After a decade of record numbers showing young people identifying somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum—in 2023, the Centers for Disease Control reported that around a quarter of high school students identified as LGBTQ—the trend may have finally peaked.
Last month, Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, published a report through the Centre for Heterodox Social Science titled “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans,” highlighting that “since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z.”
“Andover Phillips Academy in suburban Boston surveys over three-quarters of its students annually,” Kaufmann summarized at UnHerd. “In 2023, 9.2% identified as neither male nor female. This year, that number has crashed to just 3%. A similar story emerges at Brown University: 5% of students identified as non-binary in 2022 and 2023, but by 2025 that share had dropped to 2.6%.”
Kaufmann noted that in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual survey of U.S. college students, the percentage of students identifying as transgender halved from 6.8 percent in 2022 to 3.6 percent in 2025. Some scholars noted that it is primarily the “non-binary” identification that is plummeting; Kaufmann responded at length with evidence buttressing his thesis that “trans is in decline,” at least among young, educated Americans.
In fact, the decline in non-binary identification has been accompanied by a ten-point plunge in other “unconventional sexual identification” that created the steep rise in LGBTQ-identifying youth in the first place, including the increasingly amorphous “queer,” “bisexual,” and simply “questioning”—that is, anything but straight, which was considered excruciatingly “boring.”
Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, published follow-up research days later, analyzing data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), gathered annually by YouGov. “[The data] show that identifying as transgender really is in free fall among the young in the United States,” Twenge concluded. “Among 18- to 22-year-olds, trans identification fell by nearly half from 2022 to 2024. Nonbinary identification dropped by more than half between 2023 and 2024.”
“When I looked at adults of all ages in the survey . . . I found a huge increase in identifying as transgender from those born before 1980 (Gen X and Boomers) to those born in the early 2000s (who are now 21 to 25 years old),” Twenge told Fox News Digital. “Identifying as transgender then declined, especially for those born in 2005 and 2006 (who are now 18 to 20 years old). I think the question now is not if trans is in decline, but how far it will fall.”
The full story behind the data is still unclear. Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright observed in the Wall Street Journal that trans identification is a “social contagion,” and that thus a “boom-and-bust pattern” is to be expected. Wright had his academic career nearly destroyed some years ago merely for referencing Dr. Lisa Littman’s social contagion research after Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare noted a 1,500 percent spike in girls ages thirteen to seventeen identifying as transgender between 2008 and 2018.
There is certainly another cultural aspect to this. For a decade, identifying as LGBTQ was “cool”; to be anything but straight was to be celebrated, praised, and singled out for special attention, especially at schools and universities. Thus, the staggering rise in young people identifying as LGBTQ was not accompanied by a rise in same-sex activity, as one would expect if the surge was due to increasing social acceptance of alternative sexual lifestyles.
Both Andrew Sullivan and Eric Kaufmann observed that youth were identifying as LGBTQ but acting straight. New identities were invented so that everyone could be LGBTQ; even Andrew Cuomo’s daughter came out first as queer, then as “demisexual”—a new “orientation” to describe people who develop sexual attraction after achieving emotional closeness. These new “orientations” are merely on-ramps for straight kids who don’t want to be left out during Pride Month; a real-life “hello, fellow gays” meme.
The “queer moment” may have peaked. J. K. Rowling’s relentless and brutally effective mockery of gender ideology has constituted a one-woman defenestration of the transgender movement. Celebrities like Keira Knightley now feel comfortable laughing at transgender boycotts rather than kowtowing. The LGBTQ movement achieved cultural dominance and is becoming predictably passé as they embrace the role of woke-scold censors. Can anything be less edgy and countercultural than Big Banks wrapped in the rainbow colors for Pride Month?
The LGBTQ movement still wields tremendous cultural power. They control Hollywood, the Democratic party, much of the educational system, and academia. They have been badly damaged by a string of studies highlighting the carnage wrought by sex-change “treatments,” court rulings condemning these practices, and laws on both sides of the Atlantic restricting them. The tragic stories of detransitioners like Chloe Cole have also begun to change the narrative.
It is too early to tell, but the smart money is on Twenge’s analysis: Trans identification will continue to collapse. The only question is how far, and how much damage this social contagion will leave in its wake.
