On 5 June, presumably on the occasion of Pride Month, wPolityce.pl published an article entitled: "Demoralisation in France is growing! As many as 22 per cent of citizens under the age of 26 identify as LGBT+." The text is probably intended to cause panic among readers. Yet people who don't lose sleep over the romantic lives of strangers are more likely to say... "So what?"

The report by Ipsos, one of the world's largest market and opinion research agencies, which the wpolityce.pl article cites, does indeed contain a lot of other interesting data on the situation of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide.

Public opinion in 30 countries around the world was surveyed. Approximately 1,000 people in each of the surveyed societies responded to the online survey. The resulting data are, according to Ipsos, representative of: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, South Korea, New Zealand, Poland, the United States, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Elsewhere, the people surveyed are representative of the more urban part of society that uses the Internet more extensively. These countries are: Brazil, Chile, Ireland, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Thailand and Turkey.

Indeed, the study showed that young people worldwide, born between 1996 and 2010 are more likely to identify as non-heterosexual than older generations. This is clearly the result of loosening of rigid patriarchal and religious social norms regarding our sexuality.

The biggest increase has been in the area of 'fluid' sexual dimensions such as bi-, pan- and omnisexuality. For younger people not constrained by rigid rules, it's becoming more important whether a partner is attractive (in various aspects) than the gender identification of the person.

The fact that human sexual orientation is a fluid continuum and not a black-and-white phenomenon has been known since the middle of the last century, when Alfred Kinsey published his famous reports. Modern research confirms these ideas. There are people with exclusively heterosexual orientation, exclusively homosexual orientation, and a whole spectrum of other preferences in between. Orientation can also change over the course of each individual's life.

The non-heterosexuals have become more visible as well. It is easier to accept one's orientation if it is not socially perceived as something 'weird'. 47 per cent of people surveyed globally know at least one gay or lesbian person. 26 per cent know a bisexual person, 13 per cent a transgender person and 12 per cent a non-binary person.

Poland would not be Poland if it did not stand out in this study. We found ourselves among the six countries where the of LGBTQ+ people are least prominent. The other places from the surveyed where admitting to a non-heterosexual orientation is still problematic or even dangerous are: Japan, South Korea, Romania, Turkey and Hungary.

The only thing that changes about human sexuality is the stiffness of the framework into which we try to force it. Mind you, it was created to control the inheritance of wealth within a family or as an element of religious leaders' control over their followers. Humanity is not in danger of extinction. That is, it is endangered, but because of overpopulation and the climate crisis.