It’s bleak right now but the future, assuming that humans manage to stave off the climate catastrophe for another millennia, is bright. According to a new survey by the Family Equality Council, most LGBTQ millennials in America are becoming parents, having more children, and planning to grow their families—options that most LGBTQ people in generations past didn’t have thanks to both advances in technology and changes in public policy and perception.
The survey, which USA Today calls “the first of its kind” because it includes “people who are transgender, bisexual, even potentially single parents” suggests “a dramatic growth in the number of LGBTQ-headed families in the coming years,” according to Family Equality Council CEO Rev. Stan Sloan.
“For too many generations now, the dream of having children and forming a family was one that too many of us have felt we had to trade off in exchange for coming out of the closet,” he said. Now, “we see that for a generation of young LGBTQ people, this trade-off is no longer necessarily in place.”
According the survey, 63 percent of LGBTQ people aged 18 to 33 are considering becoming parents or growing their families, and 63 percent of those planning families are using foster care, adoption, or technologies like in vitro or artificial insemination, options that were not readily available to older generations.
“There were significantly fewer options for those in the LGBTQ community pursuing foster care and adoption, fewer safeguards for securing legal parentage of biologically-conceived children, and a lack of parenting resources for the community as a whole,” the report notes. “A decade ago, a majority of Americans still opposed same-sex marriage, let alone equality that extended into the realms of parental rights for all members of the LGBTQ community. As such, family building was an uphill battle for many, and was often challenging to achieve within the context of an LGBTQ relationship.”
The gap between parenting LGBTQ millennials and straight, cis millennials is narrowing, but it’s hardly equal. LGBTQ people face more economic barriers, still don’t have equal rights, and live under an administration that denies their basic humanity. But a tidal wave of change is coming, and try as they might, not even Mike Pence and Mother can stop it.