A surprising shift is taking place in the gender and sexual identities of young Americans. Data from my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans”, shows that since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z.

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%.

Trans and non-binary identification is declining on American campuses

Share of students not identifying as male or female, 2016-25

More surveys ask about sexual orientation than gender identity. And while there is a broader spread of data points, the basic pattern looks similar: rising non-conformity from 2010 until 2023, with a near 10-point return to the norm in the ensuing two years in most datasets.

Interestingly, when the trans and queer trends were at their peak, freshmen were more likely to be non-conforming in their gender and sexuality than seniors. Now that BTQ (bisexual, trans, queer or questioning) identification is in decline, the reverse is true: younger students are less BTQ than older students in their colleges. This is a sign that fashions are changing.

It’s tempting to speculate about the reasons behind the rise and fall of trans and queer identities. Mental illness among American teens, for example, has fallen since 2021-22 — a pattern confirmed in the FIRE data from 2023-25. My analysis 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.

But the drop in mental health issues encompassed all social groups, including trans and queer youth. 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. And while social media use may be in retreat in the world as a whole, Pew finds no change in the online behaviour of young Americans through to 2024. This does not seem to be what’s driving the retreat from alternative gender and sexual identity either.

The so-called anti-woke “vibe shift” since 2022 is an obvious candidate. Yet FIRE and other data show little change in students’ political ideology or party identification over the past five years. “Woke” attitudes — such as support for shouting down speakers or punishing those perceived as hostile to transgenderism or Black Lives Matter — have not receded much since 2020.

It’s a similar story for religion. Despite hints of a youth religious revival, FIRE survey data shows no major drop in the share of non-religious students, who still make up nearly half of the sample in recent years. Woke progressives and secular students are much more likely to identify as trans, bisexual, or queer than conservative or religious people. This ties in with upbringing and longstanding tensions between religious conservatism and LGBTQ identity.

But as the ecological fallacy reminds us, correlations across individuals do not necessarily reflect relationships over time. Just as wealthier individuals tend to be more Democratic, trans and queer individuals appear to be more “woke” than straight people. However, years with higher shares of trans and queer students — such as 2022 and 2023 — are not necessarily more woke overall than years like 2020 or 2025, when those shares were smaller.

Trans and queer identification have declined among young Americans even as levels of wokeness and irreligion have not. For young people, gender and sexual identity are now independent fashions that rise and fall separately from other cultural and political currents.

Whether trans and queer identities will drop to 2010 levels is an open question. But the fact both have declined sharply in just two years is a startling and unanticipated post-progressive development that the education and media establishments will be reluctant to acknowledge.

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Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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