Is transgender identity really declining among young adults? What the real data says

Plus: the consequences of the Trump administration's policy on sex and gender

Earlier this week, a new report found that the number of young Americans identifying as transgender or nonbinary peaked in 2023 and has plummeted since.

The report got a lot of attention (for example, over 15 million views on X and a retweet by Elon Musk), perhaps because it concluded that a shift in cultural attitudes might be responsible for both the increase 2019-2023 and the decrease 2023-2025 in young people identifying as transgender or nonbinary.

Eric Kaufmann, who wrote the report, concluded that the decline “seems most similar to the fading of a fashion or trend.” It could also be that more people were willing to identify as transgender or nonbinary when they thought this would be accepted and are less willing to do so when it would not be.

Either way, it’s an intriguing finding, showing whiplash-quick cultural change over the period of just a few years. But is there actually a population-wide decline in transgender identity?

That’s impossible to say with this data. Strikingly, as Benjamin Ryan noted, these three surveys don’t ask about “trans identification” at all, as Kaufmann’s tweet says. Instead, they ask about identifying as nonbinary, gender fluid, and so on. Here are the choices in the Andover survey, for example:

The Brown and FIRE surveys were similar, asking about nonbinary and gender queer identification. None of these three surveys used the word transgender. So there might be a decline in identifying as nonbinary, but these data tell us nothing about trends in transgender identification.

These are also not representative samples. Two of the data sources for this graph are extremely selected populations: students at Andover (the most elite boarding school in the country) and students at Brown (an Ivy League campus with a 5% acceptance rate). These samples are very unrepresentative of the population of U.S. young adults as a whole.

The third data source is a FIRE survey of U.S. undergraduates in four-year degree programs at 257 research universities. This sample is more representative than the other two but still does not reflect the majority of 18- to 22-year-olds, most of whom attend less selective four-year colleges, go to community college or trade schools, or are not in college at all.

Since I’ve written about generational trends in identifying as transgender before, including in this newsletter as well as in Generations, I immediately wondered what nationally representative data that actually asks about transgender identity would show. That would tell us if this really is a population-wide trend, versus something happening only in selected, elite groups. It would also help rule out the possibility that the trends were caused by differing admissions standards or self-selection into or out of these schools rather than a true change. And it would show us trends in identifying as trans, not trends in identifying as nonbinary or gender queer.

So has transgender identification declined among the population of young adults as a whole?