Read the Full Results Here: Click Here
"Love Is Love" is the anthem the LGBTQ community chants during Pride events or protests. But after many years researching and writing a TV show centered at helping improve LGBTQ education, we wanted to put that anthem to the test.
Powered By Rainbows has been providing LGBTQ educational episodes online to over 7.5 Million people and in-person at over 20,000 schools in 82 countries. Time and again in our comments and research, we kept finding LGBTQ people who wanted to separate our community so their sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI) can gain more acceptance. We felt first-hand the discrimination our community sometimes dishes out where the community body shames their own members or openly protest against the rights of other members. We've felt the competiveness from other LGBTQ organizations who wanted praise for their good work but never wanted to collaborate or come together because, in their words, they would have to share the spotlight.
We've seen people who are not members of our community come to us with genuine questions and wanting to understand more about our community. Every time, our team would respond with the best answers we could, sometimes even reaching out to experts or researchers to get answers for us. Sadly, many times we've watched as other members of the LGBTQ attack these commenters for not already completely understanding and accepting everything about our community. So, those other people have stopped asking for our help because they're afraid of getting attacked again.
While I understand our community has been attacked for generations, nowadays some people are being more understanding . Our study found 34.92% of LGBTQ people feel their country is LGBTQ friendly. Many more people outside our community are trying their best to accept us. The progress we seek may not always be as fast as we want it to be but this is a good start.
After many years of these experiences, we wanted to see how big these issues were and see if anyone else in the community has similar experiences. So, we asked our incredible audience for help. Luckily, we had 561 people respond from 56 countries. We asked a lot of questions - 59 questions to be exact - so the idea that 561 people took that amount of time to help us with our effort here is incredible.
Majorly, our participants came from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Most of them are 15 to 24 years old with over 25% of them being homosexual and over 21% of them being Gender Non-Binary.
Some of the most incredible findings we had in our study include:
82.77% of LGBTQ people have never had any LGBTQ education in school.
45.87% of participants do not use the restroom matching their gender identity including 73.72% of gender non-conforming individuals.
59.89% of participants have never attended an LGBTQ Pride event; however, even more (70.41%) have not attended one in the past year meaning attendance is down at Pride events this year compared to prior years.
18.0% of LGBTQ people think Pride events should have a dress code.
47.24% of participants have changed their religious beliefs thanks to anti-LGBTQ churches and teachings including 54.55% of LGBTQ Christians.
67.74% of participants want a monogamous relationship; however, only 50.45% of LGBTQ people want friendships.
Only 88.41% of LGBTQ people support those in open relationships. Most shocking here is that 2.56% of those who want or currently have an open relationship and 2.36% of those who want or currently have polyamorous relationships do not support those with open relationships.
We asked participants to tell us who the most and least supportive person in their life is. Overwhelmingly, the most supportive person to someone's SOGI is a friend; however, the least supportive person their parents / legal guardians.
Overall, the LGBTQ community massively has support for members who are lesbian or gay; however, the community offers the least amount of support to those who are Agender (with Genderfluid coming in a close 2nd to last).
44.92% of LGBTQ people at least somewhat believe that splitting sexual orientations from gender identities (LGB / TQ+) would benefit sexual orientations to gain more acceptance. Similarly, 38.15% of LGBTQ at least somewhat think a split would help gender identities gain more acceptance.
67.20% of LGBTQ somewhat feel that the amount of labels in the LGBTQ makes it too confusing for others.
64.35% felt the LGBTQ community was cold or unfriendly to their own members.
19.07% have felt other members of the LGBTQ community attempting to make them feel bad about their appearance.
46.52% of LGBTQ people at least particially felt the LGBTQ community sometimes desires or provokes anti-LGBTQ hatred.
Only 57.22% felt that Drag should be associated with the LGBTQ community and 6.77% felt that Drag performances are not appropriate for children under the age of 15.
Only 34.88% of adults have LGBTQ protections at work.
42.79% of LGBTQ adults between the ages of 20 to 99 are unemployed.
10.16% of LGBTQ people would still shop at a store that removed LGBTQ pride displays or decorations and 3.21% would still shop at a store that supports conversion therapy.
11.59% of LGBTQ people feel LGBTQ organizations do not work well together.
17.29% of participants do not feel there is enough scientific evidence proving sexual orientations are valid compared to 26.38% of people who feel there is not enough evidence proving gender identities are valid.
Sadly, we found that overall, our experiences were not unique. The LGBTQ community has a lot of in-fighting and internal issues at the moment. Years ago, in the days of the Stonewall Riots in 1969, our community was discriminated on much more often. But in those days, it seems from our extensive research, we were a lot more supporting of each other and cohesive as a community.
Although we did not get responses from every single LGBTQ person, we feel 561 responses from 56 countries is a good sample size to make scientific groupings and base our recommendations on.
Overall, we recommend that much more LGBTQ education be put in schools and made mandatory. This way, more people outside our community will better understand that our sexual orientation or gender identity is scientifically valid and something we are born with. It is our hope that existing members of the community learn from this and seek out education to help them better understand different parts of their own community. While our participants are correct that more research needs to be done to better understand our community from a scientific perspective, that research needs to be presented consistently to everyone in school alongside straight education so it's put on an even playing field and normalized so future generations don't have this discrimination.
We also recommend continued research to see if these issues improve in the future for our community. As one of our participants from India wrote, "We want only one thing acceptance [and] love". So, our final recommendation in this study is that our LGBTQ community start showing that love and acceptance a little more to our own members and to others who genuinely just want to learn. Perhaps the best way we can summarize our findings and our recommendations would be the words from a participant in Spain who said: "I wish people were nicer to each other".
Please support our education work and get some awesome LGBTQ items and books here: https://www.pbrmerchstore.com/
Read the Full Results Here: Click Here
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