Analysis: The Transgender Tulip Bubble Has Popped

Eric Kaufman, writing at Skeptic:

A few weeks ago, I published results from six waves of the massive Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual survey of undergraduate students. The data were unequivocal: the share of students identifying as a gender other than male or female--that is, as non-binary--peaked in 2023 and has halved in the two years since. This is a stunning reversal in the culture that will reverberate through society and politics in the coming years.

The survey captures over 50,000 students per year from nearly 250 leading American universities. Its size guarantees statistical power and enables us to look at small subgroups like trans or queer people. FIRE data is a random sample, a small percentage of each university's student body, and I wanted to be sure it triangulated with two surveys capturing a much greater share of the total. One comes from the elite Andover Phillips prep school near Boston; the other is run by Brown University's student newspaper. Both interview a far higher share of their target pool than FIRE surveys (up to 50 percent for Brown freshmen, and 75 percent in the Andover case). As Figure 1 shows, these surveys corroborate the "peak trans" pattern in the FIRE data, revealing a rapid decline since 2023.

Note that chart actually shows students saying their neither male nor female -- i.e., "non-binary" -- and is not about transgenderism per se. But transgenders would claim to be of the other sex, so it's hard to find them in these surveys. The author argues (plausibly) that the "non-binary" delusion is closely correlated with the trans delusion, but some, like pro-life/anti-groomer activist Billboard Chris, think it's an error to conflate the two.

The article also responds to technical criticisms like claims that these figures aren't weighted by demographics. That's both above my pay grade and below my threshold of actual interest.

Make up your own minds. I'm not your daddy.

Or... am I...?

Son?

...

I expand more fully on these findings in my University of Buckingham Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, which also found that the decline in non-binary identification was matched by a 10-point drop in unconventional sexual identification. Namely, in students identifying their sexual orientation as something other than heterosexual or homosexual--such as pansexual, queer, questioning, bisexual, or asexual. Many students who identify as neither male nor female also identify as sexually non-conforming, so the correlation trend is unsurprising.

Sexual orientation has been measured in more youth surveys for longer than gender identity has been. While gay and lesbian share remained flat through 2020 to 2025, Figure 2 shows that the broader non-heterosexual group--covering bisexual, queer, pansexual, asexual, questioning, and other labels--rose steeply to 2023 and then fell across a wide range of surveys.

See the link for the chart. Preposterously, identification as non-heterosexual rose to 40% at some schools. It's so depressing I don't want to reproduce the chart here.

Here, in my digital home. My home!

The non-heterosexual proportion peaked at around 30 percent overall, reaching as high as 40 percent at progressive-leaning Ivy League schools like Brown and 50 percent in liberal arts colleges such as Smith College. Importantly, the decline in non-conforming sexual orientation parallels the decline in non-conforming gender identity, suggesting a common underlying dynamic.

Well, Smith is famously Finishing School for Lesbians.

Identification as non-heterosexual has also fallen, though not as dramatically as identification as "neither male nor female."

Classic pattern of social contagion or viral mental illness.

...

Why is the trans curve bending downward? Are young people becoming more conservative and religious? No. The same FIRE student surveys that show non-binary gender and queer sexuality dropping like a stone find no shift to the political right over time, and no rise in the share affiliating with a religion. Students are also no more supportive of free speech, and no more opposed to shouting down speakers, than they were in 2020. They are as woke as ever, just less trans and queer.

Oh well that's just great.

Peter Heck at NottheBee is a high school teacher and he says these stats match his direct-but-anecdotal observations.

While it's purely anecdotal, I can testify that from my own vantage point as a public high school teacher that the researchers are not imagining things. Not long ago, many schools across the country became pronoun battlegrounds, with students cycling through new "identities" every semester, and teachers instructed to oblige and rat out their colleagues who refused.

Today, pronoun announcements have all but disappeared. The once-growing cluster of self-identified non-binary students has shrunk dramatically. Whatever once felt like an unstoppable cultural wave now looks like what many warned it was all along: a disastrous social contagion.

But now must come The Great Reckoning:

While the trend may be reversing, the damage remains. Adults who have been entrusted with the well-being of our children, who should have been a bulwark of stability and truth, instead bent the knee to ideas that were, from the start, patently unscientific and philosophically incoherent. Administrators, professors, teachers, board members, and counselors all treated biological reality as hateful. Feelings were elevated above facts, and the ideological whims of a political crusade were permitted to rewrite human nature.

But, like the Japanese soldiers at the end of World War II -- and I still do not know which side I wanted to win that war; Demon Attack Survivor Tucker Carlson teaches me that both sides had heroes and villains, like Winston Churchill and also Jews -- they are still fighting to the last man for the last beach on the last island.

posted by Ace at 05:20 PM

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