#eric kaufmann

By: Eric Kaufmann

Published: Nov 7, 2025

Afew 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 Findings

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.

[ Figure 1. Two large surveys corroborate the “peak trans” pattern in the FIRE data, revealing a rapid decline since 2023. ]

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. 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.

[ Figure 2. Sexual orientation has been measured in more youth surveys for longer than gender identity. While gay and lesbian share remained flat through 2020 to 2025, this figure shows that the broader non-heterosexual group rose steeply to 2023 and then fell across a wide range of surveys. ]

The Reaction

A thread on 𝕏 summarizing my findings went viral—retweeted by accounts such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr., Matt Walsh, and others, and has been viewed 19 million times. Beyond my piece and interview in UnHerd, it was covered by National Review, Laura Ingraham (Fox News), and other outlets.

Two main critiques followed. First, that “non-binary isn’t trans.” Second, that the analysis erred by not using weighted data. Let’s consider both.

Are “Non-Binary” and “Trans” Distinct?

Some trans-skeptical activists such as “Billboard Chris” Elston worried that declaring “trans decline” could undercut the political momentum behind the campaign against gender ideology. Their substantive argument is that non-binary people who do not identify as male or female differ from binary trans individuals who do identify as male or female, just the opposite sex from the one in which they were born. Benjamin Ryan, a health and science journalist, added that the findings were based on the “false presumption” that trans and non-binary were linked.

However, in practice, trans advocacy organizations explicitly include non-binary identities as part of trans. Second, even if one restricts “trans” to binary switchers, many who change their gender from female to male, or vice-versa, are likely to pass through a non-binary stage of gender indeterminacy. Conceptually, non-binary identity functions as a gateway to binary transition.

Trends in the two should, and do, correlate. On the Cooperative Election Study (CES), where people are asked whether they are trans separately from their gender, those who identify as trans are nearly 70 times more likely to identify as non-binary than a person who does not identify as trans, a monumental correlation. While it’s possible for non-binary to fall while binary trans holds steady, the CES data, summarized by Jean Twenge, shows that the two trends move together, with trans and non-binary both in decline.

The Weighting Dispute

Progressive commentators, led by Erin Reed, who based her rebuttal on the analysis of blogger Jacob Eliason, claimed the analysis was “dead on arrival” because it did not use survey weights. (Weights correct demographic imbalances in the survey sample to approximate population-level estimates.) Eliason applied weights and showed that doing so flipped my trend. Now, instead of trans decline, non-binary was stable at 2 percent from 2020 to 2023 then surged to 10 percent in 2024-25. Alongside some friendly statisticians commenting generally about the importance of weighting, and FIRE statisticians saying weights should be applied, they felt they had a “gotcha.”

But weighting can distort rather than clarify when applied to small subgroups like trans respondents. Weights artificially adjust samples to match population demographics by sex, race, and institution. That’s useful for FIRE when comparing institutions in particular years in college free speech rankings. Over time, however, changes in sampling frames and weighting formulas can introduce arbitrary noise, rendering weighted data considerably more error-prone than raw unweighted results.

Eliason’s weighted time series produced an erratic spike in 2024 because College Pulse, who conduct the FIRE surveys, suddenly revised their gender weights. I had run the data both ways and found that weighting produced erratic results while unweighted data aligned with the more representative Andover and Brown trends.

After I explained these issues in a rebuttal, Eliason conceded that the weighting was problematic. He then pivoted to claim that unweighted samples overrepresented certain graduating classes. Yet a fixed-effects regression controlling for college, cohort, financial aid, socioeconomic background, race, religion, and ideology can account for this, and yields the same profile as the chart I initially circulated.

Meanwhile, FIRE, having examined the assumptions underlying their data over time, revised their view, cautioning that weighting was not actually the recommended approach in this case.

Jean Twenge Weighs In

Following the heated debate sparked by my 𝕏 thread, Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and arguably the leading quantitative youth trends researcher in the country, made an important discovery. Using data from the CES that I had overlooked, she was able to examine the question of transgender identity separately from gender identity. Her conclusion:

Among 18- to 22-year-olds, trans identification fell by nearly half from 2022 to 2024. Nonbinary identification dropped by more than half between 2023 and 2024.

These findings echoed the Census Bureau’s official Household Pulse survey, which revealed a large decline in youth non-binary identification in the first half of 2024. More than that, Twenge found, as I did, that the youngest cohorts were least likely to identify as trans, portending future decline in transgenderism. Her intervention turned the tide with skeptics such as Benjamin Ryan, and informed the work of Colin Wright, who followed up with an Opinion Editorial in the Wall Street Journal declaring trans a social contagion.

A few weeks later, Twenge analyzed data from the Monitoring the Future survey, which surveys teens as young as age 13. The share of 8th, 10th and 12th graders identifying as neither male nor female dropped in half between 2022 and 2024, with the change sharpest among the 8th graders. Twenge writes that the trends confirm a broader pattern in which new patterns arise first among the youngest, spreading later and less forcefully to older teens.

Altogether, Twenge’s analysis and my data, spanning 6 major youth surveys, present a robust and compelling case against attempts to downplay the reality of the decline.

Interpreting the Trend

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.

Not only that, but the rise and fall pattern for gender non-conformity took place on both red and blue state campuses, among both liberal and conservative students, albeit from different baselines. At ultra-liberal Oberlin College, for example, the share of students identifying as non-binary plunged 20 points between 2023 and 2025. On Ivy League campuses, the collapse was more pronounced than it was among students at less prestigious institutions.

Could a decline in mental health issues explain the decline of trans identification? There is evidence that student mental health improved substantially between 2023 (when five mental health questions were first introduced in the FIRE data) and 2025. The share who said they were anxious most or all of the time declined from 38 to 28 percent while the proportion who said they were depressed fell from 17 to 10 percent. The CDC finds an improvement in mental health among high school students between 2021 and 2023, the latest data point. Statistical analysis shows that better mental health helps to explain only part of the decline in non-binary gender identification.

Most of the change in gender identification is not accounted for by better mental health, with mental health issues also declining among non-binary students. Instead, it seems to largely be an independent youth fashion that operates on a plane that is separate from politics and mental health.

Faced with mounting evidence that trans is in decline, some progressive and transactivist writers have shifted to arguing that Republican attacks on their movement have pushed trans people back into the closet. However, the FIRE data shows that non-binary students self-censor their opinions less than other students, and feel as free as anyone else to voice their views on transgender issues, with no change after Donald Trump took office for the second time. Accounting for the political views of non-binary students and their peers, there is no evidence that the speech climate for non-binary students worsened on red state campuses more than blue state campuses after 2024. This is not about trans people going back into the closet.

Implications

The trans downturn might not have been caused by politics, but it has major political implications. First, the data suggest that trans was a social contagion that rose and fell. That means health practitioners who went along with transitioning permitted ideology to trump their responsibility to safeguard their patients from a fad, and to do no harm.

Secondly, since the 2010s, the rise of trans and queer identity has been umbilically connected to a progressive story of the inevitable progress of marginalized groups remaking the mainstream. Cultural reversals profane the progressive left’s eschatological “arc of history overcoming resistance” narrative. A movement based on millenarian inevitability cannot accept a loss in the court of public opinion without undermining the sacred narrative. Youth gender identity, alongside public opinion toward natal males accessing female spaces, have both moved against the progressive narrative in recent years. This has opened up a cleft between an insurgent anti-woke center-left and the establishment woke left that continues to roil the Democratic Party.

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Turns out it was a fad and social contagion all along.

Erin Reed at Erin In The Morning:

On Tuesday, far-right academic Eric Kaufmann published a new “analysis” through his so-called Centre for Heterodox Social Science and the outlet UnHerd, claiming that transgender identification in America is dramatically declining—a finding tailor-made for those who insist that being transgender is just a passing “fad.” Within hours, conservative leaders like Elon Musk and Matt Walsh were celebrating the supposed downturn as proof their anti-trans rhetoric was working. But as the data has now been reviewed by independent researchers, it turns out Kaufmann’s conclusion is based on a massive statistical error. When corrected, the numbers show the opposite of what he claimed: transgender and nonbinary identification in America has risen over the last two years as more people come out than ever before. On Tuesday, Kaufmann posted a Twitter thread declaring that “trans identification is in free fall among the young.” The graph he used to prove it, however, was fundamentally flawed—it showed students who identified as “neither male nor female,” a category that excludes most transgender men and women. In other words, Kaufmann’s supposed evidence of a collapse in “trans identification” was actually a selective chart of nonbinary students, not transgender people as a whole. The distinction didn’t matter to the far-right echo chamber. Matt Walsh seized on the claim, boasting, “Transgenderism is effectively over. We destroyed it,” while Elon Musk reposted the graph to his hundreds of millions of followers, personally thanking Walsh for “playing a major role” in the so-called victory.

The error didn’t stop there. Researchers quickly discovered that Kaufmann’s graph—based on data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a right-leaning organization [Fire disputes this characterization| that studies campus speech—contained a fundamental methodological mistake. Data scientist Jacob Eliason was the first to spot it: Kaufmann had run his analysis using the raw survey responses rather than applying the weighting provided by FIRE to make the results nationally representative. Without weighting, the data dramatically misrepresented the population—and created the illusion of a drop where none existed. When Eliason re-ran the numbers correctly, the trend line flipped entirely, showing that the share of students identifying as neither male nor female had increased, not decreased. Kaufmann’s analysis, in other words, didn’t reveal a cultural shift—it revealed statistical malpractice.

[...] Most reputable data analysis shows the opposite of Kaufmann’s claim: queer and trans identification continues to rise. The Gallup Poll—an industry standard in public opinion research which also uses survey weights—found that 1.3 percent of Americans now identify as transgender, up from 0.9 percent in 2023 and well above the roughly 0.5 percent reported in prior years. Generation Z accounts for much of this increase, with LGBTQ+ identification broadly climbing across all categories. Far from fading, the data suggests that as stigma decreases and visibility grows, more people feel safe enough to be honest about who they are.

Readers should be skeptical of any “research” that skips the scrutiny of independent peer review—especially when it comes from ideologically driven academics using partisan platforms to launder bad data into public discourse. Kaufmann, who has previously argued for so-called “white self-interest” and publishes through the vaguely named “Centre for Heterodox Social Science,” is not offering neutral scholarship—he’s doing politics dressed up as science. Data is powerful, but only as reliable as the person interpreting it. When fundamental errors go unchecked, misinformation spreads at lightning speed, shaping policy and public perception long before the truth can even lace up its shoes.

A purported new “survey” from far-right anti-trans extremist Eric Kaufmann, who runs the Centre for Heterodox Social Science and a contributor to UnHerd, put out a lie claiming that trans identity in the US is declining.

In reality, the opposite is true, as trans identity (and LGBTQ+ identity as a whole) rates are rising in the USA.

See Also:

By: Eric Kaufmann

Published: Oct 17, 2025

Has the dramatic rise of transgender identification among young people gone into reverse?

That was my claim, published on Tuesday in a thread on X, at Unherd and in my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report. The first chart is key: it shows the percentage of students in three surveys identifying as a gender other than male or female. The non-binary share rose across three independent surveys of educated young people between 2020 and 2023, then declined between 2022-23 and 2025. The fall in non-binary identification is quite dramatic, a halving in just two years. This is the first indication that the transgender trend among young people has reversed.

The data is drawn from three sources. First, the massive annual Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) survey of American undergraduates. The latest wave covered over 68,000 students at more than 250 institutions (skewed toward major research universities and liberal arts colleges). The FIRE survey can only sample a small fraction of the student body, so I compare this data with two sources from individual institutions where a larger share of the target pool is surveyed. These include Andover Phillips Academy (a private elite prep school) which conducts an annual student survey that is generally answered by more than 3 in 4 students, and the Brown Daily Herald spring and fall polls of Brown University students, which reach as much as 50 percent of the target population. The fact all three tell a broadly similar story is remarkable.

The other major finding in the report concerns sexual orientation. While the more traditional gay and lesbian category had a stable share across 2020-25, the proportion that is of non-conforming sexual orientation - queer, questioning, bisexual, pansexual, asexual or other - has risen and fallen along the same trajectory. This shows up in the non-heterosexual share, as captured in the graph below. There is a rise in most datasets to a peak in 2023, followed by decline. (Bear in mind that data is missing in many series beyond 2023-24). Notice that while the non-binary line above peaks at 9 percent of the total student body, the non-heterosexual share peaks much higher, between 30% and, in the case of Brown students, over 40%, of the total student population. Nearly half of Brown’s undergraduates were LGBTQ+ in 2023, and in some liberal arts colleges such as Smith College, that figure topped 50 percent in the FIRE data.

Just so you know exactly what these lines are measuring, here are the questions that ran on the FIRE surveys in these years (Andover Phillips and Brown used very similar formats):

Gender

Which of the following genders do you most identify with?

1) Man 2) Woman 3) Nonbinary 4) Agender 5) Genderqueer or genderfluid 6) Unsure 7) Prefer not to say

Sexual Orientation

What is your sexual orientation?

1) Gay/lesbian 2) Straight (heterosexual) 3) Bisexual 4) Pansexual 5) Queer 6) Fluid 7) Same-gender-loving 8) ASexual or aromantic 9) Unsure 10) Questioning 11) Other

The trans proxy encompassed categories 3 through 7 in question 1. The BQ+ proxy for the sexual orientation question amalgamated answers 3 through 11.

The Reaction

The first thing to say is that the tweet thread went viral, retweeted by a number of major conservative accounts, among others, Elon Musk (via Wilfred Reilly), Donald Trump Jr and Matt Walsh. It was also covered widely in the press. The post had 30,000 likes and was seen 6.1 million times. I have been on a number of TV and radio spots since, including Unherd and Fox (Laura Ingraham), with more in the offing.

The Critics

Two main lines of critique soon emerged. The first more conceptual, concerning the operationalization of transgender, the second more technical, revolving around whether my analysis should have used data weights.

1. Non-binary is not Transgender

The first critique is that the survey I responses I used picked up non-binary identity which is not the same as trans. The argument here is that a trans individual identifies with a binary gender (male or female) identity that is different from the one they were born into.

My fellow Vancouverite Billboard Chris Elston (whose work I generally admire), along with some others who are campaigning against gender ideology, are worried that if people feel trans is decreasing they will relax the political campaign to reign in gender ideology in schools, institutions and the law. Chris cited a post from Benjamin Ryan, a centrist writer on this platform, and a Swedish researcher on X.

My first response is that the meaning of the term transgender is not fixed to only refer to binary transgender individuals who identify as male or female. Movement organizations and activists include non-binary under their definition of trans.

Second, even if we are focused only on binary trans individuals, the question is how they would answer the gender question above. Even if most tick male or female (which is a big assumption that I am skeptical of!), so long as the share who tick a non-binary option is non-trivial, the non-binary category will be an indicator - even if somewhat muted - of trans identification. My study was not about providing an exact point estimate of the binary trans population, only the direction and magnitude of the trend over time.

Third, even if every binary trans individual ticked a male or female identity, the non-binary category is arguably the gateway between conventional gender identification and transgender identification. That is, a girl who comes to believe she was born in the wrong body would go through a period of non-binary uncertainty before definitively moving to the other gender. Thus if non-binary is increasing, the pool from which binary trans individuals springs will increase, and the number who will fully transition will increase.

That is, non-binary and binary transgender trends should be correlated over time. Which means that trends in non-binary will reflect trends in binary trans identification.

I said as much in my response tweet on Thursday:

And Benjamin Ryan was good enough to admit that there is no data that can disprove my challenge (I accept that I don’t have the data either, but I think there are strong conceptual reasons to expect a correlation).

Jean Twenge, whose work I greatly respect, then produced an article which argued that while non-binary is not exactly the same as trans, and my data focuses more on elite youth than the wider young population, there is an indication from the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse survey data that transgender identification rose after 2021 and declined between early and late 2024.

Sadly, as Twenge notes, the Trump administration’s policies have meant that government sources can no longer ask questions such as these, so we won’t get 2025 data. This is one reason why I think people should try to keep facts and values separate: asking about trans is not the same thing as endorsing trans. I have a similar skepticism about the power of census racial categories to shape identity.

Of course it is theoretically possible that you could get a fall in non-binary share but no decline in binary trans identification, or even hardcore (chemical, surgical) transitions. But I think that is unlikely. These phenomena have risen together and it would be surprising if they did not fall together.

2. I Did Not Weight my Data

The second line of attack came more squarely from left-wing accounts. Erin Reed, who runs a popular blog on the left, triumphantly declared a ‘gotcha’ that debunked the entire story from ‘far-right professor Eric Kaufmann.’ This was a more technical claim, which argued that because I did not use survey weights (which are used to make survey responses match the population if some groups such as men or Hispanics are undersampled), the results were invalid. I had not used the weights included in the FIRE data, and therefore my results were ‘dead on arrival’. She managed to find a number of methodologists that endorsed that view. The subtext: I was a methods neophyte who committed a schoolboy error.

The source for Erin’s piece - which was picked up by other sympathetic sources - was blogger Jacob Eliason, whose piece argued that I had made a ‘significant analytical error’ by not using survey weights.

Eliason produced a chart showing that applying weights not only removed any increase in non-binary identification, but actually showed the opposite: a big jump in non-binary in 2024-25. Gender non-confirmity was not in decline, it was surging!

But take a look at Eliason’s graph, comparing dotted (my unweighted data) and solid lines (the weighted data) within each colour band. Warning lights should have been going off. Why? The first thing to notice is that the weighted solid lines for each colour pairing show more volatility over time than the unweighted dotted lines. For instance, even when looking at female share in red, this moves up and down a lot while the unweighted data is more stable.

Now focus on the green lines for non-binary. If Eliason’s account is correct, non-binary share was a stable 2% between 2020 and 2023, then jumped to 9-10% during 2024-25.

What that would mean is that instead of my chart, which shows an alignment between the FIRE data and the Andover and Brown data (where sampling is much less of an issue due to a larger coverage of the target population)…

..the reality is that the FIRE data (watch the orange line) exhibits a diametrically opposing trend from the others, not to mention from the non-conforming sexual orientation trends:

Why is Eliason’s chart wrong? The truth is that I had experimented with FIRE data weights, but past experience had taught me that when looking at small groups, applying weights can distort survey results much more than they can help them approximate the population.

What happens with weighting is that the raw data are ‘corrected’ to match a population (by sex, race, school, and so forth). This makes sense when you are comparing universities for rankings such as FIRE’s free speech rankings. You need to be sure that you haven’t sampled a disproportionately female group of students at Harvard and male students at Yale, knowing that men are more pro-free speech than women, or the rankings won’t be fair. Official population and college data sources provide the demographics to adjust the raw survey data. That’s the right approach, especially to construct rankings in a given year.

But there is a problem with using weights to look at aggregate trends over time. This arises in two ways. First, if there is a change in weighting methodology between years that affects certain questions. This affects small groups like trans where a few individuals may be inflated or deflated several times over in the survey. Second, because the aggregate ‘population’ shifts as some colleges are included in certain years and others in other years, and so the weighting formula to derive nationally-representative samples varies over time.

This volatility means that going with the raw data may be a better strategy than applying weights which introduce more error than they correct for. In this case, I think the evidence is quite clear that weighting is a mistake.

Lo, all of a sudden, after my response to the weighting criticism, there was an ‘update’ from Eliason recognizing (to his credit) that applying weights might not be such a great idea.

It turns out that the gender benchmarks used by College Pulse to weight its FIRE survey were changed in 2023-24, producing the spike in non-binary we saw in the weighted data.

Eliason then pivots to the argument that using unweighted data is a problem, illustrating his claim by showing an unequal distribution of freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors across the years.

But when weights cannot be relied upon, there are other strategies one can use. Running a fixed-effects statistical model that controls for each college, as well as demographics such as graduating class, financial aid status, socioeconomic background, race, religion and ideology screens out the distorting possibilities that Eliason asserts. The result of such an exercise, graphed below, confirms the ‘rise and fall’ pattern in my report.

Year of study remains statistically significant in predicting whether a student identifies as neither male nor female even when controlling for many of the things weights correct for, i.e. demographics and the mix of colleges.

To end on a positive note, the debate on X shows that twitter is not a sewer of misinformation and partisan claims, but an ecosystem where claims can be challenged and defended and serious people can assess truth or falsehood.

Trans is either in decline or it isn’t. I believe the data shows that it is, and that this represents a significant change in youth culture. It also has implications for the confidence of cultural progressivism, as rising gender and sexual diversity is a key component of its historicist narrative that humanity is progressively overcoming oppressive traditions.

However, at the end of the day, future data will be the judge of whether this is a blip, the beginning of the end of trans, or a decline that will settle out at a higher steady state than before the trans awakening of the 2010s.

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The definitions the activists themselves gave made "trans" an "umbrella" under which everyone who is not "cis" is categorized.

From HRC:

Planned Parenthood:

Egale:

"Non binary" is "trans light." Anyone can claim it for intersectional alphabet-mafia cred and entitlment, while changing absolutely nothing about yourself.

The problem for the gender loons is obvious: the percentage has to go up or plateau, otherwise everyone will figure out it's all just a fashion trend, social contagion or culture-bound syndrome.

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By: Eric Kaufmann

Published: Oct 14, 2025

A surprising shift is taking place in the gender and sexual identities of young Americans. Data from my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans”, shows that since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply among younger Americans.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in that year, just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.

This trend is especially marked in elite institutions. Andover Phillips Academy in suburban Boston surveys over three-quarters of its students annually. In 2023, 9.2% identified as neither male nor female. This year, that number has crashed to just 3%. A similar story emerges at Brown University: 5% of students identified as non-binary in 2022 and 2023, but by 2025 that share had dropped to 2.6%.

More surveys ask about sexual orientation than gender identity. And while there is a broader spread of data points, the basic pattern looks similar: rising non-conformity from 2010 until 2023, with a near 10-point return to the norm in the ensuing two years in most datasets.

Interestingly, when the trans and queer trends were at their peak, freshmen were more likely to be non-conforming in their gender and sexuality than seniors. Now that BTQ (bisexual, trans, queer or questioning) identification is in decline, the reverse is true: younger students are less BTQ than older students in their colleges. This is a sign that fashions are changing.

It’s tempting to speculate about the reasons behind the rise and fall of trans and queer identities. Mental illness among American teens, for example, has fallen since 2021-22 — a pattern confirmed in the FIRE data from 2023-25. My analysis indicates that changes in mental health over time, especially depression, made a significant difference to the trajectory of trans and queer identities over this period.

But the drop in mental health issues encompassed all social groups, including trans and queer youth. The post-pandemic decline in mental illness did not immediately trigger a drop in sexual and gender nonconformity; that shift came a year or two later, suggesting other forces are also at work. And while social media use may be in retreat in the world as a whole, Pew finds no change in the online behaviour of young Americans through to 2024. This does not seem to be what’s driving the retreat from alternative gender and sexual identity either.

The so-called anti-woke “vibe shift” since 2022 is an obvious candidate. Yet FIRE and other data show little change in students’ political ideology or party identification over the past five years. “Woke” attitudes — such as support for shouting down speakers or punishing those perceived as hostile to transgenderism or Black Lives Matter — have not receded much since 2020.

It’s a similar story for religion. Despite hints of a youth religious revival, FIRE survey data shows no major drop in the share of non-religious students, who still make up nearly half of the sample in recent years. Woke progressives and secular students are much more likely to identify as trans, bisexual, or queer than conservative or religious people. This ties in with upbringing and longstanding tensions between religious conservatism and LGBTQ identity.

But as the ecological fallacy reminds us, correlations across individuals do not necessarily reflect relationships over time. Just as wealthier individuals tend to be more Democratic, trans and queer individuals appear to be more “woke” than straight people. However, years with higher shares of trans and queer students — such as 2022 and 2023 — are not necessarily more woke overall than years like 2020 or 2025, when those shares were smaller.

Trans and queer identification have declined among young Americans even as levels of wokeness and irreligion have not. For young people, gender and sexual identity are now independent fashions that rise and fall separately from other cultural and political currents.

Whether trans and queer identities will drop to 2010 levels is an open question. But the fact both have declined sharply in just two years is a startling and unanticipated post-progressive development that the education and media establishments will be reluctant to acknowledge.

[ Via: https://archive.today/o8Ysl ]

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It has the same trajectory as every social contagion.

By: Eric Kaufmann

Published: Jul 17, 2025

Will the Trump administration’s war against antisemitism on Ivy League campuses push Jewish students into the Republican camp, or will the young right’s growing skepticism of Israel leave Jewish students politically isolated?

In my new report, “Jewish Inhibition, Conservative Freedom: New Trends in Expressive Freedom on Elite American Campuses,” I discovered something startling in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s large-scale student surveys. The proportion of Jewish students at Ivy League institutions who said they self-censored their opinions several times a week jumped from 10%-13% during 2021-23 to 35% in 2024. At the same time, conservative Ivy League students experienced a big drop in self-censoring, from 55%-58% during 2021-23 to 31% in 2024. The pattern could be seen across the full range of colleges, but was most pronounced in prestigious universities whose students lean left.

A closer look at the 2024 data shows that the pro-Palestinian tent encampments had a big impact: Before they went up on April 17, 28% of Ivy League Jewish students self-censored. Afterward, 40% did. Across all institutions in the FIRE data, statistical analysis shows that the encampments increased Jewish self-censorship while reducing it for conservatives. Conservative speech has for years been the least free of any major demographic, but Jews have now converged with them. In the Ivy League, Jews now self-censor more than conservatives do.

Why would Jewish elite students feel more inhibited at precisely the time conservative students feel freer? The main reason seems to be that student-led cancel culture pivoted from focusing on race and gender to foregrounding Israel-Palestine. As recently as 2022, FIRE data shows that nearly two-thirds of student-on-student targeting revolved around perceived race or gender transgressions. By 2024, 65% focused on Israel-Palestine, with just 25% concerning race or gender.

This took heat off conservative students and placed it on Jews. I argue that this is because race and gender are central to the identity politics ideology of the campus left while Israel-Palestine is somewhat secondary: Though it can be shoehorned into a racial frame, it primarily concerns the actions of a faraway state. Conservatives are viewed negatively primarily because of the left’s sense that they are moral transgressors on race or gender, not because of their views on Israel. This was especially true under the Biden administration when the FIRE surveys I examined were fielded, with leftist animus over Middle East politics directed principally at the Democratic establishment.

One result of the left’s pivot to Israel-Palestine has been to alienate many Jewish students from the far left, and, to a lesser degree, from the left in general. Prior to 2024, FIRE data shows that Jews leaned left of the average American student, including on elite campuses. But, according to the 2024 data, most Jewish students, even liberals, support Israel while non-Jewish students, apart from conservatives, do not. For instance, American students in 2024 were somewhat more likely to say that Israel rather than Hamas caused the “2023 outbreak of violence in the Middle East.” Among liberal Jewish students, 53% said Hamas started the violence and 20% that Israel did, placing them far closer to conservative Jews, 83% of whom said Hamas started it, than liberal non-Jews, just 14% of whom blamed Hamas.

When the encampments went up on elite campuses, Jewish students abandoned the far left in droves. The share of Jewish Ivy League students who identify as “very liberal” on a 7-point ideology scale declined from 40% before the encampments to 13% after they appeared. The proportion of “strong Democrats” tanked from 37% to 14% while the Republican share rose from 12% to 18%. Ivy League Jews went from being well to the left of the median Ivy League student to leaning right of the average.

But non-Jewish conservative students have not rallied to Israel, and clearly do not feel chilled by the left’s protests against Israel. While conservative students are twice as likely to blame Hamas as Israel for starting hostilities in October 2023, most see both as culpable or have no opinion. Just 38% blame Hamas. This means that liberal Jewish students are considerably more pro-Israel (53% blame Hamas) than conservative non-Jews.

Young conservatives prioritize “America First” and free speech over supporting Israel and combating antisemitism. Recent polling finds that conservatives under 50 have shifted from nearly two-thirds support for Israel to a balanced position. A University of Maryland poll finds that more Republicans under 35 attribute campus protests to Israel’s actions in Gaza than to antisemitism.

So conservative students on elite campuses have a weak sense of linked fate with Jewish students who are feeling hard-pressed by their liberal non-Jewish classmates. The result is an increasingly isolated and politically alienated group of elite Jewish students, who are likely to have an outsize influence on the future of Jewish American political loyalty.

Jewish students are at a crossroads.

Much depends on how the Trump administration’s targeting of elite universities unfolds. If it solidifies the connection between Israel and conservatism on campus, Jewish students could move into the Republican column in larger numbers. If conservative students follow suit by embracing the cause of Israel, this could smooth the path for Jews to move right. Liberal students could then react by policing the right-wing minority more aggressively, reversing conservatives’ recent gains in freedom of expression.

But another scenario is possible, in which the Tucker Carlson isolationist wing of the MAGA movement detaches young Republicans from Israel. Trump could make a deal with Harvard, Columbia, and other universities, weakening the focus on antisemitism. If so, Jewish students—and perhaps American Jews more broadly—could find themselves caught between the antipathy of the left and the apathy of the right in a no-man’s-land of political alienation.

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By: Eric Kaufmann

Published: May 2, 2023

Is the era of woke censorship coming to an end on campus? The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, among others, are heralding a new epoch in which university leaders stand up to snowflake students. While it’s encouraging that progressive legacy media outlets are nailing their free speech colours to the mast, these are counter-wavelets on the surface of a rising swell. Progressive illiberalism is not going anywhere because it is baked into the demography of tomorrow’s professors.

The Post cites a number of examples of institutional pushback, including Cornell’s refusal to implement a mandatory trigger warnings policy on academic freedom grounds. The paper and others note the encouraging defence of liberalism at Penn and Vanderbilt, along with Harvard’s new Steven Pinker-fronted Council on Academic Freedom, a group of over 50 faculty members who have robustly lined up against the culture of progressive conformity on campus. 

The sceptic in me says it’s one thing to strike down a trigger warning for an innocuous book which doesn’t touch sacred progressive beliefs. Penn’s current trial of controversial law professor Amy Wax for legal speech will be a far more important barometer of the new administrative liberalism. 

Still, the gradual emergence of a liberal centre willing to speak its name is cause for optimism. This came to broader attention with the Harper’s Letter in July 2020, continued with an Economist editorial in April 2021, and was followed by the first New York Times editorial in March 2022. Since then, the NYT has run a series of articles challenging campus conformity and has even been willing to court protests by running pieces sceptical of gender reassignment surgery. WaPo is late to the game, but confirms the trend. 

[ Fig. 1. Source: College Fix Campus Cancel Culture Database; FIRE Scholars Under Fire database; David Acevedo, ‘Tracking Cancel Culture in Higher Education’, National Association of Scholars (NAS) ]

Why the turnaround? Incentives explain a lot here. First, some of the energy in cancel culture has ebbed post-George Floyd, with the number of cancellation attempts dropping back to the (still high) levels of the mid-2010s (Figure 1). Second, the attacks on universities from the Right, encapsulated in Ron DeSantis’s campaigns against critical race theory and gender theory, permit liberals to use a “both sides” defence of liberalism. Conservative media attention also focuses centrist liberals on the need for internal reform rather than the prospect of further embarrassment. The Right has been a vital ingredient in the new liberalism.

But in the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces. The new cultural liberalism in the media reflects the views of senior staff members, and is opposed by affinity groups and young employees. That’s important, because surveys consistently find that “woke” values are twice as prevalent among younger Leftists than among older Leftists. Over 8 in 10 undergraduates at 150 leading US colleges say speakers who say BLM is a hate group or transgenderism is a mental disorder should not be permitted to speak on campus. What’s more, 7 in 10 think a professor who says something that students find offensive should be reported to their university. Young academics are twice as censorious as those over 50. These are the editorial teams and professoriate of tomorrow.

[ Source: Eric Kaufmann, ‘The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America’, Manhattan Institute 2022 ]

The steady erosion of free speech values is generational. Today’s young people are far more censorious than the young people of 1980 or even 2000, and they won’t grow out of it. While Zoomers are scared of being cancelled, figure 2 shows that they accept this risk as part of their political ideology.

The excesses of Trump and the online influencer right have revived talk of the Woke Right. I get the emotion, but as a scholar who, like the political scientist Giovanni Sartori, is a stickler for the rigorous use of concepts, I must rebel. Sartori famously warned, in a 1970 paper, against the sin of ‘conceptual stretching’.

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Woke refers to a very specific phenomenon: the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual groups. This informs a moralistic worldview that judges people's core character. A reverse wokeism would require making whites, men and straight people sacred.

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