If you ask me, I maintain that it's definitely 10%! 😃

It's also important to note that 10% of the female population is still a very small population of lesbians. I'm always weirded out when people act like 10% equals to 50% of the female population. 10% of lesbians is not going to result in streets and sidewalks filled with lesbians. And 10% of lesbians is not going to result in screens and books filled with lesbian characters. For that, you need 50% of the female population to be gay.

On to the reasons why. I remembered briefly a long time ago, a conversation between several people debating about the possible numbers of lesbians and gays. One of them quipped, "That's not possible! If these are their numbers, that'd make homosexuals more than the number of Jews worldwide!" Apparently, we must be less than the numbers of Jews. 😅

But more seriously, every time I come across such straight people who love to write verbose passages on statistics about gay people, notably on lesbians, they'd always lay their premise something along the lines of "There mustn't be allowed to exist too many of such gay people around". I think we have to acknowledge that a lot of straight people are incredibly uncomfortable with our existence. And we can certainly expect a clear degree of inaccuracy or outright falsification in every statistic.

Now, some may ask then, what about the amount of lesbian visibility? To this, I recall an old quote that says "The ability to be a lesbian is a privilege" or something like that. And this is true. One can only live out a life fully as a lesbian if the two conditions are largely met. And that is, women's human rights and modernecy.

Women's human rights: The ability to go to school, get jobs she qualifies for, own property, the ability to choose her own path in life (family is not allowed to sell her, women aren't thrown in jail due to social control (ex.middle-east)), and access to birth control/abortion.

Modernecy: While half of it is the modern standard of living and the digital era, the other half of it is to mean a society which largely focuses on individual pursuits and are thus loathe to wide-scale police or put in the real effort to overly police these things. Medieval acts like torture are usually considered uncouth. Homosexuality is largely de-criminalized or a grey area that is usually unpursued, regardless if the public at large is okay with gay people.

In the absence of enough of these, lesbians won't be visible as they will face great difficulties in living life authentically. This is because I've been hearing some people comment about not seeing enough lesbians. But from my point of view, there won't be much visibility or a wide environment if these conditions are not met. I consider the actions by the gender/identity/trans group a massive attack, where lesbians are metaphorically criminalized. Thus I expect lesbian visibility to drop a lot in the time being where this is present.

There are some places where there isn't much of the gender/identity/trans eclipse. However, this is due to higher mainstream homophobia, where society, corporations and the government will distance themselves from LGBT folks and/or penalize them. The interesting thing I noticed, is that a lot of the gender/identity/trans cannot survive or thrive without mainstream approval. They are extremely dependent on it's coddling, attention and validation. When this is removed, they will either drop their fetish or go incognito and bide for a more favorable time to alter laws.

Whereas since lesbians/gays/genuine bis are a real orientation and not a validation fetish/plot to attack others, lesbians thrive pretty well as long as they have freedom and are undisturbed.

So in these places, even with higher mainstream homophobia (but with gender/identity/trans greatly reduced), the two above conditions are mostly met. This results in a kind of freedom which lesbians/genuine bis actively make good use of and flourish. I know that one day it will be attacked as patriarchical society will never allow women to freely lead their lives. So, anyway, this is what makes me think that lesbians are more along the lines of 10%. But you need an environment that allows you to get to see the full picture.

Although, there is one caveat I must make. And that is, lesbians aren't exactly uniformly spread out. I'd say the population is scattered all over the place. Some areas will have lots of lesbians. Some scenes will be dead. So you can't just base numbers on one region or country.

To answer your last question, I'm sort of a part of a lesbian acquaintance friend group that I knew about 2 years ago. Amongst the seven of them 2 are more seriously attached (living together with their girlfriend/partner), the other two are dating with one hoping to move the relationship in a more serious direction if things turns out well. The other 3 are single.

On the point, as an example, I was browsing through some lesbian couples on a previous day. A few of them could be pegged as almost living the dream. You know, two pretty women together, that sort of thing. However, despite their attractiveness, they are just normal people like you and me. They aren't multi-millionaires or people who are famous. The lesbians are there. It isn't just 1%.

I was thinking that luckily homophobes don't get to see some of those couples. Otherwise they will wind down the statistics of our population to 0.005% and institute more homophobic measures, cause they are angry that we aren't troubled like the way they want us to be.

To end, this long post is meant to be an encouragement. Take heart! Lesbians exist in numbers more than 1%. And regardless of numbers, the real success for lesbians is the right environment and all the lesbians will be there.