In 2021, nearly one in three ninth-grade girls in America told federal researchers that they were lesbian or bisexual.
By 2025, fewer than one in five did.
Psychologist Jean Twenge analyzed the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey. She reports that lesbian and bisexual identification among ninth-grade girls fell from 30 percent to 17 percent in four years. Among all high-school girls, it dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent between 2023 and 2025 alone.
Human nature does not change in four years; trends do.
A Retreat Across the Board
The high-school numbers are not an outlier. Twenge also took a look at the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the federal government’s largest ongoing health survey. She found that homosexual, lesbian or bisexual identification among adults aged 18 to 24 peaked at 20 percent in 2022 and fell to just over 15 percent by 2025, a 21 percent decline in three years.
On campus, the reversal is even sharper. In the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) survey of tens of thousands of undergraduates, the share identifying as heterosexual climbed from 68 percent in 2023 to 77 percent in 2025. Students identifying as neither male nor female fell from 6.8 percent to 3.6 percent over the same period.
At insanely liberal Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, nearly half of the undergraduates identified as LGBTQ+ in 2023. Half? No serious person believes biology produced that number, and that number has dropped to 25 percent in three short years.
The Honest Concession
The collapse is not mainly among those who call themselves homosexual or lesbian. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whose analysis set off this debate, found that what changed was all the other classifications such as “queer, questioning, bisexual, pansexual, asexual or other.” Twenge likewise identifies that the biggest change was bisexual identification, “especially among young women.”
What the Swing Reveals
For a generation, Americans were told that sexual identity is innate, fixed and discovered, never chosen. “Born this way” was not merely a slogan, it was the foundation of an entire legal and cultural program.
Yet the fastest-growing labels of the past decade, bisexual, queer, gender diverse, non-binary and pansexual, have shown clearly that they were not innate. The trend toward bisexuality, for example, surged among teenage girls, peaked in 2022 and 2023, and receded within a single high-school career. Twenge herself suggests that the pattern is “cyclical” and says it “suggests a cultural shift—one that might grow or fade.”
To state the obvious, biological innateness does not change; for example, eye color does not fade, and left-handedness does not peak.
An identity that is influenced by social media is not a birthright. It responds to an environment shaped by social influences. Schools celebrated it, platforms rewarded it and institutions treated it as a credential rather than a shameful moral failing.
Remove the applause and many young people quietly stop proclaiming the moral perversion of same-sex attraction.
The Applause Has All but Stopped
Many young people are perceiving that the culture is changing. For a teenager, the signal is the point; the rainbow logo was the message, and the message is no longer center stage.
Fortune 500 participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index collapsed from 377 companies in 2025 to 131 in 2026. Use of the term “DEI” fell 98 percent across Fortune 100 communications between 2023 and mid-2025, according to Gravity Research.
Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, Harley-Davidson, Meta, Google, Salesforce, Ford, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Walt Disney, Toyota, PepsiCo, Brown-Forman, John Deere and Target all publicly stepped back in their support of DEI.
Is This a Turn Rightward?
This shift in attitude is also reflected in the culture. At a 9-point drop, the lowest level since 2016 and down from 71 percent in 2022, Gallup finds that 62 percent of Americans feel homosexual or lesbian relations morally acceptable. Among Republicans, acceptance fell 21 points to 35 percent, independents dropped 8 points while Democrats barely moved.
While this is not a national conversion yet, it is a breath of fresh air on the right, exhaustion in the middle and obstinate rebellion on the left. Gallup notes that the broader trend toward permissive attitudes “has largely plateaued or pulled back.”
Indeed, a generation that has seen identities come and go like fashion statements may now be ready to ask if anything is immutable. If they look, it is clear to see that human beings are created male and female. They can see that human nature is immutable, not invented nor redefinable.
The ninth-grade girls of 2021 were told they were discovering who they truly were. Fortunately, four years later, many discovered something else.
They had been foolishly following a trend set by the false elites in Hollywood, and dutifully echoed by leftist clergy, media, big business and academia.
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First Published on TFP.org