The number of young people in the US who identify as transgender or non-binary has greatly reduced, according to a well-regarded annual survey. Jean M Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who runs the Generation Tech substack, recently posted stats from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), surveyed each year by YouGov and administered by Tufts University.
“Among 18- to 22-year-olds, trans identification was cut nearly in half from 2022 to 2024, “Twenge reports. “Nonbinary identification dropped by more than half between 2023 and 2024.”
Twenge was following up on an earlier post by Professor Eric Kaufmann, who had made a bold claim: Identifying as transgender is “in free fall among the young.” That was based on surveys of a small number of campuses, and data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which surveyed 60,000 students. But that captured a fall in students not identifying as either male or female, rather than transgender. But Twenge found data on both questions, justifying the “freefall” allegation.
The Cooperative Election Study site is here https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/research-faculty/research-centers/cooperative-election-study
The CES is a 50,000+ person national stratified sample survey. Half of the questionnaire consists of Common Content asked of all 50,000+ people, and half of the questionnaire consists of Team Content designed by each individual participating team and asked of a subset of 1,000 people. In 2021, 2022, and 2024, the transgender identification question was asked of the 50,000+ cohort.
Twenge analyses data from earlier years, when a smaller subset of people were asked about identifying as transgender or non-binary. She found that of those born before 1979, “less than .5% identified as transgender or nonbinary, with the number at a flat zero in some earlier birth years. Those numbers begin to rise with Millennials (born 1980-1994) and continue upward with Gen Z (born after 1995) until they abruptly plummet with those born in the mid-2000s.”
Twenge adds a caveat, “We don’t have 2025 data from the CES yet, so we can’t tell if this trend will continue. CES is partially funded by the National Science Foundation, so it’s possible the survey will not ask about or report data on transgender or nonbinary identification this year due to the Trump administration’s mandate on not acknowledging gender identity. I hope they do, though, as that will be the only way to know that the 2024 data aren’t a blip.”
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