Transgender identification among American students nosedives, study shows

A newly released study shows the number of young Americans who identify as nonbinary has dropped by nearly half since peaking in 2023.

The percentage of university students “not identifying as male or female” plunged from 2023-25 in three of five surveys evaluated by Eric Kaufmann, political science professor at the University of Buckingham in England and director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science.

“Trans, queer and bisexual identities are in rapid decline among young educated Americans,” said the report, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans,” which was released Tuesday.

Despite referring to a drop in trans identities, the study doesn’t offer data on the number of young Americans who identify specifically as the opposite sex, which is the commonly understood definition of transgender — but not the only one.

The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ group, defines transgender as an “umbrella term for people whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth.”

The surveys used include the annual Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual poll of more than 50,000 college students, which found that those “not identifying as male or female” fell from 6.8% in 2023 to 3.6% in 2025.

Other sources showing a decline were the annual Andover Phillips Academy poll and the Brown University student survey conducted by the Brown Daily Herald.

The Andover Phillips Academy survey showed 9.2% of students identified as neither male nor female in 2023, a figure that plummeted to 3% in 2025.

The same trend was found at Brown, where 5% of students said they were nonbinary in 2023, but just 2.6% did so two years later.

Underclassmen were less likely to identify as transgender or queer than upperclassmen, “a sign that fashions are changing,” said Mr. Kaufmann in his analysis in UnHerd.

1/ NEW: trans identification is in free fall among the young

(h/t @FIRE data in particular) pic.twitter.com/i0Z1BNcWG8

— Eric Kaufmann (@epkaufm) October 14, 2025

The study also found that the number of students identifying as nonheterosexual plummeted by about 10 percentage points, driven by a decline in those describing themselves queer, pansexual, asexual and other terms.

At the same time, the number of heterosexual students rose to 77% in 2025 after bottoming out at 68% in 2023, according to the FIRE surveys.

Meanwhile, the number of gay and lesbian students remained “largely stable,” as shown in survey data from the Andover Phillips Academy.

Why the decline? It would be tempting to credit the anti-woke “vibe shift” as well as changes in religious affiliation and social-media, but the study found said the polling showed no significant differences in those factors.

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

One factor that has changed is mental health. Youth mental illness increased steadily during the 2010s before peaking in 2021 and improving by 2023.

While the study said that improved mental health has played a role, that factor alone “cannot adequately explain declining trans, queer and bisexual share.”

“The postpandemic era of improving mental health appears to encompass alternative sexual orientation and gender suggesting the two trends are substantially independent over time,” the report said.

Mr. Kaufmann noted that the “startling” findings are unlikely to be welcome in progressive circles that champion the transgender movement.

“Only time will tell if the substantial decline of BTQ+ identification will continue among young Americans,” the report said. “If so, this represents a momentous and unanticipated post-progressive cultural shift in American society which is distinctly out of phase with the expectations of cultural left observers in educational institutions and legacy media outlets.”

The study also drew from data from the Higher Education Research Institute freshman survey, which does not include a question on gender identity.

Editor’s note: This report has been updated to make clear that the study uses the term “trans” to refer to what is commonly understood as “nonbinary” identification.