Trans identification really is in free fall: New data

And so is nonbinary identity.

A firestorm erupted last week when Prof. Eric Kaufmann made a bold claim: Identifying as transgender is “in free fall among the young.”

But as journalist Benjamin Ryan rightly pointed out, these surveys didn’t measure identifying as transgender. Instead, they measured identifying as nonbinary (note the chart says “not identifying as male or female,” which is not the same as identifying as transgender). Another journalist, Erin Reed, criticized Kaufmann’s analysis for not using survey weights. Kaufmann has since responded to both critiques.

Wondering which side was right, last week I analyzed data from the nationally representative Household Pulse survey, which asked directly about identifying as transgender and which is a better population-wide indicator than the elite schools in Kaufmann’s graph. The Household Pulse data showed a decline in trans ID among 18- to 22-year-olds in 2024, but I was cautious about drawing conclusions from it as the decline appeared only in a limited time period (July to September 2024) and two of the three survey administrations added an option for nonbinary identification that wasn’t there before. Maybe that was why identifying as trans declined.

Then, over the weekend, I found it – a nationally representative survey that asked about transgender identification in the same way from 2021 to 2024. It also asked separately about identifying as nonbinary.