"Surprising Shift": Transgender Bubble Pops at Colleges

In short, youngsters appear to be rejecting the multi-decade social engineering experiment by leftists.

Oct 15, 2025

This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Tyler Durden

Democrats and their radical leftist allies need an urgent wake-up call after betting the entire political strategy on transgender ideology, which most notably is the effort to queer America’s youth into “gender-fluid” left-wing activists operating in schoolyards and on city streets.

That strategy appears to be collapsing, if it hasn’t already, as a new study reveals a sharp decline in youngsters identifying as something they’re not.

In short, youngsters appear to be rejecting the multi-decade social engineering experiment by leftist public school bureaucrats, Hollywood, progressive doctors, left-wing NGOs, and other ideological operatives aligned with the globalist agenda.

New data from Dr. Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, revealed a surprising trend that may concern strategists of the Democratic Party.

In Kaufmann’s report titled “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans,” he discovered that since 2023, both trans and queer identification have fallen sharply among members of Generation Z.

Here are the key findings from the report that was condensed and repackaged for consumption on the British news and opinion website Unheard:

Sharp decline in trans and queer identities:
Among U.S. university students, the transgender share fell from ~7% in 2023 to under 4% in 2025. Non-heterosexual identification dropped by about 10 points in the same period.
Most affected categories:
Declines are concentrated in queer, pansexual, asexual, and bisexual identities; gay and lesbian shares remained stable.
Generational reversal:
Freshmen are now less likely to identify as bisexual, trans, or queer (BTQ+) than seniors, implying that the downward trend is continuing.
Elite institutions lead the decline:
Schools such as Andover Phillips Academy (9%→3%) and Brown University (5%→2.6%) show the steepest drops, suggesting the trend began in elite academic settings
Non-binary identification:
Fell roughly by half across FIRE, Brown, and Andover datasets between 2022–25.
Sexual orientation:
Bisexual: Peaked around 2022–23, now retreating.
Queer/Other: Rose sharply through 2023 then collapsed by 2025.
Gay/Lesbian: Stable near 3–5%.
Heterosexual: Rebounded to ~77–82% across major datasets by 2025

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Kaufmann on X published a wild chartpack (view here) that shows the data (cited from major youth surveys, including FIRE, HERI, Brown Daily Herald, Andover Phillips Academy, CCES, GSS, and CDC YRBSS) that shows the trans bubble has popped.

Non-conforming sexual identity (queer, questioning, etc) is also in sharp decline. Gay and lesbian are stable while heterosexuality has rebounded by around 10 points since 2023.

Not only this, but freshmen in 2024-25 were less trans and queer than seniors whereas it was the reverse when BTQ+ identity was surging in 2022-23. This suggests that gender/sexual non-conformity will continue to fall.

What explains the sudden reversal of trans and queer? It’s not because the kids became less woke, more religious or more conservative. Those beliefs remained stable throughout the 2020s.

Is it improved mental health? Yes, in part. Less anxious and, especially, depressed, students is linked with a smaller share identifying as trans, queer or bisexual.

But not entirely. Mental illness fell after the pandemic but the sexuality and gender shifts happened at least a year later. All groups, including LGBT, got less mentally ill after the pandemic.

The decline in anxiety and depression occurred within trans, bisexual and queer groups as much as among others. So it wasn’t the case that most of those who solved their emotional problems became heterosexual.

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.

So what’s the bigger picture here? Just like that, the trans bubble has burst, explained away by “improved mental health.”

But the real question now is: Where’s the accountability? For the politicians, doctors, educators, and left-wing activists who spent years pushing the sexualization and queering of America’s youth for a sinister globalist agenda, there must be accountability.