New federal teen survey data show most high school students now identify as straight, while the share choosing LGBTQ labels appears to have leveled off in recent years.
Story Highlights
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 73.3% of students identify as heterosexual.
- Shares for gay or lesbian, bisexual, and questioning are measurable and trackable over time.
- Category changes in 2021 affect clean year-to-year comparisons across the past decade.
- Underlying data remain available for deeper sex and grade cross-tabs through CDC systems.
CDC finds most teens identify as heterosexual in latest national survey
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers reported that 73.3% of high school students identified as heterosexual in the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. The same report listed 4.0% as gay or lesbian, 11.4% as bisexual, 4.4% as questioning, 4.3% as some other identity, and 2.5% who did not understand the question. The national report treats sexual identity as a standard measure across the school-based survey program, which has run for decades and tracks teen behaviors and risks.
Earlier Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting shows that sexual minority identification has been a stable, trackable part of these school surveys. In 2017, the national series reported 2.4% of students as gay or lesbian, 8.0% as bisexual, and 4.2% as not sure. These estimates sit inside a long-running, biennial project designed to follow teen health and behavior trends across the country with consistent methods and weights so the public can compare cycles.
Method changes in 2021 added new response options
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance updated the sexual identity response set starting in 2021. The survey added “questioning,” “some other way,” and “I do not know what this question is asking.” This change helps teens choose a clearer label, but it also means simple point-to-point comparisons across many years require care. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention trend methods advise using identically worded questions to judge movement over time, which limits direct decade comparisons for this item.
The 2023 technical release also notes the large sample design and the use of national weighting to show distributions by sex and grade. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention documents describe a national sample exceeding twenty thousand students across grades nine through twelve, which supports subgroup analysis. The agency’s methodology summary reports that 13.2% of students identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual and 9.3% as other or questioning in recent adolescent reporting frames, showing how the distributions can be broken out for sharper insight.
Access to deeper cross-tabs and what analysts should check next
Reporters and parents can review more detail in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Youth Online system. That platform provides cross-tabs by sex and grade for many measures, including sexual identity. Education Week noted that the 2025 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention summary narrowed its narrative to selected differences but kept the full underlying data accessible for outside review. That means analysts can examine subgroup patterns even if the headline report is brief on that topic.
The present materials do not include a complete sex-by-grade trend table that would quantify a specific rise or fall for younger girls across multiple years. Analysts who want that answer should pull the microdata or the posted cross-tabs from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention systems and test for trends with the same wording set. That step would confirm whether any subgroup shift is large, small, or within normal survey variation for that measure.
How parents can read these numbers with common sense
Parents see that most teens still call themselves straight, and that lines up with everyday life. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data also show a steady share of students who choose bisexual, gay or lesbian, questioning, or other. Because the labels changed in 2021, the cleanest comparisons are within the most recent cycles that use the same categories. That approach respects sound methods and helps communities focus on real needs while avoiding hype or culture-war spin.
Sources:
lifesitenews.com, edweek.org, cdc.gov, archive.cdc.gov, epi.washington.edu
