In today’s day and age, some people feel identifying as a member of the LGBTQ+ community puts a target on your back. Whether it’s sneers from strangers as you walk hand in hand with your partner or the brigade of conservative politicians filing bills to legislate discrimination against trans folks, a palpable disdain toward queer-identifying Americans seems to be hanging in the air.
And now, there’s data suggesting acceptance of LGBTQ+ people has decreased according to Tessa E.S. Charlesworth and Eli J. Finkel, both of whom are research psychologists who study bias and political partisanship and wrote a guest essay for The New York Times on the matter.
A study conducted by Charlesworth receiving 7.1 million responses from Americans collected from 2007 to 2020 had researchers track both explicit bias and implicit bias toward LGBTQ+ related topics. Across every U.S. state and demographic group, anti-gay bias plummeted — by roughly 75 percent on explicit measures and 65 percent on implicit ones, on average. Forecasting models suggested that, at that pace, anti-gay bias could hit zero as early as 2022.
An analysis of 2.5 million additional survey responses collected from Americans from early 2021 through 2024 shows that progress has reversed. Anti-gay bias rose by about 10 percent in just four years.
Bias also increased toward Black, darker-skinned, older, disabled and overweight people, though by smaller margins. As attitudes toward gay people improved faster than others before 2020, they have since worsened more sharply.
The shift was most pronounced among Americans under 25. Young adults showed faster growth in bias toward marginalized groups – especially gay people – than older age groups. While conservatives recorded the steepest increases, anti-gay bias also rose among liberals.
According to the two psychologists, while it’s unknown what the cause of this decline could be, they suggest there are two reasons that can possibly be ruled out.
“The first is that the anti-gay backlash is a side effect, or spillover, of the backlash against the movement for transgender rights. If that were so, you would expect increases in anti-trans bias to be meaningfully correlated with subsequent increases in anti-gay bias, which the research does not show,” Charlesworth and Finkel write.
“The second hypothesis is that the anti-gay backlash reflects the rise in moral panic language about sexual grooming, the notion that gay adults are recruiting or influencing children to become gay. But the research shows no evidence of spikes in grooming discourse (measured through Google searches) that are meaningfully correlated with subsequent spikes in anti-gay bias.”
Research from the Pew Research Center supports this claim by Charlesworth and Finkel. A May 2025 report from the Pew Research Center showed a majority (61 percent) say there is a great deal or a fair amount of acceptance for people who are gay or lesbian while about half (52 percent) say the same for those who identify as bisexual. Much smaller shares say there’s a great deal or a fair amount of acceptance for people who are nonbinary (14 percent) or transgender (13 percent). And over half (52 percent) say there’s not much or no acceptance at all for transgender people, with 44 percent saying this is also the case for non-binary people.
In the same report, survey respondents were asked about acceptance now versus 10 years ago. Most LGBTQ adults say acceptance has grown over the past decade for gay and lesbian people, with 82 percent saying there is now much or somewhat more acceptance. Majorities say the same about bisexual people (76 percent), transgender people (66 percent) and nonbinary people (64 percent).
Even among those who say acceptance remains limited, most still report that it has increased compared with 10 years ago. Another Pew Research Center report showed in 2004, 31 percent of Americans supported it, while 60 percent opposed. By 2015, 55 percent supported same-sex marriage, while 39 percent opposed. And support has continued to grow: In 2023, 63 percent of Americans expressed support for same-sex marriage.
However, this report also noted majorities of gay or lesbian adults (73 percent) and transgender adults (68 percent) say they have been subject to slurs or jokes because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Transgender adults are about twice as likely as gay or lesbian adults to say this has happened to them recently – that is, in the 12 months prior to the survey (42 percent vs. 22 percent). Around 70 percent of transgender adults say they have feared for their personal safety at some point while about half of gay or lesbian adults (52 percent) and 28 percent of bisexual adults say the same.
With this data in mind, there’s an even greater concern as more and more Americans have been open about their LGBTQ+ identities. A Gallup study on LGBTQ+ identification showed 9.3 percent of U.S. adults identifying as LGBTQ+ in 2024, representing an increase of more than a percentage point versus the prior estimate, from 2023. Longer term, the figure has nearly doubled since 2020 and is up from 3.5 percent in 2012 when Gallup first measured it.
What this shows is that many Americans are now more vulnerable than ever as anti-LGBTQ+ bias, particularly against transgender or gender-nonconforming individuals, has risen in the last four years.
What are your thoughts? If you’re a member of our community, have you experienced any anti-LGBTQ+ actions or sentiment recently? We’d like to know what your experience has been. Is the data collected and reported in this story reflective of what you might have dealt with in the last few years?