- A new report by Eric Kaufmann shows a sharp drop in young people identifying as transgender or queer since 2023 across several universities.
- There was also evidence of improving mental health among students.
- Kaufmann suggests shifting cultural trends may mark a broader “post-progressive” shift, but more research is needed to confirm the causes.
A new report released through Buckingham University and the Center for Heterodox Social Science shows a rapid decline in young people identifying as transgender and queer since 2023.
The report was compiled and written by Eric Kaufmann, a politics professor at the University of Buckingham in England.
Kaufmann drew from surveys conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Andover Phillips Academy and Brown University.
Each institution found college students increasingly identifying as transgender and non-binary until from 2020 until 2022 and 2023.
At Andover Phillips in 2023, 9.2% of students surveyed identified as non-binary, and in 2025, the rate dropped to 3%. Similarly, in 2022 and 2023 at Brown University, 5% of students identified as non-binary, but the rate dropped to 2.6% in 2025.
In 2025, fewer college freshmen identify as LGBTQ+ than college seniors, “suggesting that the decline will continue,” the report says.
What caused the transgender identification free fall?
There doesn’t appear to be a correlation between transgender-identification rates dropping with lower social media use, religious revival or a political shift toward conservatism, Kaufmann wrote. Social media usage among young people has not dropped as of 2024.
And “despite high correlations between sexual/gender identity and political attitudes within individuals, the over-time trend in gender and sexuality seems relatively independent of political, cultural and religious beliefs,” Kaufmann said.
However, there is some evidence that improvements in mental health have reduced bisexual, transgender and queer (BTQ+) identification.
The percent of high school students feeling persistently sad or hopeless peaked in 2021, with LGBT students on the high end at 76%. Between 2021 and 2023, all students improved in reported mental health, but LGBT students improved the most dramatically.
However, those who identified as transgender who continued to report feeling depressed generally continued to identify as transgender.
“This means that part of the decline in trans identification was compositional, arising because there were fewer students with anxiety and depression in 2025 than in 2023,” Kaufmann wrote.
What role did the pandemic play in this?
Covid-19 “provided a natural experiment,” Kaufmann said. The World Health Organization found a direct correlation between rapidly increased depression and anxiety rates and the pandemic.
If, as the data suggests, mental illness changes sexual and gender identity, there should have been a peak in 2021 and 2022, following the pandemic, he said. But the spike in LGBTQ+ identification happened in 2022 and 2023, one year after peak mental illness rates among young people.
“While a one-year lag between mental health improvements and LGBT reduction is possible, we must explain why there was a delayed pandemic effect for sexual orientation and gender identity but not for mental health,” Kaufmann said.
More research needed to test other hypotheses
“Woke beliefs played a role in the emergence of BTQ+ identity and mental illness identification in the 2010s, but these have since become substantially uncoupled, obeying their own distinct rhythms,” Kaufmann wrote. Tracking this split could provide more insight into why transgender identification rose until 2023 and has since fallen, he said.
He added that further research is needed to test other hypotheses.
Similar surveys in the coming years will offer more insight into the relationship between BTQ+ identification, mental health, the political climate and more.
If rates continue to decline, “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,” Kaufmann concluded.