Rights Campaign report last fall found that LGBT people were more likely than the general population to report experiencing unemployment and reduced work hours even as some states had started to reopen their economies.

In fact, 22% of LGBT U.S. adults experienced poverty, according to a recent report by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, while 27% faced food insecurity, compared to 16% and 15% of non-LGBT adults, respectively. Some 667,100 transgender adults in the U.S. lived below 200% of the poverty line and 139,700 were unemployed, it added.
 
LGBT adults are also more likely to be renters than homeowners. Indeed, 50% of LGBT adults were homeowners, far less than the 70% for non-LGBT adults.

LGBT people have also faced increased health risks during the pandemic. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report earlier this month found that a number of underlying conditions that heighten the risk of more serious COVID-19 outcomes were more common among people who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual than among heterosexual people. The number of transgender or nonbinary respondents was too small to produce reliable estimates for comparison to cisgender people, the CDC said.

Black and Hispanic Americans have suffered an outsized impact from the pandemic, the report noted, “and the increased prevalence of certain risk factors among sexual minority members of these racial/ethnic minority populations is of particular concern.” 

Due to their sexual orientation, the report added, gay, lesbian and bisexual people “experience stigmatization and discrimination that can increase vulnerabilities to illness and limit the means to achieving optimal health and well-being through meaningful work and economic security, routine and critical health care, and relationships in which sexual orientation and gender identity can be openly expressed.”