By Lily Wakefield
A fifth of LGBT+ youth identify their orientation as something other than lesbian, gay or bisexual, as more young people embrace labels that fall outside of the binary.
The Trevor Project’s National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health 2019 had more than 34,000 respondents, all between the ages of 13 and 24.
It showed that while 45 percent of LGBT+ youth identify as gay or lesbian, and 33 percent identify as bisexual, 22 percent said they were “something else”.
Language around sexual orientation is constantly evolving, and the survey states that participants identified with more than 100 orientations.
Some of the labels used by young people surveyed include ace spectrum, graysexual, gynedemisexual and abrosexual.
Many also split how they identify their orientation between romantic attraction and sexual attraction, for example, a person could identify as biromantic homosexual, meaning they are romantically attracted to two genders but only sexually attracted to one.
Examples of this recorded in the survey included panromantic asexual and greyromantic demisexual.
Dr. Amy Green, director of research at The Trevor Project, told Bustle: “The Trevor Project often hears from young people who identify outside of the sexual orientation labels of gay, lesbian, or bisexual and many times they are able to articulate the difference between their emotional, romantic, and sexual attractions to others.”