Are young Americans becoming less likely to identify as trans?
This claim is getting a lot of attention on social media after two researchers published survey data appearing to show a shift in youth gender identity.
The first analysis came from Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, and a longtime anti-PC and anti-”woke” crusader. In early October, Kaufmann published a report titled “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity Among Young Americans.”
“The transgender share among university students peaked in 2023 and has almost halved since, from nearly 7 percent to under 4 percent,” Kaufmann writes in that report.
A few days later, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, posted on X that “trans identification really is in free fall among the young,” citing data from the Cooperative Election Study, a long-running survey of voting behavior and public opinion. Unlike Kaufmann, Twenge is known most recently for relatively apolitical work on kids and smartphones.
Several scholars have raised significant methodological questions about Twenge’s and Kaufmann’s work, which has not been peer-reviewed or published in academic journals. The Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law that has studied the number of Americans identifying as transgender since 2011, has not seen a similar drop in its data.
The debate has bigger implications for trans rights. Social conservatives have already touted Kaufmann and Twenge’s work as evidence that trans people have ceased to exist, or that trans identity has always been suspect. “Transgenderism is effectively over. We destroyed it,” right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh posted on X in response to Kaufmann’s report.
At the same time, accurate data is important for representation, scholars and activists say. If trans people aren’t counted in surveys, “it almost leads to a sense of isolation,” Marlin Xie, an 18-year-old activist with the nonprofit Advocates for Youth, told me. “It’s almost like there are less of my community that I can go to for support.”
The entire conversation is happening at a time of enormous stigma against trans people, coming from the highest levels of government. Donald Trump made anti-trans messaging a core part of his second presidential campaign and, since taking office again, has taken swift action to restrict trans people’s access to gender-affirming care and public facilities; meanwhile, prominent Democrats have walked back support for trans rights in an effort to win back Trump voters. Among their many other effects, these statements and policies could make it harder for researchers to get a clear picture of trans communities.
An anti-“woke” professor measures trans identity (maybe)
To understand current debates around youth gender identity and why they matter, it’s helpful to understand a little more about Kaufmann and Twenge’s work.
Let’s start with Kaufmann. His new report draws from a few data sources, including Brown University student polling and surveys of undergraduates at major research universities conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression over the past five years. In those data sets, Kaufmann finds that the share of young people “not identifying as male or female” has dropped significantly between 2023 and 2025. He also finds a corresponding drop in youth identifying with sexual orientations other than heterosexual.
“It appears that trans and queer are going out of fashion among young people, especially in elite settings,” Kaufmann writes.
Several journalists have raised questions about Kaufmann’s statistical analysis, but probably the most basic criticism of his report concerns what he’s measuring. The data sources he uses don’t actually ask if people identify as trans; instead, they ask for gender identity, offering options like male, female, or nonbinary. Kaufmann appears to have grouped together respondents who selected options other than male or female and counted those respondents as trans.
This method leaves out the many trans people who identify as male or female; being trans and being nonbinary are not the same. Kaufmann told me in an email that “not identifying as male or female” was an appropriate proxy for trans identity because “trans includes non-binary (this is the position of trans movement organizations).” He argues that even if his method doesn’t measure all trans people, it’s an appropriate way to measure trends, because “non-binary is a gateway between identifying with birth sex and identifying with the opposite gender in a binary way.” If nonbinary identification decreases, he says, trans identification will decrease too.
However, other researchers have studied trans identity specifically, without relying on such proxy categories. In a 2025 report, the Williams Institute found that 3.3 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds in the US and 2.7 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds, identified as trans. In 2022, those figures were 1.4 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively.
“We have not seen a decline in identification as transgender among the youth or young adults, or adults overall,” Jody Herman, a senior scholar at the Williams Institute, told me.
It’s also worth noting that Kaufmann’s anti-”woke” stance could give his analyses an ideological bent. He launched the University of Buckingham’s Center for Heterodox Social Science, which published his youth gender-identity report, specifically to counter what he saw as “woke” ideas around race and gender. In a Substack post in 2024, he wrote that “the social sciences and humanities have been skewed for decades because of the dominance of the left among the professoriate,” and that the center’s goal was “to form the kernel of an alternative social science in Britain, the only non-progressive social sciences centre in the country.”
Kaufmann told me that he doesn’t believe the center’s mission biases his analyses, and that “ultimately with viewpoint diversity, academic freedom and a common and agreed set of scientific objective evidentiary rules, the best arguments win out.”
“The Centre is about rebalancing the social sciences,” Kaufmann said. “I wouldn’t want an end to progressive social science, but the problem is we don’t have the other side represented.”
A broader look at gender identity (again, maybe)
Now let’s look at Twenge’s analysis, which uses data from the Cooperative Election Study, a large survey based at Tufts University that asks both demographic and policy questions. This study does include a question directly asking respondents whether they identify as trans, and Twenge reports a large drop among 18- to 22-year-olds, from over 5.5 percent identifying as trans in 2021 to just over 3 percent saying the same in 2024.
Twenge’s conclusions have also come in for criticism, however. Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at Tufts who co-directs the Cooperative Election Study, posted on X that Twenge had neglected to include the margins for error in her results. Taking those into account, the 2021 share of youth identifying as trans could be anywhere from 3.8 percent to 8.3 percent, and the 2024 share could be anywhere from 2.1 percent to 4.8 percent. That means it’s possible that trans identification fell between 2021 and 2024, but it may have held steady, or it may have even increased slightly.
Twenge told me in an email that when she calculated the margins of error, she got different numbers from Schaffner that still show a clear decline; Schaffner replied that she was using the wrong methods for her analysis.
“We need to have a little caution around these numbers,” Schaffner told me.
Trans representation in surveys matters
Beyond debates over proxies and margins of error, it’s important to take a wider look at why these numbers matter. Social conservatives and critics of trans inclusion have taken Kaufmann and Twenge’s analyses as evidence that trans identity is “over” or perhaps never existed in the first place. To them, the studies are proof of their prior opinions that trans identity is a fad or a form of leftist indoctrination. These arguments have been used to restrict trans people’s medical care and access to schools and other facilities.
It is possible to study the demographics of gender identity in a rigorous way, and some trans rights activists support that study. At the same time, many caution that this research could become more difficult in an environment of deep stigma against trans people.
During the second Trump administration, trans Americans have seen a near-constant march of restrictions targeting their health care, education, military service, travel, and more. “It has been very challenging to maintain hope and have the capacity to support others through this back-to-back-to-back-to-back bad news,” Xie, the 18-year-old, told me.
Given all this, it is possible that analyses like Twenge’s and Kaufmann’s, despite their potential problems, are picking up on something real: a reluctance to identify as trans to researchers. Again, the Williams Institute has not seen the effects of such reluctance in their data. But it could be popping up in other surveys. After all, researchers may not even be able to measure gender identity directly — what they measure is “people’s willingness to disclose their identity on a survey,” Herman said.
Young people in particular might be fearful of sharing their gender identity, since they are highly aware of government surveillance efforts and the potential of hacks that could expose private data, Xie said: “Why would you want to give someone that knowledge, that information, when you don’t know how it will be used against you?”
With all that in mind, we may still see more fluctuations in surveys of gender identity over the coming years. Some of those surveys, depending on their quality, could tell us something about the language people are using to describe themselves, or about how comfortable they feel describing themselves at all. But they will not tell us that trans people, who have been part of societies around the world, likely for thousands of years, are “over.”
As Herman put it, “trans people have existed, they will exist, they have always existed.”
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