A growing number of young French adults are turning away from heterosexuality and traditional gender roles, according to a new report from the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED).
The apparent shift, researchers argued, marked a “deep-seated transformation” in society.
The change was especially pronounced among women, whose rejection of heterosexuality has risen by five times since 2015. Among men, the figure has quadrupled.
The study published on April 30 showed that almost one in five French women aged 18 to 29 no longer identified as heterosexual, while 8 per cent of men in the same age group said the same.
Researchers cited the rise of the #MeToo movement and broader critiques of heterosexual relationships as major drivers behind the trend.
“The #MeToo movement has gone beyond denouncing sexual violence to question the heterosexual norm,” the report stated.
The researchers suggested that women in particular were reacting against what they described as “restrictions and inequalities in heterosexual life”, everything from gender-based violence to the unequal distribution of chores at home.
“Their [women’s] identification with heterosexuality has receded significantly,” the report said.
The authors stopped short of declaring a permanent societal shift but floated the idea that France could be witnessing a generational realignment. That, they suuggested, could be because today’s youth, who came of age during peak gender activism, were abandoning the “binary” model of sexuality in large numbers.
Still, the researchers admitted uncertainty about whether these identifications would stick as the youth of today aged.
“We do not yet know whether the identifications of these young people will change as they get older,” they said.
Still, they did argue that a number of factors, such as the scale of the increase in non-heterosexual identifications between 2015 and 2023 and their spread within different categories of the population, suggested a “profound” change.
Around 100 people are applying to change their legal gender each day in Germany under federal-level legislation passed late last year. https://t.co/Ou4atGJBX2
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