According to a new analysis of government survey data, the number of American teenage girls who say they are lesbian or bisexual has dropped sharply over the past few years. In fact, the decline has been so steep that the Washington Post recently ran a headline [1] announcing that the number of teens who identify as homosexual or bisexual is in “free fall.”
The analysis was done by Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, who has spent years studying the effects of smartphones on young people. Twenge used the raw data from the CDC’s 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which polls a large sample of American high school students every two years, and compared it [2] with the results from previous years.
According to her analysis, in 2023, 27% of high school girls identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual, but two years later that number had fallen to 22%. Among boys the decline was smaller, from 9% to 7%.
Notably, however, it is among the youngest girls that the change has been most dramatic. In 2021, nearly one in three 9th grade girls (30%) said that they were lesbian or bisexual, while in 2025 the figure was 17%. The share of 9th grade girls identifying specifically as bisexual fell from 26% to 13%, i.e., it was cut in half in the space of just four years.
A graph [3] showing the rise and fall of LGBT identification is visually striking.
Importantly, Twenge didn’t just look at teen self-identification. She also looked at what they were doing. She found that the percentage of sexually active girls who reported having had a same-sex partner also peaked in 2021, before dropping steeply in the years since, with the biggest declines again among the youngest girls. In other words, this is about more than girls feeling shy about using a particular label on a government survey.
The political scientist Eric Kaufmann made much the same observation [7] noting that: “[W]hen we look at homosexual behavior, we find that it has grown much less rapidly than LGBT identification.”
In other words, much of the enormous increase in young people “coming out” over the past decade had very little to do with any change in how they were actually living, and a great deal to do with what they were calling themselves.
Why Some are Baffled by the Fall in LGBT Identification
“It really does look like a free fall,” Twenge told the Post. As for why it is happening, she admitted that she is stumped: “I have to confess: I have no idea.”
The news has also left some on the left scratching their heads. “Are teenagers actually becoming straight again?” PZ Myers, a biologist and well-known atheist blogger, asked [8] in an essay. “That makes no sense.”
Myers is quite right that it makes no sense, at least if you accept the story we have been told over and over again for the past thirty years, namely that sexual orientation is an innate and unchangeable part of who a person is, something that young people “discover” about themselves rather than something they pick up from the world around them.
If that were true, then the share of 14-year-old girls who self-identify as lesbian or bisexual should stay more or less the same from year to year. It certainly shouldn’t double in six years and then fall by nearly half in the four years after that.
Myers himself tries to explain it in a novel way. It’s “oppression,” he claims in his essay. “This is not a good time to honestly express yourself, because the [expletive] crazy Republicans are running roughshod over schools, education, and science,” Myers wrote.
Unfortunately for Myers, the drop in LGBT identification started under President Biden, not President Trump, when Biden was pushing every pro-trans, pro-LGBT initiative he could think of. When practically every public school and institution across the country routinely flies the rainbow flag, our media is saturated with pro-LGBT content, and same-sex “marriage” is the law of the land, the idea that “oppression” is causing teens not to identify as LGBT is simply laughable.
LGBT Identification Learned “As if by Osmosis”
So, what’s really going on?
In Amoris Laetitia [9], Pope Francis wrote the following:
The family is the first school of human values, where we learn the wise use of freedom. Certain inclinations develop in childhood and become so deeply rooted that they remain throughout life, either as attractions to a particular value or a natural repugnance to certain ways of acting. Many people think and act in a certain way because they deem it to be right on the basis of what they learned, as if by osmosis, from their earliest years: “That’s how I was taught.” “That’s what I learned to do” (no. 274).
The Holy Father went on to add:
In the family we can also learn to be critical about certain messages sent by the various media. Sad to say, some television programs or forms of advertising often negatively influence and undercut the values inculcated in family life (no. 274).
The young girls who began identifying as LGBT in record numbers in the early 2020s were twelve and thirteen years old when the pandemic hit, when schools closed their doors and millions of children were sent home with little to do other than stare at their phones or computer screens.
And what were they doing on those screens? According to the latest figures from Pew Research [10], about six in ten American teens use TikTok, and 19% of teenage girls say that they are on the app “almost constantly.”
In January of 2022, I wrote a column [11] warning parents about the dangers of TikTok. At the time, the Daily Mail had just published an investigation showing that videos with the hashtag #Trans had been viewed more than 26 billion times on the platform. Many of these were slick, upbeat videos made by teens and young adults, explaining how to go about getting cross-sex hormones and surgery. Parents who spoke to the Daily Mail worried that TikTok was spreading a kind of “social contagion” among their children, and for saying so they were dismissed as bigots.
There are numerous concrete instances that verify the idea of a social contagion. In one extreme case, a total of 17 students at a single UK school suddenly identified as transgender. Many of those students, incidentally, had autism. Girls, in particular, seem to be especially susceptible to what social scientists have termed “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” i.e., confusion about their gender identity seems to arise suddenly, often due to peer influence.
Sometimes, said the Pontifical Council for the Family, “this really leads to the deformation of consciences” (Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality [12], no. 1). I can think of no better description of what happened to so many girls who were told by their phones (with their parents too often saying nothing) that the ordinary confusion of early adolescence might be a sign that they were “queer.”
The Trans Backlash Has Begun
There is at least one other piece of the puzzle that ought to be mentioned here. It is difficult to look at the timing of this decline without noticing that it coincides with a growing backlash against the more extreme claims of the LGBT movement, and in particular against the push to medically “transition” gender-confused children.
In many ways the turning point came in the United Kingdom. In 2020, a young woman named Keira Bell, who had been put on puberty blockers at the age of 16 by the Gender Identity Development Service at London’s Tavistock clinic, and who later came to bitterly regret her transition, took the clinic to court. Around the same time, whistleblowers inside the clinic began to describe children being put on powerful drugs after only the most cursory assessments.
In 2022, the interim report of the Cass Review, an independent inquiry commissioned by the National Health Service (a topic previously discussed [13] in this column.), described the clinic’s model of care as “neither safe nor viable,” and NHS England announced that the Tavistock clinic would be shut down. It closed its doors for good in March of 2024. A few weeks later, the final Cass Review concluded that the evidence behind puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors was remarkably weak, and the British government has since made its ban on prescribing puberty blockers to minors for gender dysphoria indefinite.
Things have moved more slowly in North America, but they have moved. In June of last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on medical “transition” for minors. Then, as I reported in February [14], the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended that surgeons wait until patients are at least 19 before performing gender-related surgeries, citing “insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio.” The American Medical Association, which for years had been among the loudest champions of so-called “gender-affirming care,” promptly said that it “agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”
Only days earlier, a New York jury had awarded $2 million to Fox Varian, a young woman whose healthy breasts were removed when she was 16, in the first malpractice verdict of its kind in the United States. Even in Canada, Dr. Karine Khatchadourian, one of that country’s pioneers of pediatric gender medicine, has said publicly that she would now “challenge medicalizing the majority of youth that are presenting to clinics.”
Public opinion has been moving in the same direction. According to Gallup, only 38% of Americans now say that changing one’s gender is morally acceptable, which is eight points lower than in 2021. And Twenge herself has found that the share of 18- to 22-year-olds identifying as transgender or nonbinary fell by roughly half between 2022 and 2024. “[F]or now,” she has written, “it looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.”
If the huge spike in LGBT-identification is a case of social contagion (which seems highly likely), the fact that society has begun to cool on the issue would also explain the reduction among teens. For a short time it was “cool” to identify as trans. However, the enormous harms caused to teens who “transitioned” are now being widely reported in the media.
The Family is the Cure
The Catholic Church will never tire of proclaiming the truth that rich, healthy human formation begins in the family, and that the family – and parents in particular – have an enormous moral responsibility not to hand over the formation of youth to outside influences.
The Pontifical Council’s advice to parents in 1995 is as relevant today as it was then:
Aware of … the real difficulties that exist for young people in many countries today, especially when social and moral deterioration is present, parents are urged to dare to ask for more and to propose more. They cannot be satisfied with avoiding the worst — that their children do not take drugs or commit crimes. They will have to be committed to educating them in the true values of the person, renewed by the virtues of faith, hope and love (no. 49).
A teenage girl who has stopped calling herself bisexual has, at best, avoided the worst. That is a good thing, but it is hardly the same as having been taught the truth about her sexuality, and about what her sexuality is for. That task falls first and foremost to her parents. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Familiaris Consortio [15], the sex education that parents provide must be “truly and fully personal: for sexuality is an enrichment of the whole person — body, emotions and soul — and it manifests its inmost meaning in leading the person to the gift of self in love” (no. 37 [15]).
This is something quite different from the “information” that is handed out in so many classrooms. It takes years, and it requires parents to actually spend time with their children. “Parents must find time to be with their children and take time to talk with them,” the Pontifical Council for the Family writes. “Children are more important than work, entertainment and social position.” In these conversations, parents “should learn how to listen carefully to their children, how to make the effort to understand them, and how to recognize the fragment of truth that may be present in some forms of rebellion” (no. 51).
How many of the girls who took on a “bisexual” identity during the lockdowns were looking for the kind of loving attention from the adults in their lives that every child craves, and found it from strangers on TikTok instead?
Twenge has said that the recent decline “could be a harbinger of a coming wave of change, or it could be a blip.” My own conviction is that the answer will depend on what happens around the kitchen tables of ordinary families. The ideologues had years, and billions of views, in which to form our children. Now, it is up to families to take their children back.