The Transgender Fad Is Collapsing Among Young Americans

The trend of young Americans identifying as transgender has seen a sharp and remarkable decline since peaking in 2023, signaling a significant cultural reversal among this demographic. University students identifying as transgender dropped from 6.8% in 2023 to a mere 3.6% in 2025, according to a 2025 study by Eric Kaufmann, a political science professor at the University of Birmingham. That steep decline suggests the left’s relentless push to normalize transgenderism is losing its grip—and the fad is rapidly becoming less fashionable among American youth.

At Andover Phillips Academy, student identification as “nonbinary” plummeted from 9.2% in 2023 to just 3% in 2025. Brown University showed a similar drop—from 5% “nonbinary” in 2023 to 2.6% two years later.

These declines accompany a broader retreat from queer identities, where categories such as queer, pansexual, and asexual shrank notably by about ten percentage points. In contrast, heterosexual identification rose from 68% to 77% during the same period, while gay and lesbian figures remained relatively steady. The data makes clear that young Americans are retreating from fluid and expansive identity labels back toward more traditional concepts of gender and sexuality.

“Trans and queer identification have declined among young Americans even as levels of wokeness and irreligion have not,” Kaufmann told The Washington Times. “For young people, gender and sexual identity are now independent fashions that rise and fall separately from other cultural and political currents.”

What makes these changes even more striking is that they appear unrelated to broader shifts in politics, religion, or social media use—often cited as factors driving identity trends. The movement away from transgender and queer labels seems to occur independently of the usual cultural currents, as Kaufmann points out.

So what’s behind this sudden shift? While improving youth mental health after the pandemic may have contributed, it doesn’t fully explain the rapid unraveling of identities once loudly celebrated on campus. The boom-and-bust pattern of transgender identification looks less like a political awakening and more like a social trend running its course—something embraced for status and belonging, then discarded just as quickly when the cultural winds changed.

This pattern is especially obvious among younger college students—freshmen and sophomores show more drastic declines than upperclassmen—signaling a generational shift as younger cohorts rethink or reject the identity frameworks adopted by their immediate predecessors. This trend prompts the provocative suggestion that the recent explosion in transgender identification was nothing more than a social contagion or a passing fad amplified by youthful exploration and peer influence. Now, the fad is fading, and with it the inflated identity figures plummeting sharply downward.

Some critics insist it’s too early to call it a total collapse of transgender identity, pointing out that younger adults still report higher rates than older generations. Maybe so—but the sheer speed and scale of the drop among key groups is impossible to ignore. The elite universities and cultural institutions that once treated gender ideology as sacred ground are now quietly backing away, and the students themselves seem to be moving on just as fast.

When you look at the data from multiple surveys and academic studies, one conclusion becomes undeniable: transgenderism—and the ever-expanding list of invented identities that come with it—was never a legitimate identity movement. It’s a social contagion, a cultural fad masquerading as moral progress and amplified by widespread mental health struggles. The once-explosive wave of gender confusion among young people is now collapsing under its own absurdity, proving this was never about authenticity or truth—it was about chasing the latest trend the left demanded everyone pretend was real.