Teens these days are pretty much saying “Bye, Felicia” to the gender binary. No, seriously. As Broadly so elegantly puts it, Generation Z is “queer AF” and there’s even a study that proves it.
According to a survey conducted by the J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group, young Americans aged 13 to 20 are a lot less rigid when it comes to gender and sexuality. When given the option to rate their sexuality between 0 and 6, 0 being totally straight and 6 being completely homosexual, over one-third of the group surveyed said they were somewhere in the middle.
In terms of gender, one-third agreed that gender does not define a person as much anymore, and only 44 percent of those surveyed claming to buy clothes specifically designed for their gender. While we’re obviously still fighting the iron grip of gender stereotypes right and left, these statistics show a major change in thinking among younger people.
“We’re even more confident about this for this particular survey because we see clear patterns across the different questions that show that Gen Z has a more complex and less binary approach to gender than millennials,” Shephard Laughlin, the director of trendspotting at J. Walter Thompson, told Broadly.
The news doens’t really come as much of a surprise when you consider how often we hear news of Jaden Smith killing the game in dresses, skirts, and other forms of clothing normally marketed toward women. The 17-year-old actor even made fashion headlines when he landed a deal with Louis Vuitton womenswear in January. With other young celebrities like Girl Meets World star Rowan Blanchard coming out and claiming that she doesn’t want her sexuality to be exactly defined, this comes as a sign that gender fluidity is being pushed to the forefront and becoming more widely accepted by the general population.