A report on the “free fall” of young people identifying as LGBTQ+, first published last October by the Center for Heterodox Social Studies at the University of Buckingham, is getting a closer look following the release of a second study last week from the Centers for Disease Control, which backs up the “free fall” findings.
Together, they’re earning some interesting responses about the cause.
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“They probably are just keeping it to themselves bc Republicans are fucking crazy,” was one theory posted to X.
“The chances are more likely that, rather than ‘becoming straight,’ people don’t feel as safe identifying themselves again,” came another.
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Whatever the reason, the numbers are a startling shift according to multiple surveys asking young people how they identify. They’re led by findings in the CDC report from the youngest respondents, reported by Jean M. Twenge on the Generation Tech Substack.
The number of 9th graders, composed of 14- and 15-year-olds, who identify as gay or bisexual dropped from 17% to 11% between 2023 and 2025. The biggest shift was among girls, who had also shown the biggest increase in identifying as LGB in recent years.
9th grade girls identifying as LGB fell from 27% in 2023 to 23% in 2025. Among boys, the shift was smaller, from 9% to 7%.
Among 12th grade girls, however, the shift isn’t nearly as stark, moving from 26% in 2021 to 28% in 2023 and down to 25% in 2025.
Those drops, however, followed remarkable surges among both girls and boys in the previous 10 years. Girls identifying as LGB surged 128% between 2015 and 2021. Among boys, the number doubled in the same time period.
The biggest change among those 14- and 15-year-old girls was for those who identified as bisexual: that number plummeted by half, from 26% in 2021 to 13% in 2025.
Numbers for how girls identify roughly aligned with responses about their sexual behavior. While boys continued to show a slow and steady rise in same-sex activity, girls identifying as LGB showed a steep peak of 30% in 2023, with a big drop down to 21% in 2025.
The study from October by the Center for Heterodox Social Studies at the University of Buckingham showed even steeper drops among American young people identifying as trans and nonbinary in several campus surveys among older students.
“The scale of the decline in the student data is considerable, even accounting for variability in the data,” the authors write, referring to responses drawn from both public and private schools.
A sample from Phillips Academy in Massachusetts shows a drop from over 9% nonbinary in 2023 to 3% in 2025. Among a much larger sample, from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual campus surveys of undergraduate students, the decline during the same period is 6.8 to 3.6 percent. A 2025 Brown University student survey, capturing about half the target population, shows a drop from around 5% in 2022-23 to 2.6% in 2025, also a halving of the trans and nonbinary share.
By contrast, a Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) freshman survey encompassing less elite schools showed stability in roughly the same period, from 2019 to 2024, with an average of just under 2%.
The changes follow a “rise and fall pattern,” the authors write, with “numbers returning to pre-surge baselines” before rising coincident with the COVID pandemic.
The changes in nonbinary numbers are in contrast to CDC data indicating stability among older and college-age students, the same cohort that was identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in greater numbers when they were in 9th grade, and an argument against the “fad” theory.
The Trump administration’s CDC report, the Youth Health in Focus Report, drawn from surveys of young people by the center’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, does not track gender identity.
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