related to prev post, i saw this article recently & i’ve been thinking about this finding:
In a recent poll, Gallup found that LGBTQ+ identification has more than doubled since 2012, with especially high rates among Gen Z women, or those born between 1997 and 2012. In 2023, 28.5% of Gen Z women identified as LGBTQ+, compared with 10.6% of Gen Z men. […]
Our research found that, across 15 years, young women have steadily become less likely to report being exclusively attracted to the other sex. In 2011, about 22% of female students reported attraction that was not exclusively to men; by 2026, that had increased to close to 50%. Similar movement appeared across sexual behavior and identity: The share of women who reported not having exclusively male sexual partners increased from 8% to 35%, while the share identifying as something other than exclusively heterosexual increased from 18% to 44%. These trends were broadly consistent across racial groups. […]
Young men showed no comparable long-term shift and instead remained concentrated in exclusive heterosexuality; any movement away from that was limited and less sustained. The share of male students reporting attraction that was not exclusively to women remained nearly unchanged: about 14% in 2011 and 13% in 2026. This lack of movement was also seen in behavior and identity.
Among students who identified as something other than exclusively straight, male students were more likely to report exclusively gay identities than female students were to report exclusively lesbian identities. This is consistent with gender norms that leave men less room for sexual ambiguity and sort male desire into either entirely straight or entirely gay.
in studies like the USTS we can see the massive dearth in the counting of nonbinary people assigned male. & its not reducible to the exclusion of trans people assigned male, because trans women are roughly equal to trans men. its specifically the combination of being nonbinary and assigned male. & this seems to be a similar trend to what is seen here in queer men, particularly bisexual & other mspec men.
& we cannot simply attribute this to “(people perceived as) men experience more punishment for queerness” because bisexual cis women have some of the highest rates of violence victimization and poverty in the community. bisexual women do not have it easier than bisexual men, bisexual women are not privileged over bisexual men, and in general, under patriarchy, people classed as women are not being given more room for sexual exploration and sexual freedom than people classed as men.
personally my theory is that its a combination of things. particularly what comes to mind for me is that people raised & perceived as women are in general more likely to lean towards being progressive, which could mean they are more likely to find themselves in spaces (esp. online) and friend groups where they have many opportunities to learn about queerness and various kinds of queer identity. people raised & perceived as women already experience life as gender marginalized and experiencing mockery, degradation, and violence as a result, and queer spaces also tend to have feminist leanings and talk directly about these experiences of marginalization, which can allow people to interpret the marginalization they face as “an injustice that warrants resistance” and reduces the overall hoops one needs to jump over internally to identify oneself as bisexual or nonbinary or otherwise queer.
comparatively, people raised & perceived as men can cumulatively have less opportunities to learn about these identities, have a community or friend group where they can explore them, feel motivated to publicly identify with these identities, etc. and both bisexuals and nonbinary people are groups that deal with massive amounts of erasure and pressure to not only “pick a side” but pick the normal side, whether out of self-preservation or a feeling that they don’t “need” or “deserve” an openly queer identity in comparison to a monosexual gay man or a binary trans woman - who may be seen as “real” queer people.
![II. DEHUMANIZATION The point that systems of oppression, including patriarchy, stabilize themselves through the complicity of some set of the subordinate class, securing the meager "benefits" and degraded "entitlements" within the oppressive structure, leads to a further insight regarding Manne's claim, perhaps controversial, that misogyny relies upon the inclusion, rather than exclusion, of women from the human community. Contrary to the view she calls "humanism," Manne argues that the reactive attitudes that underwrite the hostility and accompanying violent behavior that subordinated groups, specifically women, are subjected to presupposes their humanity. Manne's argument that dehumanization is not the best explanation of violence and terror against persons as members of subordinated groups can be plausibly challenged. In particular, if one interprets the claim of dehumanization as a failure to secure the conditions of equal standing necessary for full recognition of human status, and the accompanying rights, rather than as a description of the psychological belief state of perpetrators, then Manne's arguments are better read as narrowly attacking one interpretation of what it means to "dehumanize" persons. (footnote: For example, I do not read Catharine A. MacKinnon's work as advancing the humanist theses Manne criticizes. Manne does not offer extended analysis of MacKinnon's work in the chapter devoted to humanism, so she may agree with me. However, the book opens with a quote from MacKinnon ("When will woman be human? When?") and the passages on Langton's work as an extension of MacKinnon's analysis of pornography suggest that, perhaps, Manne locates MacKinnon in the humanist tradition as she defines it. Against this possible reading of MacKinnon, I read her as arguing that human rights law, in particular, has been built upon men's experience of such violations and that human rights law itself must change to conceptualize the specific group-based injuries women experience because they are women. This argument doesn't rest on attributing psychological states to perpetrators of violence against women, including mass rape and genocide. Rather, it says the concept of human rights violations, and indeed humanity, had to be expanded to recognize that "group-based injuries [are] central to the denial of humanity, with sex- and ethnically- based harms at the core of, rather than peripheral to, human rights" (MacKinnon, 2005, p. 2). Thus, the critical point of MacKinnon's arguments about equal standing within the legal frameworks designed to secure human rights. As she writes: "Legally, one is less than human when one's violations do not violate the human rights that are recognized" (MacKinnon, p. 3). Thus, Manne's arguments that denying women's "humanity," as it were, depends upon hierarchically organized group divisions as socially situated forms of inequality is quite congenial with MacKinnon's position, rather than opposed to it. /end footnote.) Nonetheless, the arguments she offers claiming that many of the reactive attitudes that function to underwrite misogyny depend upon attributing human status to women provide grounds for thinking about gender non-conforming persons' relation to the category "human." Manne argues that the conflict that generates, supports, and structures hostility towards women, both in its structural and personal forms, relies upon attributing and recognizing the humanity of women—as the reactive attitudes of resentment, perception of rivalry, perception of another as threat, as out of place, depend upon a kind of recognition of the status of the other, the aggriever, as within the human moral community. Central to grounding these reactive attitudes is the perception that the other, women who fail to fulfill their subordinate, relational role, denies their superior some good to which they are "entitled." Misogyny works, in part, to both punish the transgression and to restore the claimed entitlement thought to be denied.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f346645aefa9b12e8cb59427f736fd8f/298d08d2c63de6f5-88/s1280x1920/8a06cc8a4fdb7dc689f098f361449d12bccd8599.jpg)
