Research Transgenderism is in rapid decline among young Americans (survey)

[Zinjanthropos]

Wow, that's a bad idea. Sounds like she's doing it just to keep him around... or from cheating. That can't be a healthy relationship, even if mental illness wasn't involved.

No doubt in my mind she’s doing this to placate lover boy. Hard to tell if he’s a cheater, hardly says a word, to me at least. I wonder if her reason for transitioning is rare or commonplace.

[Yazata]

I've always believed that there is little or nothing objective or biological about transgenderism and that it's almost entirely subjective and psychological.

And as such, it's socially conditioned as much as anything else.

So the explosive rise in people claiming to be, or somehow being diagnosed as transgender, was largely the result of transgenderism suddenly becoming trendy and faddish in a certain subculture. Not just a popular adolescent subculture either, but extending well beyond as professional medical associations endorsed and fostered it.

And now that it's less stylish to be "trans", interest is slacking off. Leaving many permanently damaged people behind.

[Syne]

And now that it's less stylish to be "trans", interest is slacking off. Leaving many permanently damaged people behind.

That's the real tragedy. I'm hoping these people can avail themselves of class action lawsuits in the future.

[Magical Realist]

"Right-wing media outlets worked themselves into a froth this week over a new report claiming that bisexual, transgender, and queer identities are on the decline among college students. One problem: the report’s basic data analysis is so flawed that one data scientist called it “dead on arrival.”

The report, titled “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity Among Young Americans,” was authored by Eric Kaufmann, a professor and founding director of the University of Buckingham’s Center for Heterodox Social Science. Kaufmann is a notorious “anti-woke” academic, once known for denouncing “anti-white ideology” before turning his attention to LGBTQ+ identity and founding the Center in 2024 to oppose progressivism in higher education. Other faculty at the Center include James Esses, a former psychotherapy student and advocate for “exploratory” talk therapy for trans youth — a euphemism for conversion therapy.

In the report and his accompanying article for the conservative British opinion site UnHerd, Kaufmann cites several surveys of U.S. college students from 2019 to 2025 to argue that being bi, trans, and/or nonbinary peaked among young people several years ago, and is significantly less widespread today.

“It appears that trans and queer are going out of fashion among young people, especially in elite settings,” Kaufmann claims in the report, pointing to student surveys from Brown University and Andover Phillips Academy (a private prep school), as well as annual surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Higher Education Research Institute.

Kaufmann took pains to observe that the number of students who consider themselves gay or lesbian — which he calls the “traditional homosexual categories” — seemed to remain generally stable over time, but that bi, trans, and other queer identification decreased in the majority of his cited surveys. Much of the back half of the report is dedicated to Kaufmann’s speculation about whether “BTQ+” identities and “woke attitudes” are a product of poor mental health, a right-wing talking point that has gained steam this year. This was, of course, music to the ears of conservative media outlets like the New York Post, the National Review, and the Daily Mail, with headlines celebrating the arrival of “peak trans” (which, it’s worth noting, Kaufmann thought had already arrived in 2021). “Transgenderism is effectively over,” proclaimed anti-trans ideologue Matt Walsh on Elon Musk’s X on Tuesday, hailing the “[c]learest and most decisive cultural win that conservatives have ever achieved.”

But as many analysts quickly pointed out, Kaufmann’s report was wildly inaccurate, riddled with fallacies and errors in its interpretations of the cited data. Perhaps most significantly, as data scientist Jacob Eliason wrote on Tuesday, Kaufmann appears to have used only the raw dataset from FIRE’s student demographic surveys, rather than the weighted data, which is adjusted to better represent a full target population. For instance, Kaufmann claimed that nonbinary identification among students dropped to 4% in 2025 from a peak of 7% in 2023; after recalculating the numbers, Eliason found that the properly weighted data actually showed a net increase from 2% to 9% over the same period, starkly opposing Kaufmann’s conclusions.

“Weights rebalance the actual sample toward externally validated benchmarks so estimates better represent the population of interest. If you ignore these, you are explicitly describing the respondent pool, not the target population,” Eliason explained. “Deriving causal claims about temporal effects from cross-sectional data is always challenging, but a good faith answer to the question of how the prevalence of gender non-conforming identification has changed over time is dead on arrival without survey weights.”

Kaufmann’s particular interest in Brown University is also peculiar, and relies on ignoring important political context. Per surveys of the student body by the Brown Daily Herald, nonbinary and genderqueer identification among incoming freshmen has decreased among respondents in the past year, falling from 4.8% in 2023 and 2024 to 1.9% in 2025. One major contributing factor could be the political climate at Brown. In July this year, Brown signed an agreement with the Trump administration in order to maintain federal funding, under which the university agreed to adopt the government’s strictly binary view of “biological sex” for all policy purposes and to refrain from providing gender-affirming care through its medical program.

But Kaufmann elides this context entirely, writing only that because FIRE data indicated that “political ideology [...] remained stable” among students themselves, “the ‘vibe shift’ away from woke” was not a significant factor. Instead, Kaufmann insists, “[t]here is evidence that improved mental health has reduced BTQ+ identification,” and that improvements in youth mental health “appear to account for a portion of the change” in trans and queer identity among students. His only cited evidence is that rates of poor mental health and “BTQ+” both appeared to decrease among students since 2023, according to the FIRE survey data — which again, according to Eliason, Kaufmann appears to have fundamentally misanalyzed.

“Anti-trans policy requires a belief that being trans is a trend. If the numbers of people ID'ing as trans is shown to have major fluctuations, it can be used to argue that trans identity is fake and social contagion,” nonbinary author Dex Anderson wrote on Bluesky, referencing the debunked anti-trans hypothesis that young people identify as trans due to peer pressure and are likely to “desist” if unsupported. “That's the point of this whole project.”

Kaufmann’s report itself comes in the context of an ongoing war between conservatives and universities, which has spilled into multiple political arenas, from trans students to protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Conservatives often accuse colleges, as well as K-12 schools and individual educators, of “indoctrinating” students into becoming LGBTQ+. Last year, then-candidate J.D. Vance falsely claimed that young people identify as trans to gain an admissions advantage over their peers. In 2023, right-wing media — many of the same publications which spread Kaufmann’s report this week — spread false and misleading reports that a Harvard class contained lessons about “transgender infants.”

Since his inauguration this January, President Donald Trump has targeted universities with threats to their grants and other funding streams, leading some like Brown and the University of Pennsylvania to cave. The administration unveiled a “compact” demanding ideological adherence from various colleges and universities earlier this month, which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology swiftly rejected."

https://www.them.us/story/eric-kaufmann-...ties-study

[Syne]

The quote: "Despite not actually wanting to be a boy, I spent my middle school years desperately trying to figure out how to be one. As a confused trans child, I used my anger as both armor and camouflage." was written by Samantha Riedel.
It is from an article where she explores her relationship with anger, trauma, gender, and growing up trans.
- Google AI

9_9

[Magical Realist]

Doesn't sound like a passing fad to me. Many trans people are non-binary.

[Yazata]

[Image: G5WEBVYXkAAJeeL?format=jpg&name=small]

[confused2]

Cherry picked (a popular strategy) from MR's post here-
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-19169-...l#pid78380

Why choose stats from Brown University..?

One major contributing factor could be the political climate at Brown. In July this year, Brown signed an agreement with the Trump administration in order to maintain federal funding, under which the university agreed to adopt the government’s strictly binary view of “biological sex” for all policy purposes and to refrain from providing gender-affirming care through its medical program.

[Zinjanthropos]

'You can be anything you want to be'..... one of the biggest myths there is. People have to realize there are natural limitations involved. Physical, intellectual and psychological to name a few. A person with one leg shouldn't count on becoming a champion ass kicker for instance.

'How many roads must a woman walk down before they call her a man?(Or vice versa). Apologies to Bob Dylan but the answer will always be blowing in the wind. It's about futility, a strive towards the unattainable. How many trans have overcome all their natural limitations and successfully changed their sex 100%? None

[Syne]

A university's policies wouldn't change how people identify, unless those identities were only assumed to gain advantage at said university.