LGBTQ+ students binge drink more often, at younger ages
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Key takeaways:
- Five times more transgender middle schoolers reported binge drinking compared with cisgender middle schoolers.
- Ethnic minoritized transgender students binge drank more often than white transgender students.
LGBTQ+ middle and high schoolers reported binge drinking more often and at younger ages than cisgender and heterosexual students, according to findings published in Pediatrics.
“As early as middle school, LGBTQ+ youth report binge drinking at higher rates than their cisgender, heterosexual peers,” M. Bishop, PhD, postdoctoral research fellow in the department of family science at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, told Healio. “These results are important because earlier ages of binge drinking are associated with alcohol dependence later in life.”
The statewide cross-sectional study included 925,744 7th, 9th and 11th grade students who completed the California Healthy Kids Survey during the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 school years. The researchers compared binge drinking behaviors based on grade level, race and ethnicity, and sexual orientation and gender identity.
Overall, 4.9% of students reported consuming five or more drinks within 2 hours at least once within 30 days before the study.
Sexual and gender minority students reported higher rates of binge drinking than cisgender and heterosexual students. Five times more transgender 6th through 8th graders reported binge drinking than their cisgender peers (7.1% vs. 1.4%). Further, among 9th and 10th graders, 3.9% of straight students binge drank in the prior 30 days compared with 6.7% of lesbian and gay students and 7.5% of bisexual students.
Binge drinking was more common among white cisgender students in 9th through 10th and 11th through 12th grade than Black and Asian cisgender students. However, the opposite occurred among transgender students, of whom ethnic minoritized students had higher probability of binge drinking than white transgender students, except among Asian transgender students.
Among transgender 11th through 12th graders, Black students reported the highest rate of binge drinking (24.7%), followed by Hispanic or Latine students (17%), multiracial students (14.3%), white students (12.1%) and Asian students (9.8%).
“One crucial takeaway is that it is not young people’s sexual or gender minoritized identities that cause the disparities we found,” Bishop said. “Instead, many studies show that LGBTQ+ youth binge drink in response to what we call, ‘minority stress,’ which is a stress response to cissexist or heterosexist stigma and discrimination. ... Pediatricians are in a great position to help reduce binge drinking disparities by implementing developmentally and culturally appropriate interventions that decrease minority stress. One example could be to update office forms to include diverse gender and sexual identity options.”
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