The cultural whiplash of 2024 vs. 2025
More evidence for changes in sexual orientation as the culture shifted in the U.S.
Late 2024 and early 2025 were a political turning point in the U.S. Trump was elected in November 2024 and took office in January 2025. Mass upheaval followed for government workers, grant funding, USAID, and many others. But the change was more than just politics; cultural attitudes shifted as well. For example, it suddenly became acceptable to publicly question puberty blockers for kids or transgender athletes in women’s sports. When given the chance, people questioned the idea that there were more than two genders.
The change wasn’t limited to attitudes about others. Fewer Americans identified as transgender or non-binary – even among kids as young as 13. Fewer identified as non-heterosexual, with an especially large decline in bisexual identity.
We still have very little data from 2025, though, given the delays in datasets becoming publicly available. In an earlier post, I found that fewer young adults, especially women, identified as bisexual in 2024 and early 2025 compared to earlier years. The change wasn’t large, though, and for men only appeared in the data from 2025, which was collected at the very beginning of the year as part of the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and was included in the 2024 datafile. We don’t have the 2025 datafile for the BRFSS and won’t until August.
But we do have data from April and June 2025 from the Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey, a continuation of the Household Pulse Survey collected by the Census Bureau from April 2020 to September 2024. Household Pulse asked about sexual orientation beginning in July 2021. Beginning in late July 2024, they changed the “other” response from “Something else” to “I use a different term.” So we’ll compare July-September 2024 to June 2025, all times whe the sexual orientation question was asked in the same way. (I included only June to get the most recent data; it’s also not clear if the April and June datafiles are the same people since the design transitioned to longitudinal).
What does this data show?
