The Trans Trend Is Collapsing: Why Gen Z Is Walking Away From Gender Ideology In Record Numbers

For a gender identity that makes up less than 1% of the global population, it’s curious that so many of these trans children seem to be concentrated in the homes of Hollywood celebrities . I mean, what are the odds of having not just one but multiple, perhaps even all, trans children concentrated under one roof, endemic to metropolitan areas like New York City and Los Angeles? If transgenderism is a mismatch between the brain and the body that exists independent of outside forces, you wouldn’t expect it to be so geographically concentrated and predictive of having certain types of parents or certain types of environments. And yet, when and where trans identities pop up are heavily indicative of some sort of social influence. Why do rates explode in the teens and early twenties but don’t remain stable over a lifetime? Why does there appear to be social synchronization, where one peer coming out as trans tends to initiate a domino effect? Why is hanging around on certain social media websites and forums predictive of becoming gender confused? Why do people who transition have so many psychiatric comorbidities in the form of autism , trauma, or mental illness? And why are rates of detransition on the rise? To be trans means to identify as the opposite gender from your assigned (or shall we say, observed) sex at birth. Why some people believe they’re in the wrong body is a continuous debate in social sciences, as is, unfortunately, what a woman even is . Interestingly, no such debate has broken out on the male side of the species. But what specifically gives rise to the feeling of gender dysphoria remains a curiosity. It used to be classified as a mental illness in both the DSM and the ICD, but the DSM has since softened its description of gender dysphoria, shifting away from mental illness to a diagnosable condition tied to distress. The ICD, meanwhile, reclassified it altogether. Where it used to be found under mental disorders, it’s now listed under conditions related to sexual health. This reclassification is important because it shifts not just how transgenderism is understood but diagnosed, treated, and dealt with legally, socially, and culturally. Much of the culture wars of recent years have centered around trans issues. You could even argue the last election was won by the GOP, in massive part, because of a burning out of “trans rights” bulldozing over women’s spaces, voices, and concerns. The ludicrous talking points that emerged around “ transgender operations on illegal aliens ” solidified the end of the great ‘awokening’ and the emergence of what’s been termed the vibe shift. In this brief vibe shift window, we’ve seen Trump’s reelection along with Republican domination of both chambers of Congress and the Supreme Court. Following years of polarizing activism from athletes like Riley Gaines , who have spoken out about the unfairness of biological men competing in women’s sports, and polls revealing the majority of Americans don’t agree with the far-left progressive position on gender identity, we start to make headway. Celebrities are changing their tune on J.K. Rowling , even outright laughing at the trans ally boycotts of her projects. Slowly but surely, the evidence is compiling on the side of dissenters, and we’re finally seeing the needle moving. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is looking into implementing a broad ban on transgender athletes from competing in female categories for the 2028 Olympics, citing “scientific advantages to being born male.” You might be thinking, “but this evidence is hardly new,” and you would be correct, but the public support for female-protected spaces and categories is. Self-identification with gender and sexual nonconforming identities is in rapid decline. Most promisingly, self-identification with gender and sexual nonconforming identities is in rapid decline, following a similar trajectory of decline in mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, shared and expounded on results compiled from several studies on evolving gender identification. The first comes from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) annual survey of 50,000 undergraduate students from about 250 of the United States’ leading universities. To confirm that the downward trend wasn’t just a statistical fluke, Kaufmann compared FIRE’s national campus survey, based on small random samples across roughly 250 leading U.S. universities, with two high-response local surveys from Phillips Academy Andover and Brown University’s student newspaper. Because those surveys reach a far larger share of their student populations (50–75%), they provide a useful check on FIRE’s findings. All three map the same general pattern: a sharp rise in identification with a gender identity outside of male and female (such as transgender or nonbinary) in 2020, peaking in 2023, and sharply declining ever since. Kaufmann also reports a ten-point drop in identification with unconventional sexual orientation (orientations other than heterosexual or homosexual, such as bisexual, pansexual, queer, questioning, or asexual). So, both nonconforming gender and sexuality appear to be on the decline, and they seem to map onto each other pretty neatly along the same downward trajectory and timeline. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology and one of the leading quantitative youth trends researchers in the field, pointed out, using data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), that trans identification among 18 to 22-year-olds fell by about half in just two years, between 2022 and 2024. Nonbinary identification dropped by more than half in just one year, between 2023 and 2024. This supports Kaufmann’s conclusions without the associated criticisms of the wording of the study, like not specifically using the term trans or using unweighted data. Most significantly, the youngest cohort is the least likely to identify as trans, suggesting a significant generational shift and a decline in transgenderism with younger Gen Z as well as Gen Alpha, the latter of which has also seen a steep drop in gender nonconforming identification. Among eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders, students identifying as neither male nor female dropped in half between 2022 and 2024, and the sharpest decline was found in the eighth-grade cohort. Twenge suggests these trends confirm a broader pattern in which new patterns arise first among the youngest, spreading later and less forcefully to older teens. This undercuts the progressive-left narrative that fluidity in sexuality and gender would keep infinitely expanding until heteronormativity dissolved entirely. Though the decline in unconventional gender identity (and sexuality) began steeply declining in 2023, alongside a general improvement in mental health among the CDC and FIRE data, it’s only a partial explanation for the reduction in trans and nonbinary identification. It doesn’t give us the whole picture. Students who identify as nonbinary also saw an improvement in mental health, and it also can’t be attributed to students becoming more politically conservative. The same FIRE data reporting the decline in nonconforming gender and improvement of mental health show that students are no more supportive of freedom of speech than they were during the peak of woke circa 2020. Kaufmann concludes the college kids are “as woke as ever, just less trans and queer.” What exactly is contributing to this sudden shift in identification is unclear, since it can’t be explained away by improvements in mental health alone, and as Kaufmann rightfully points out, the idea that trans and nonbinary college students have suddenly been scared back into the closet because of an administration that is hostile to their identities seems unlikely. For one, these surveys are self-reported and anonymized, so participants are not incentivized to lie about their identities. Secondly, conservatives are much more likely to self-censor their opinions. It’s hardly a plausible explanation, then, that the most left-leaning students attending liberal Ivy League colleges are suddenly censoring themselves. They’ve proven themselves to be quite a vocal, activist-oriented cohort. It also undercuts the progressive-left narrative that fluidity in sexuality and gender would keep infinitely expanding until heteronormativity dissolved entirely. The data shows the opposite: these patterns have clearly waxed and waned. Yes, more people identify as transgender today than in the 1990s or early 2000s, but as Kaufmann points out, we have no idea where the downward trend ends. Only time will settle that one. What we can say is that the data suggests the trans and nonbinary wave was, at least in part, a social trend that has gone out of vogue. If trans activists are interested in advocating for the interests of genuinely trans people (that is, people who experience enduring, clinically significant gender dysphoria) who have determined the proper treatment is to present socially as the opposite gender, they should welcome the fact that adolescents who were merely experimenting with their identity aren’t being swept into permanent, life-altering medicalization. Because for countless vulnerable communities, those with a history of mental illness, trauma, autism, those who don’t neatly adhere to gender roles and are misled from a young age that these tendencies mean that they should sterilize themselves and hack off their breasts, they amount to avoidable casualties. Their experiences could have been chalked up to nothing more than a confused phase of experimentation rather than being placed on the fast track to irreversible medicalization. We have to distinguish experimentation and social contagion from true dysphoria. A 2018 peer-reviewed paper published by physician and researcher Lisa Littman identified a phenomenon she coined as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Young girls with no previous childhood history of gender dysphoria or gender nonconformity began adopting trans identities soon after or at the same time as their friends and peers did. The study concluded they were being influenced by “immersion in social media consumption and an ideologically homogenous peer group with a shared belief that their trans identity was the cause of their mental health problems.” In other words, it was a social contagion. We never pathologize women’s college girl-kissing phases as a betrayal of the lesbian cause. We recognize it as a harmless, low-stakes period of exploration, not something that harms gay people or invalidates the existence of homosexuality. The same logic applies to gender identity. We have to distinguish experimentation and social contagion from true dysphoria because it safeguards the people who need it most, on both sides of the equation. Right now, we’re treating trans identities with more flippancy than getting a tattoo. Applying careful skepticism and placing bureaucratic, medical, and psychological barriers in place to make transitioning an official and tedious process is not heartless or empathetic; it’s the kind of discerning pragmatism that’s morally necessary to protect our children from permanent damage and regret. It also lends more credibility to adult lifelong dysphoria sufferers who have only found relief in their personal decision to socially and medically transition. Whether they’re mentally ill, spiritually lost, or just exercising their freedom to live exactly the way they want to, I’m only interested in minimizing the damage inflicted on their collateral orbiters. That means treating social and medical transition with the seriousness it deserves, with the weight and gravitas of a permanent medical decision that carries real, lasting consequences.