A new report from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law has put scientific data behind the number of the population of “queer” self-identified people in the United States. According to its findings, only 6 percent of the LGBT community identify as queer, while 47 percent identify as lesbian or gay, just over 40 percent identify as bisexual (Eighty-five percent of the women who were polled reported being attracted to both men and women.) and about 7 percent identify as “other.”

The data’s age demographic characteristic shows that od the 6% of the LGBT community that identify as “queer” Ninety-eight percent of queer people are ages 18 to 44, with the vast majority (76 percent) ages 18 to 25, or Generation Z. The study found that just 2 percent of queer-identified people are ages 52 to 59, the oldest age cohort in the study.

Despite the push by the younger generation of the LGBT community to “reclaim” the word “queer” many older members of the community resist doing so because the pain and harm both physical and emotional that the it caused many over the past 100 years and believe it is incredibly insensitive and selfish to reclaim the word.

An unofficial poll ran by the Gay UK website in 2018 found that 60% of those polled said that using the term “Queer” to describe members of the LGBT community is deeply offensive”, particularly to men who identified as gay.

Only seven percent of gay men surveyed thought that the term “queer” was acceptable