Yesterday, American psychologist Jean Twenge shared new data that, she said, showed “Trans identification really is in free fall”. This finding supports last week’s claim by professor Eric Kaufmann that fewer people are identifying as trans and non-binary.

Critics of that report focused on Kaufmann’s methodology, including the lack of “survey weights” — used to balance the importance of particular data points. But even to those without an intimate understanding of statistics, the data felt uncertain. Kaufmann looked at who identified as neither male nor female, using that as a proxy for non-binary, and using non-binary as a proxy for trans, then declaring a plunge in numbers. That didn’t represent all those girls identifying as boys, and vice versa.

In her examination of Household Pulse Survey, which asked directly about trans, and the Cooperative Election Study, Twenge not only confirmed the decline but found a correlation with age: those most likely to identify as trans were born in the mid-2000s. Those born before or after were less likely. “Those numbers begin to rise with Millennials (born 1980-1994) and continue upward with Gen Z (born after 1995) until they abruptly plummet with those born in the mid-2000s,” she wrote.

What should we make of these sharp spikes and declines? They support the idea of a “social contagion”, first proposed in 2017 — the idea that trans identification was spreading through the culture, not occurring naturally. But those young people were not only reared in a culture that acknowledged trans identity; they were raised in a culture that both celebrated and institutionalised it.

They were taught in schools that embodying stereotypes associated with a girl made you a girl, even if you had the body of a boy. They were taught that to be masculine was to be a boy, and that something was wrong with your body if it didn’t align. These beliefs were cemented in the guidelines and policies of major medical associations, and framed as the only acceptable approach; anything else was deemed not only hateful, but dangerous to a child’s survival. To be a liberal or Democrat — which was code for “good person” — was to affirm these beliefs. No wonder so many people opted in. “Social contagion” is no longer a strong enough term. This was institutional enforcement.

Since Trump took office, we’ve seen institutional enforcement in the opposite direction. Schools that accept federal money technically shouldn’t teach gender ideology, though many still do. Hospitals that accept federal money aren’t supposed to offer gender surgery, hence the shuttering of many paediatric gender clinics. And while some major medical associations continue to propagate the now-clearly-untrue claim that paediatric gender medicine is medically necessary and evidence-based, what we’re seeing is that Trump’s actions didn’t just cut off the supply. They’ve also helped curtail the creation of the demand. Knock the building down, and they’ll stop coming.

For many concerned about the harms caused by the gender medicine industry, this is good news. But I worry about all those people represented by the peak in the graph, those born in the 2000s who were steeped in these institutionalised ideas. What is the path forward for them? There is very little support for detransitioners out there, or for those harmed by these interventions but unable to detransition because they can no longer pass as their actual sex. How will we help them when they figure out that what they were taught as facts — that sex is a spectrum, that they can and should change their sex, that everyone must affirm their subjective sense of sex — are actually just beliefs?

Meanwhile, Twenge points out that we might not be able to continue collecting data, as Trump has cracked down on studying gender identity. The gender-affirmation industry started without data to support its psychological and medical interventions. Let’s hope we can still collect data during the aftermath.

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Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy. She writes at Broadview on Substack.

LisaSelinDavis

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