Yes, LGBT identity really is in free fall among American teens

What goes up so quickly will eventually come down just as fast.

This is precisely what has happened with gay and trans identity among American teens after our national LGBT social acid trip.

Gallup has carefully tracked how dramatically LGBT identity shot up for all ages in the U.S. over the last decade or more. It really rocketed in 2020. In 2012, only 3.5% of Americans identified with any of the experimental sex and gender alphabet soup letters. By 2020, 5.6% did. By 2024, it reached an eye-popping 9.3% of Americans. It seemed to be roughly doubling with every new generation.

Comedian Bill Maher severely mocked this clearly unnatural phenomenon on his Real Time television show, stating, “if we follow this trajectory, we will all be gay in 2054.” He followed this with precisely the right observation, “I’m just saying, when things change this much, this fast, people are allowed to ask, ‘what’s up with that?’” He then went off on long tirade about how silly and artificial all this seems. Maher didn’t use the terms “social contagion” and “politically inflated” but that is exactly what he was getting at.

Something is happening here, and it certainly isn’t natural biological diversity.

Earlier this year, Gallup reported the number of LGBT-identified Americans had declined slightly for the first time, to 9.0%. It’s not just polling outfits marking this change. Science has been tracking even greater declines over the last few years.

In 2022, Canadian social scientist Eric Kaufmann, started noticing something strange in the emerging data. What young people were reporting as an identity did not correspond with their actual behavior. He explained, “when we look at homosexual behavior, we find that it has grown much less rapidly than LGBT identification.” Specifically, he pointed to “a high-point estimate of an 11-point increase in LGBT identity between 2008 and 2021 among Americans under 30.” Yet, he added,

“Of that, around 4 points can be explained by an increase in same-sex behavior. The majority of the increase in LGBT identity can be traced to how those who only engage in heterosexual behavior describe themselves.”

Professor Kaufmann also observed the political and social contagion dynamic here, “very liberal ideology is associated with identifying as LGBT among those with heterosexual behavior, especially women.”

More recently, one of the smartest scholars on the habits, beliefs and practices of young people in America started noticing something truly interesting. Last October, Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author Generations and iGen, explained how data from the Cooperative Elections Study administered by Tufts University demonstrated that “trans” and “non-binary” identities declined by roughly half among 18- to 22-year-olds from 2022 to 2024. She called this a “free fall among the young in the U.S.” The trend lines Twenge presented in her report look like this:

She observed, “for now, however, it looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.”

Professor Twenge added to this conclusion in late September with new findings that “younger teens are now much less likely to say they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual” by remarkable margins.

Drawing from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s 2025 Youth Risk Survey, she explains the declines in reported L, G, and B identity among youth “are striking.” They are happening most starkly among younger teens, especially girls. In fact, it “really does look like a free fall” she explains, especially for 9th grade students. Her chart demonstrates remarkable downward slopes:

Good data doesn’t lie: What ballooned so fast is now coming down. These lines denote the numbers of U.S. high school students “identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual” by grade from 2015-2025.

Twenge says the increases “in identifying as LGB was … larger among girls, with a 128% increase (more than doubling) from 2015 to 2021 among girls and a 99% increase (doubling) from 2015 to 2023 among boys.”

However, these identities dropped from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025 among girls. For boys, the decline was more modest from 9% to 7%.

Specifically, the decline among 9th grade girls “dropped from 30% in 2021 to 17% in 2025, nearly cutting the numbers in half.” Declines among 12th grade girls have been much smaller, “from 26% in 2021 to 28% in 2023 and 25% in 2025.”

The biggest decline is among those who identified at bisexual, which is easily the largest “LGBT” category. Bi-identity is found mostly among younger populations and women in particular. This indicates more experimentation than anything else. But of the recent change, Twenge explains, “while 26% of 9th grade girls identified as bisexual in 2021, only 13% — half as many — did in 2025.”

Professor Twenge also observes that this trend of overall LGBT decline is not reflected in the data for young adults, ages 18 to 24. Among this age group, non-heterosexual identity is not declining, but it is not really increasing either. Instead, Twenge explains “it has stabilized and is no longer racing upward as it did between 2014 and 2022, when identifying as LGB nearly tripled among U.S. 18- to 24-year-olds.” She adds, “among 25- to 34-year-olds, identifying as LGB also stabilized after more than doubling from 2014 to 2023.”

So, what’s up with all this? Twenge asked this in her latest essay and humbly admits, “I have to confess: I have no idea.”

I will hazard some guesses.

First, the wind appears to be going out of the sails of the same-sex and gender revolution. Gallup gave new evidence for this in June and it’s true for both Blue and Red Americans, yet at different rates. Specifically, among movement insiders, it’s no longer cool to be L, G or B. Too vanilla.

Queer has become the hot new thing, which famously doesn’t really mean anything. Folks like Matthew Vines who has confused scores of young people with his false “gay-Christian” rhetoric is really miffed at this evolution.

As Bill Maher observed in his previously mentioned monologue, “remember, the prime directive of every teen is ‘anything to shock and challenge the squares who brought you up!’ It’s why nobody gets a nose-ring at 56!”

The shock factor has worn off LGBT.

Another reason why L, G, and B are losing their shine is each are fundamentally binary and the newest version of this movement is dead set against the binary. It’s why the Seattle City council unanimously voted in mid-September to change the “definition of the sexual orientation protected class to recognize gender identities outside the gender binary” like pansexuality and polyamorous relationships. They just keep making up new identities because their movement has no self-limiting mechanism. This will facilitate their self-perpetuating downfall. Remember, Satan always overplays his hand!

Add to this that more young people are likely just realizing, maybe I am just the normal boy or girl that nature made me to be, and are now living happily enough as that. The social contagion that drew so many young people into this confusion has grown tired and empty. Afterall, it’s exhausting to create your own new reality and try to convince yourself and others it’s real and life-giving.

The gravitational force of human nature over radical artificiality is certainly at work here.