What It’s Like to Be a Queer Teenager in America Today (Published 2023) (2024)

For L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers, high school is a much more accepting place than even a decade ago. They change their pronouns, go to school dances with people of the same gender, and are more likely than any previous generation to openly identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or otherwise queer.

“Being queer and being happy about it is something that’s so normal,” said Reese Whisnant, who just graduated from Topeka High in Kansas.

Yet there is a darker side. Even as they are increasingly welcomed by peers, their mental health is significantly worse than that of heterosexual young people. Many young transgender and gay people have been affected by a wave of recent Republican-led legislation questioning their identity or putting restrictions on their lives. They’re being raised by generations whose approval of and comfort with L.G.B.T.Q. identities lag their own.

Their experiences highlight a “paradoxical finding,” as researchers have described it: Even as social inclusion for young L.G.B.T.Q. people has grown, large health disparities between them and their non-L.G.B.T.Q. peers have not shrunk.

“This is what young people teach us: Change can happen as quickly as a generation,” said Stephen T. Russell, a sociologist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies adolescent development and L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

At the same time, he said, “the moment we’re in is so scary in terms of the mental health crisis.”

Researchers say many factors are probably contributing to L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers’ contradictory experiences. To better understand, we took a national poll and talked to two dozen high school students in five states. The students were from states like Florida, Kansas and Iowa, which have passed various restrictions affecting L.G.B.T.Q. minors, and Oregon, which has no such restrictions and has passed protections.

At Reese’s school, he was one of at least a dozen openly transgender students, and many more students identified as L.G.B.T.Q. It’s a different world from when his older sister, Brianna Henderson, attended just seven years ago, when there were very few openly gay students.

“It’s way different now than when I was in school,” said Ms. Henderson, who is straight. “We didn’t really talk about it. We just left it alone.”

Yet Reese has at times struggled to get the support of adults in his life. He has heard slurs in school. His home state has passed laws related to restroom use and sports participation for young transgender people. It has all strained his mental health, he said: “It’s stuff that teenagers shouldn’t have to be worrying about on top of all the other stuff we already have to worry about.”

Rapid social change

One in five adults in Gen Z (those roughly 18 to 26) identify as L.G.B.T.Q., according to Gallup polling, compared with 7 percent of adults in the United States overall. The majority of them identify as bisexual. About 2 percent of Gen Z adults are transgender, and about half of adults under 30 report knowing someone transgender.

Often, young people don’t identify in only one category, and think of them as overlapping: “The majority of my friends and peers are bisexual or pansexual, more than just straight-up gay or lesbian or trans,” said Jareth Leiker, a high school student in Portland, Ore.

Researchers say that as being gay or transgender became more accepted, more people came out of the closet than in previous generations, and earlier. Today, young people don’t necessarily feel the need to formally come out at all. Also, Professor Russell said, “It’s a bigger and wider range of kids understanding themselves in queer ways than a decade or two ago.”

In much of the country, what it’s like to be an L.G.B.T.Q. teenager changed around the mid-2010s. The Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. “Will and Grace” had been on TV, and the show “I Am Jazz” started that year. In 2014, the basketball player Jason Collins became the first openly gay athlete in one of the four major North American pro sports leagues, and a year later, Caitlyn Jenner, the Olympian and Kardashian, came out as transgender. Children and teenagers grew up with campaigns spreading inclusive messages about sexual orientation and identity.

For today’s teenagers, it has been all they have known — they were in elementary school at the time.

Perhaps the biggest driver, young people say, was the explosion of social media in the 2010s. Though it has been a contributor to bullying, low self-esteem and other mental health issues, for many L.G.B.T.Q. children, it has also been a boon.

“If you weren’t around peers or parents who were accepting, that’s all you were exposed to before you grew up and went off to college,” said Matthew Rivas-Koehl, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois studying gender and sexuality. “Now you can find communities, or just have exposure.”

A recent survey by The New York Times and Morning Consult of 1,574 young adults found that people ages 18 to 28 — who mostly graduated from high school since 2013 — were significantly more likely to know L.G.B.T.Q. students in school than those a decade older, who were teenagers in the 2000s.

The younger group was twice as likely to report knowing at least one transgender student, and three times as likely to have known three or more. Four in 10 said they knew numerous gay, lesbian or bisexual people in high school, compared with a quarter of the older group.

And while both groups reported hearing the words “gay” and “queer” used negatively at similar rates — a data point reflected in interviews with teenagers, who say they still hear “that’s so gay” in school hallways — the younger graduates were significantly more likely to hear those words used in a positive light, too. They were also more likely to have a gay-straight alliance or similar club at their school.

This reflects other data that has found that verbal harassment of L.G.B.T.Q. teenagers declined during the 2010s, while support for same-sex marriage became the norm among young people.

“You’re at the point among young adults where almost all these measures of acceptance are in the high 80s, low 90s,” said Jeff Jones, a senior editor who oversees research at Gallup. “It’s basically getting toward a consensus.”

Still, some groups experience more harassment. Native American youth are more likely than young people of any other race to say they have experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender expression, according to GLSEN, a nonprofit that does research and policy work to make schools more supportive of L.G.B.T.Q. students. Its most recent survey found that Black L.G.B.T.Q. students reported lower rates of harassment over their sexual orientation compared with white students, but were much less likely to have come out at school.

Support for transgender rights lags that for gay rights, and it’s easier to be a young gay person than a young trans person, teenagers said. “It’s a lot easier to go and say, ‘I’m attracted to the same gender,’” said Athena Stiles, a new Topeka High graduate who is bisexual. “A lot easier.”

Still, the youngest adults, those under 30, are at the “leading edge of change and acceptance,” Pew Research Center found. Nearly half in this group say society has not gone far enough in accepting transgender people, significantly more than older generations, and more than the three in 10 young adults who say the opposite.

“Most young people are very supportive,” said Autumn Person, who is transgender and recently graduated from high school in Cape Coral, Fla. “Even some Republicans my age don’t care that I’m trans. It doesn’t bother them.”

Mental health under duress

As acceptance has grown, though, the mental health of queer youth has continued to suffer. Reported rates of mental health problems among all young people have been rising for the last decade, but non-heterosexual students face far higher rates than straight students.

About 70 percent of high school students who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual reported persistent sadness, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, twice the rate of their heterosexual peers. One in five attempted suicide in the past year, nearly four times the rate of straight young people. (The C.D.C. does not track the mental health of transgender youth, but other data shows that roughly half had considered suicide in the past year.)

Researchers say one reason for the paradox is that teenagers are exploring this part of their identity while going through the broader identity turmoil that is part of adolescence.

“In most other domains of development, we don’t expect adolescents to figure it all out on their own,” Mr. Rivas-Koehl said. “We expect educators, parents, supportive adults to accept this takes-a-village mentality. Sometimes we forget about that when it comes to specific issues around gender and sexual identity. Kids still need that support, just like any other adolescent.”

Research shows that being in a minority group, especially if people in that group face stigma, causes stress that can affect their health — a phenomenon known as minority stress theory. Since adolescents feel a drive to conform with their peers, being a minority during this period may be particularly challenging. Studies have shown that L.G.B.T.Q. youth who experience more stress about their minority identity are more likely to have mental health challenges.

The isolation of the pandemic may have been particularly hard on L.G.B.T.Q. youth if they were home with families who weren’t supportive. Acceptance among both adults and peers varies by geography: It’s more common in liberal areas and cities. hom*ophobic remarks among students are more common in Southern and rural schools, and less so at private schools and in the West and Northeast, according to GLSEN.

Young people are also affected by the culture at large, researchers say, as anti-trans legislation and what critics call “Don’t Say Gay” bills reverberate across the country. Among other bills, there has been a wave of legislation this year banning what doctors call gender-affirming care for trans minors, such as puberty blockers and hormones. Although research in the United States and Europe is continuing on the benefits and risks of medical transition treatments for young people, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association have urged states not to ban or limit this care.

Many teenagers, particularly in Republican-leaning states, said protesting these bans had become a big part of their lives.

“There is good data on the fact that these public moments that promote stigma and discrimination work their way into the culture and climate in schools and peer relationships with kids,” Professor Russell said.

Parents and schools play big roles and can do specific things to support L.G.B.T.Q. youth, researchers say. Studies find that family acceptance is among the most important protective factors, something that teenagers also said in interviews.

“Accepting peers is important, but it is not the most important component of the mental health crisis that L.G.B.T.Q. youth are experiencing,” said Shelley L. Craig, the Canada Research Chair in sexual and gender minority youth at the University of Toronto. “It’s family rejection.”

Some sex education curriculums cover L.G.B.T.Q. health and identities; nine states require it. The presence of a gay-straight alliance improves the school climate as a whole, studies show, even for people who don’t participate. At Anissya Suniga’s high school in Beeville, Texas, she said, the alliance was “the first welcoming environment I’ve been in.”

At Topeka High, Reese Whisnant said, teachers now talk about L.G.B.T.Q. issues, especially in history class, and there’s a gender-sexuality alliance with nearly 100 members. “They’re really trying to help kids understand they need to be accepting and stuff,” he said. “It’s definitely a lot better than it was. There’s still stuff that needs to be worked on, but it’s a lot better.”