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.”
