Today has seen the release of new data from the 2022 Census, looking at what it reveals about the LGBTQ+ population of Scotland. It’s certainly interesting, but we also need to be aware of its limitations. Both the question on sexual orientation and the one on gender identity were voluntary, so not everybody answered them. Many people contributing their data to the census would not have been able to do so privately, so how they responded is likely to have been skewed by privacy and safety concerns. And many older people have not grown up in a cultural context that has allowed them to explore these aspects of their lives, or even had the language with which to do so.
These complexities are important because data about LGBTQ+ people is not only used to help facilitate inclusive public policies – it’s frequently used in hostile campaigns. Without context, it can present a false impression of what’s actually happening within the population, and because it concerns people who have often been the subject of moral panics, that’s dangerous.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Dr Kevin Guyan, the author of Queer Data, cautioned that the data acquired through the census is political. “Collecting more data about LGBTQ communities also invites new risks,” he wrote. “For opponents of LGBTQ inclusion, the number of LGBTQ people is always going to be too big and too small – we need to avoid getting caught in this data trap!”
This phenomenon is known in the social sciences as the Goldilocks effect. If there appear to be ‘too few’ LGBTQ+ people, those hostile to the community will argue that it’s inappropriate to spend public money on it or to consider it in policy-making. If there appear to be ‘too many’, expect dire warnings about social contagion, attacks on inclusive education and rhetoric focused around claims of threat. The important take-away here is the number can never be just right, like Goldilocks’ preferred porridge and bed. In fact, it’s not unusual for the LGBTQ+ population to find itself attacked from both directions at once.
The kids are alright
Let’s take a closer look at some of those statistics. One thing that stands out straight away is the similarity of the graphs for sexual orientation and gender compared with age. In both cases, there’s a massive skew towards young people. With sexual orientation, this is less weighted towards those aged 16 to 19, which is something we’d expect, because most people develop a clear sense of gender between the ages of two and seven, whereas sexual orientation doesn’t develop until later and it can take a while for people to feel certain that pre-sexual romantic feelings are relevant to their developing adult identities.
Why the similarity? Is it a fad, a result of some kind of brainwashing, or simply a result of young people having more access to diverse ways of thinking about themselves, and less stigma to keep them in the closet? The evidence that they have somehow been made LGBTQ+ is weak. The stigma attached to it might not be as strong, but it is still there, and what’s more, everybody in our society is subject to continual efforts to make them straight – not cruelly, in most cases, but simply by way of the weight of social assumptions and the constant presence of stories and imagery focused on boy/girl romance. The pressure to conform to gender expectations is even greater.
If we assume that, instead, the age disparity is caused by having more options, why don’t we see more older people coming out as LGBTQ+? After all, even if they missed out on information and support when young, they should be aware that it’s out there now. The answer to this is twofold. First, it’s hard to change, to reformat one’s identity, especially as one gets older – too much is invested in it. Coming out as LGBTQ+ in later life requires a lot of self-reflection, which takes time and effort.
Second, even when people do come to terms with such an identity, there are all sorts of social reasons why it’s harder to be open about it, especially if one is married with children or other dependents. For people who have reached a point in life where they don’t expect to have new sexual or romantic opportunities, or where medical issues are more likely to complicate gender transition, it may not feel as if putting family relationships in jeopardy or risking hostility from peers is worth it.
The complexity of labels
Also striking is the similarity between the proportion of trans people identifying as non-binary and the proportion of LGB people identifying as bisexual. This highlights something important: gender and sexual orientation are fuzzy categories. Not everybody in those categories will feel exactly in the middle; some will choose them just because they’re acknowledging complexity. Meanwhile, some gay men, for instance, will occasionally feel attracted to women but define as gay because it’s rare enough to seem irrelevant in most contexts. So how many people who define as straight will actually experience the occasional same-sex attraction, but dismiss it in the same way?
In our society, there’s much more pressure to assume a straight identity, so we should expect people for whom same sex attractions are rare to be more likely to reject a bisexual identity than people for whom different sex attractions are rare. Similarly, people who have faced up to stigma and come out as trans can be expected to be more flexible in how they express that than people who have not, so there are probably a fair number of people who occasionally experience gender dysphoria but dismiss it because it’s simply easier to conform. The same pressure doesn’t exist in the other direction, or at least not to anything like the same degree.
For lesbians, it’s a little more complicated, because the lesbian community has traditionally been more inclusive of bisexual women than the gay community has of bisexual men. Among young people, however, there has been an increasing tendency to drop the term lesbian in favour of describing as queer women, which may explain why there are apparently fewer lesbians than gay men. There are also different risk factors involved for women and men where coming out is concerned, and these have changed over time, which tallies fairly well with the census data on age and sexual orientation.
Location, location, location
We can also see that LGB people and trans people are more likely to live in cities than in urban areas. National Records of Scotland puts this down to the age skew and the fact that cities have larger student populations, but it’s missing a couple of things there. First of all, the risk of coming out as LGBTQ+ in a small town or village – even to the people with whom you share a census form – is much higher, because you’re much more dependent on the people immediately around you. Secondly, because of that factor, LGBTQ+ people are disproportionately likely to migrate to cities early in life in order to find safety and community.
There is much more that could be said about this particular set of statistics, but the important thing is to be aware that they shouldn’t be treated as simple fact. Be cautious about the narratives you see formed around them – and bear in mind that, in the end, numbers shouldn’t make a difference to our willingness to accept and respect all our fellow Scots.
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