New research suggests that rates of trans identification are falling among American youth.
Eric Kaufmann, writing for Unherd, published a fascinating piece this morning detailing new data showing a sharp reduction of young Americans identifying as “trans” or “queer” since 2023.
Kaufmann, who is a professor of politics at the U.K.’s University of Buckingham, studied several sets of data and found that trends that seemed inexorable during the Great Awokening a few short years ago have surprisingly reversed themselves.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in that year, just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.
This trend is especially marked in elite institutions. Andover Phillips Academy in suburban Boston surveys over three-quarters of its students annually. 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%.
You can see the decline charted in Kaufmann’s tweet here.
So what’s causing all this? It’s hard to say. According to the Pew Research Center, social-media usage rates among young people have been stable. And Kaufmann writes that the so-called vibe shift does not appear to be a major factor because young people’s religiosity and political ideology have seen little change over the period. “Trans and queer identification have declined among young Americans even as levels of wokeness and irreligion have not,” Kaufmann writes.
What does seem to have made some difference is the decline in the levels of depression and other mental-health problems in the post-pandemic period. “My analysis,” Kaufmann writes, “indicates that changes in mental health over time, especially depression, made a significant difference to the trajectory of trans and queer identities over this period.”
However, “the drop in mental health issues encompassed all social groups, including trans and queer youth,” continued Kaufmann. “The post-pandemic decline in mental illness did not immediately trigger a drop in sexual and gender nonconformity; that shift came a year or two later, suggesting other forces are also at work.”
Indeed, a possible explanation, according to Kaufmann, is that the trans-identity boom was a passing trend — or a “fashion” in his assessment — that is now receding.
For a while, during the Great Awokening, trans issues were everywhere. They became cool to many young people. They have now become simply uncool through oversaturation. Like bell bottoms after the ’70s, we may have reached peak trans.