28 May LGBT+ COMMUNITY GROWING OVER THE YEARS.
The LGBT community has forever been the centre of many debates in the past. This population is getting bigger over the years and its evolution seems to show that it’s becoming easier for people to identify themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual…
According to the Office for National Statistics, the proportion of population aged 16 years or over has decreased whereas the amount of people identifying themselves as part of the LGB community (Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual) has increased between 2012 and 2017.
People identifying as heterosexual went from representing 94.4% of the population in 2012 to 93.2% in 2017, and the LGB population has increased from 1.5% in 2012 to 2% in 2017.
It was estimated that 1.1 million people aged 16 years and over were identifying as lesbians gay and transgender out of a 52.8 million population aged 16 years and over in 2017.
According to statistics, it has been easier for men to identify as gay or bisexual than for women. If 2.3% of the LGB community are men, only 1.8% are women.
Population in London was more likely to identify as LGB than any other city or region. The North East of England and East of England were the least likely to identify as LGB with only 1.5% of the region identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual.
Although this is a significant development, the LGBT community has forever been facing homophobia and a lot of people still don’t feel comfortable coming out and don’t feel safe enough being themselves, so these statistics might not be accurate. However, mentalities are evolving and so are the laws.
Social media have also played a very important part in this evolution. If social media are getting more and more important -especially in teenagers’ lives- we can notice that around the same period of time, LGBT people started coming out. It seems like coming out online, and sharing this with people in the same situation was a way for LGBT people to find support and the courage to come out to their relatives. It seems like social media had a real impact on the LGBT community.
“The LGBT`+ community is everywhere on social media, they’re really supportive and caring. When I realised I was one of them, it just made me feel comfortable telling people that I didn’t know because they’d never judge me whereas my family would be like ‘you’ve always been into guys before, I don’t get it’” said Justine, a French student who’s had to go through this step.
Teachers have been requesting LGBT lessons to teach kids about different kinds of families such as same-sex parents, hoping to stop terror attacks and bullying that many LGBT people face every day.
Accepting and embracing everyone’s sexual identify is quite new and it takes time, but the day everyone is comfortable with who they are will come.
Workbook:
I found my dataset on The Office for National Statistics concerning sexual identity. My dataset is composed of figures showing the amount of people identifying themselves as LGBT+, according to their age, ethnicity, sex, region…
Although the evolution is going the right way it still feels like it could be improved. After reading about the impact of social media on the LGBT+ community on Health Manager, I figured it might be a good thing to speak to an LGBT+ person and see how she feels about social media, and if it’s helped that person coming out, and why. I spoke to Justine Jardin, a French sports student, identifying as LGBT+.
“The LGBT`+ community is everywhere on social media, they’re really supportive and caring. When I realised I was one of them, it just made me feel comfortable telling people that I didn’t know because they’d never judge me whereas my family would be like ‘you’ve always been into guys before, I don’t get it’”
I also mentioned teachers requesting LGBT+ classes in schools so they could finally get a chance to teach kids about same-sex families etc.
When working on my infographic, I used Visme and got the pictures from Pixabay.
