Seventeen unveiled its new section for LGBTQ teenagers on Thursday in order to fight back against President Trump. According to the editors of Seventeen, the new gay-focused section is important because teenagers are allegedly “more likely to identify as queer than straight.”
In announcement for their “HERE” section, the editors of Seventeen wrote the “community” will be dedicated to “amplifying the voices of LGBTQ-identified teenagers,” which are reportedly “something the world is missing right now.”
According to the editors at Seventeen, there is a need for a teenage-focused LGBTQ forum because Trump is president. The editors dedicate multiple paragraphs to claiming Trump has attacked the LGBTQ community:
Now, more than ever—one year after the election of Donald Trump—we need a strong community and a sense of visibility.
The queer community has been a central target in politics, especially in recent history. Trans women have been subject to innumerable hate crimes; LGBTQ people are three times more likely to contemplate suicide than their straight counterparts; the recent bathroom bills and proposed military ban have been direct attacks against transgender people; and, a year ago today, our country elected a new administration, which has acted time and time again to against the LGBTQ community.
[…]
This year has been harder than we were ever prepared for—especially for queer immigrants and POC—but it has also proven the strength of the LGBTQ family. Through countless protests, events, and new works of art, we have started our own revolution, and it’s a revolution that is (at its best) inclusive and open to everyone. That’s why, on this one-year anniversary of election day, we want to make it clear that now more than ever, this community is standing together to make ourselves more visible, more united, and more powerful.
Seventeen’s editors also make the bold assertion that unlike previous generations, current teenagers are “statistically” more likely to identify as “queer than straight.”
In order to support their claim that teenagers are somehow mostly gay now, Seventeen’s editors cite a Broadly article with the headline, “Teens These Days Are Queer AF, New Study Says.”
The actual study cited uses a Kinsey scale to measure sexuality, in which people can identify anywhere on a spectrum of sexuality, with zero being “completely heterosexual” and six being “completely homosexual.” According to the study on the J. Walter Thompson Intelligence page that Seventeen references, while 48 percent of those in generation Z said they’re “completely heterosexual,” only six percent responded that they’re “completely homosexual.” The rest of the respondents answered somewhere between the two extremes, with 12 percent saying they identify as one on the scale. This means while they don’t call themselves “completely heterosexual,” they view themselves as “predominantly heterosexual” with “only incidentally homosexual.”
It is unclear if the J. Walter Thompson Intelligence survey defined each number clearly for the teenage demographic.
However, even by the J. Walter Thompson Intelligence’s own estimation, if 35 percent (34 percent calculated by hand) of respondents say they’re some degree of bisexual, that would mean only 41 percent of generation Z identifies as queer, while 48 percent identify as straight.
Regardless of the fact that the Seventeen’s editors misinterpreted the data they cited, and made broad sweeping claims about the Trump administration without citig them, they still claim the new cite will be about “representation and visibility.”
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