The percentage of young Americans in college and high school identifying as non-binary or non-heterosexual dropped significantly in 2025, according to a new report from Eric Kaufmann published by the Center for Heterodox Social Science.
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“The fall of trans and queer seems most similar to the fading of a fashion or trend. It happened largely independently of shifts in political beliefs and social media use, though improved mental health played a role,” said Kaufmann on X.
Kaufmann’s report compiled data from a variety of sources, including individual data from institutions like Andover Phillips Academy and Brown University, along with broader surveys from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI).
Using that data, Kaufmann concluded that transgender identification among young people is in “free fall.”
According to the executive summary, the share of transgender-identifying students in higher education peaked in 2023 at around 7 percent and ended in 2024 at under 4 percent.
Though his summary mentions transgender identity, the charts included in the study appear to focus on data showing non-binary students who do not identify as male or female, as well non-heterosexual orientation, rather than explicitly transgender-identifying students.
The number of students who identified as neither male nor female saw a significant decline in 2025, according to all studies that included information through the current year. In particular, the FIRE study showed that non-binary identification among Ivy League students dropped from seven percent in 2023 to three percent in 2025.
That data notably does not reflect a change in transgender identification, as many people who identify as transgender would identify as either male or female, rather than neither.
The data also found a general downward trend in the number of students identifying as non-heterosexual since 2020.
Kaufmann could not find any link between the drop in non-heterosexual orientation and non-binary identification and an increase in the prevalence of conservative views or a decline in support for “woke ideology.” He hypothesized that the decline in non-heterosexual and transgender identification could stem from an improvement in students’ mental health.
He believes that the trend is likely to continue based on an analysis of FIRE data, which showed that college freshmen were less likely than seniors to identify as non-binary or queer.
“To the extent that the youngest represent the leading edge of new trends, this suggests that trans, bisexual and queer identities are declining in popularity with each new cohort,” said Kaufmann.
Maine collects data on student sexual orientation and self-selected gender identity in a biannual Maine Integrated Health Survey.
The 2025 survey results have not yet been released, but data from the 2021 and 2023 results showed a slight decrease in high school students identifying as LGBTQ, decreasing from 26.2 percent in 2021 to 25.5 percent in 2023.
Read the full report here:
