Trans is fast falling out of fashion

Pronoun badges and rainbow lanyards could soon be cluttering the clearance bins of campus gift shops. The latest data suggest young Americans are quietly growing out of the transgender trend – and not before time.

Sociologist Eric Kaufmann’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science has released a new report entitled ‘The decline of trans and queer identity among young Americans’. Drawing on surveys of more than 60,000 US undergraduates, the report finds that the share identifying as a gender ‘other than male or female’ peaked at 6.8 per cent in 2023. It has since fallen to 3.6 per cent in 2025, effectively halving in just two years.

The decline is steepest at the elite end of the spectrum, confirming that the trans delusion was always a luxury belief. Within the Ivy League samples, the proportion of students identifying as something other than male or female rose from three per cent in 2021 to seven per cent in 2023, before dropping right back down to three per cent in 2025.

Thankfully, the decline in trans and nonbinary identification is not evidence of a long-touted ‘trans genocide’ supposedly unleashed by President Trump and legions of Bible-thumping bigots. It simply confirms what anyone with a brain should have suspected all along – namely, that ‘queer’ identities are a fashion statement. As Kaufmann notes, only a few years ago, first-year students were more likely than final-year students to describe themselves as queer, but now the reverse is true – ‘a sign’, he says, ‘that fashions are changing’.

The sexuality data tell a similar story. Since 2023, the share of students identifying as ‘not heterosexual’ has dropped by around 10 percentage points. It seems being straight is cool again. Tellingly, the percentage of lesbian and gay students has remained steady. What’s melting away are the ‘queer’, ‘asexual’ and ‘pansexual’ labels. These have slipped from 15 per cent in 2023 to just eight per cent this year.

It’s tempting to smirk at the thought of first-year students now cringing their way through mandatory pronoun rituals at the beginning of semester. But there is a serious side to this, too. The ‘trans boom’ will continue to have knock-on implications for decades to come. Many students will shed their identity politics as easily as their septum rings and drift into marketing jobs, but the institutions they leave behind have been intellectually and morally gutted. Women’s sports (vital in the US because of scholarships) have been sabotaged by cheating men and cynical coaches. Single-sex dorms and sororities are now effectively unisex. The atmosphere of intellectual terror, where teaching basic biology could end a lecturer’s career, will take years to dispel.

As a Gen Xer born in 1982, I thank the gods of dial-up internet that there’s no photographic evidence of my cloak-wearing goth phase. The young people who made being trans their entire personality for a few years won’t be so lucky. Most limited their rebellion to pronouns and hair dye, though others took hormones or underwent surgery, urged on by vultures in scrubs and campus counsellors with saviour complexes.

It’s a relief that the trans fad is becoming old news. But now we must ask some adult questions: how did so many intelligent people persuade themselves that humans can be ‘born in the wrong body’? And why did they try to destroy anyone who said otherwise? Growing up means admitting when you were wrong. Now it’s time for universities to learn from their mistakes, ditch the ideology, and return to the principles that once made them great.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of the upcoming book, Pornocracy. Pre-order it here.