That’s not a sanity check. And IPV by a man against a lesbian is not an inconsistency.
Once again, I think you are confused about the goal of studies like this.
Here is an article about disparities of pregnancy risk in teens across different sexual orientations:
One thing you’ll note is lots of consideration of pregnancy risks due to lack of condoms used by self-identified lesbians. Because sexual minority teens report less condom use than sexual majority teens. And the study isn’t focused on making political points, it is focused on identifying risk groups in order to help them.
And then there is an issue where on some studies have a combined sexual minority group that includes bisexual girls and lesbians together.
But also, from that analysis:
Some inconsistent findings have also emerged in the literature on sexual minority girls’ pregnancy risk. Findings from studies using New York City YRBS6 and other data,15 in which lesbian and bisexual girls have been combined, suggest that both groups are more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to report a teen pregnancy. However, studies that separate lesbian and bisexual girls in analyses have found that bisexual-identified or bisexual-behaving girls are more likely than heterosexual girls to report a pregnancy1,3,9 or a pregnancy termination,16 whereas for lesbian-identified girls, there is either no difference1,9,16 or lower risk3 of teen pregnancy.
It turns out lesbian girls don’t have higher risk of teen pregnancy than heterosexual girls. Though in some studies, they have comparable risks.
Your assumption that “self-identified lesbian in a survey” equals “this respondent’s relationships are exclusively with other women” is not accurate.
In those studies, bisexual girls have higher risk of teen pregnancy than heterosexual ones. This makes sense because bisexual teenagers report higher rates of alcohol use, less rates of condom use, etc. Lesbian teenagers also have higher rates of alcohol use, less condom use, etc. So presumably the reason their pregnancy rates are lower than bisexuals (but not necessarily lower than heterosexuals) is due to having fewer relationships with men.
The risky behaviors above make sense because those are also correlated with teenagers who have a history of abuse, and LGBT people also have higher likelihood of having experienced childhood abuse:
Bisexual women also have the highest rates of IPV based on the data we were discussing earlier. Of course, most bisexual women are in relationships with men:
84% of bisexuals are in relationships with the opposite gender, versus gay men (2%) or lesbians (1%).
Note that this 1% for lesbians doesn’t preclude any of my earlier points because this is specifically polling people who currently identify as lesbians and who their current long term partner is — which is not the case for the IPV surveys, which are based on any instances of IPV experienced with a given timeframe.
Yeah it is even more pronounced in the bi category, as I just went over. But most lesbians have had relationships with men in the past.
Here is an older study of this from 2000:
And a more recent one from last decade:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/485027
And it’s a common discussion topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/actuallesbians/comments/6kqwb2/how_many_lesbians_here_have_had_straight/
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-lesbians-continue-to-sleep-with-men
So for a survey that is specifically overrepresenting younger people, this all makes sense to me. I don’t think I’m grasping at straws at all, I think I am presenting a coherent, logical possible explanation of the facts.
LGBT people have higher rates of abusive childhood, and that comes with various negative predictions about risky behaviors. Alcohol usage, low condom usage, and subsequent abusive relationships all go along with that. But there’s no reason to assume those abusive relationships are predominantly with women, even for respondents that identify as lesbians. The abusive relationships could easily have been with men.
There’s also some good discussion on this general topic here, which I stumbled across when looking up some of those studies above.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/zlthlo/women_more_likely_to_commit_intimate_partner/
I don’t have a problem acknowledging it as a possibility, but I don’t think it is the most logical explanation. I think that is a conclusion that gets draw in order to try to score political points about feminism or LGBT people, not a conclusion based in reality.
Also, all of this is setting aside other possible factors for IPV rates (such as likelihood of reporting) that I mentioned a few months ago but haven’t brought up again in this discussion. I noticed that reddit thread I just linked does have a few comments that bring that up though.
Sure, maybe not. Feel free to bow out of the discussion if you like. I figured it might be useful to state my disagreements in case anyone could learn from them, or noticed any flaws in my thinking.