Decline

A new analysis of survey data has found that the number of young Americans identifying as transgender or non-binary has declined sharply since peaking in 2023.

Context

The proportion of young people identifying as neither male nor female had risen steadily throughout the 2010s and early 2020s. This trend accelerated during and after the Covid pandemic, reaching its highest levels in 2022-2023 across multiple surveys of high school and college students.

Key Findings

An analysis released last week, conducted by Professor Eric Kaufmann at the University of Buckingham’s Centre of Heterodox Social Science, analyzed multiple large-scale surveys containing data from over 50,000 US college students annually. These included the yearly campus surveys conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

According to FIRE’s surveys, students not identifying as male or female dropped from 6.8% in 2023 to 3.6% in 2025. Similar declines appeared in surveys from Brown University, where the rate fell from 5% to 2.6%, and at the elite Andover Phillips Academy prep school, where it plummeted from 9.2% to 3%. 

Orientation Shifting

The research also documented changes in sexual orientation among young people. While the number of students identifying as gay or lesbian remained stable, there was a significant decline in those identifying as bisexual, queer, pansexual, asexual, or using other non-traditional labels. 

The FIRE surveys showed heterosexual identification rising from a low of 68% in 2023 back up to 77% in 2025.

Questions Raised

FIRE emphasized their survey was designed to measure campus free speech attitudes, not track gender identity trends, and Kaufmann’s analysis has not been peer-reviewed.

Several people have raised questions about Kaufmann’s study, with a Fox News senior medical analyst saying it “brings up more questions than it answers” about what's causing the decline. A Cornell University professor argued the shift was likely due to “negative politics around trans” rather than the mental health factors suggested by researchers, noting that young people might worry that identifying as trans “might well hurt their careers.”