Jean Twenge has made a career out of studying generational differences. Central to her work is analyzing federal survey data on youth and adults, looking for shifts in how successive generations see themselves and behave.
Some of the most notable changes between generations have involved gender and sexuality, where there has been a steady increase in young people identifying as L.G.B.T. over the decades. But as culture and attitudes evolve over time, Dr. Twenge has wondered if that trajectory will hold.
Her analysis of new federal numbers on youth and sexual identity suggests there may be a change: In a recent post on her Substack, Generation Tech, Dr. Twenge argued that lesbian, gay and bisexual identification was in a “free fall” among high schoolers, with the clearest declines among ninth-grade girls. After peaking at 26 percent in 2021, the percentage of ninth-grade girls identifying as bisexual dropped to 13 percent in 2025.
The change caught her eye, Dr. Twenge said, because “pretty much every other indicator for a very long time was going in the direction of more same-sex relationships, more acceptance of same-sex relationships, more identification.” Those patterns were evident ever since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began surveying youth about their sexuality in 2015, incidentally the same year gay marriage was legalized in the United States.
“It’s a reversal of very longstanding trends,” Dr. Twenge said.
The data were collected as part of the C.D.C.’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is administered every two years in all four high school grades across the country. Understanding how young people identify is important to researchers like Dr. Twenge because it can help predict broader cultural shifts that may shape society in the future.
Dr. Twenge’s analysis immediately prompted speculation about the forces driving the change.
Conservative commentators argued the nation’s rightward swing had swayed young people, suggesting that the prior rise in L.G.B.T. identities had been a product of progressive institutions promoting them. “Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID,” Terry Schilling, the director of the American Principles Project, posted on X.
Others argued that the findings reflected an increasingly hostile climate for L.G.B.T. people in the United States, making teenagers afraid to disclose their sexual identities, especially in surveys conducted by the federal government.
Dr. Twenge disputed both interpretations, arguing that smaller declines had first been observed under the Biden administration. She said that neither theory could explain why the number of ninth-grade girls identifying as bisexual had fallen by half between 2023 and 2025.
Still, other researchers questioned how much the data revealed at all.
Andrew Flores, a demographer at American University and the Williams Institute, stressed that it was difficult to draw broad conclusions about trends in young people’s sexual identities given that most of the change showed up only in ninth-grade girls.
The data showed a clear increase in high schoolers saying they identified as heterosexual, up to 78 percent in 2025 from 73 percent in 2023, Dr. Flores said. But most of that shift could be explained by the drop in ninth-grade girls identifying as bisexual. Across all grades, the share identifying as lesbian or gay remained relatively stable, at roughly 3 to 5 percent.
Christopher Julian, a postdoctoral researcher in demography at Vanderbilt, questioned whether the data told a story about a “free fall,” or whether the increases in gay and bisexual identification that preceded it were more noteworthy.
Dr. Julian noted that there had been a sizable decline in the share of teenagers identifying as heterosexual, to 73 percent in 2021 from 85 percent in 2019. But that had coincided with changes to the survey’s wording, with new answer options including identifying “Some other way” or “Do not know what this is asking.” Those changes made it difficult to draw direct comparisons between the two data sets.
The argument that lesbian, gay and bisexual identification was more broadly falling is “not statistically there — it’s a sensational claim,” Dr. Julian said. “Some people have suggested that there was a going back into the closet or a revoking of identity, but that’s not evidenced in the data.”
Young people are still identifying themselves under the L.G.B.T. umbrella much more than previous generations, said Phillip Hammack, director of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Data from 2025 Gallup polls of youth and adults showed that, overall, levels of L.G.B.T. identification remained mostly stable, with a slight recent dip, at about 9 percent of the general population.
“That’s a huge uptick from when they first began tracking this in 2012,” Dr. Hammack said. Looking at that data, Gen Z is clearly the biggest driver of the increase across cohorts, with more than 20 percent identifying with some kind of L.G.B.T. label. (Members of Gen Z are now 14 to 29 years old.)
But he acknowledged that the signal emerging among ninth-grade girls was something researchers should pay close attention to in future surveys.
“I think this is something we need to watch,” Dr. Hammack said, “precisely because these are young people who are starting to experience these questions about their gender and sexuality in such a hostile moment.”
Dr. Twenge agreed that understanding what’s happening among girls is important. Research has shown that girls and women are more likely to have sexual identities that fluctuate over their lifetimes and are much more likely than boys and men to identify as bisexual. That makes the political and cultural environment even more salient.
“Their sexuality just changes more,” Dr. Twenge said. “And I think that’s exactly what’s showing up here in both the increase and the decrease. But why it’s so big for the ninth graders, I don’t know.”
What is clearer is how young people in these groups are faring. While the 2025 C.D.C. survey showed promising mental health improvements among high schoolers more generally, lesbian, gay and bisexual students reported high rates of sadness and suicidal thoughts.
The survey did not include questions about gender identity, complying with an executive order from President Trump declaring that the federal government would acknowledge only two sexes.
The prior version of the survey had shown that transgender students had among the worst mental health outcomes in their peer group.
“To me, it’s just a sad loss of information about people,” Dr. Flores said. “Simply erasing that data doesn’t mean the problem stops, it just means it can’t be tracked.”
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