After two studies in 10 days have identified a dramatic decline in young adults who identify as transgender, analysts naturally turn their attention to finding a cause. While environmental factors like better mental health play a role, so do societal factors, including widespread backlash against the overreach of transgender ideologues and effective leaders showing young people a better way to live.

On October 10, British researcher Erik Kaufmann published data from five different sources of varying quality, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual undergraduate campus survey, with an annual sample of 55,000-69,000 students. Most of his sources showed that, from 2023 to 2025, the percentage of transgender-identifying (or nonbinary-identifying) young people on college campuses and an elite preparatory school declined by half or more, as The Washington Stand reported last week.

On October 20, San Diego State University professor Jean Twenge published her own research, based on entirely different data, leading her to conclude that “identifying as transgender really is in free fall among the young in the U.S.” According to the nationally representative Cooperative Election Study (CES), conducted by YouGov and Tufts University, Twenge found that the percentage of U.S. 18- to 22-year-olds identifying as transgender declined from just over 6% in 2022 to just over 3% in 2024 (with no assessment in 2023), while the percentage identifying as nonbinary declined from 5% in 2023 to 2% in 2024.

“Year of birth plays a key role here. Americans born in the early 2000s were more likely to identify as transgender than those born before or after them,” wrote Twenge. “Among Silents, Boomers, and Gen Xers (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.”

“We don’t have 2025 data from the CES yet, so we can’t tell if this trend will continue,” Twenge cautioned. “For now, however, it looks like the peak of trans identification is in the past.” The issue could benefit from deeper analysis by more scholars, but these researchers have provided a start.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins identified national leadership as a key factor in this apparent, age-limited social trend of trans-identification. “Leadership is important, and it shapes the way young people think,” he insisted. “When you have a president in the White House, as we did with Joe Biden, who was championing this transgender craze — and paying for it, by the way — it’s not surprising you got more of it.”

Americans born in the early- to mid-2000s (2002-2007) reached the age of majority during the COVID era (2020-2021) and Joe Biden’s subsequent presidency (2021-2025).

President Biden heavily promoted the transgender political agenda, but this provoked a backlash on issues such as men in women’s sports and gender transition procedures for minors. “When we saw schools blatantly saying, ‘We’re going to let boys compete against girls,’ I think that was just the end of it,” reflected Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) on “Washington Watch.” “It just took a few of us to stand up, and then the rest of America stood up and said, ‘Enough of this.’”

The year 2023 (when Americans born in 2005 turned 18) proved to be a watershed, with nearly half of the states passing legislation protecting minors from gender transition procedures, and many also taking other actions to counteract what legislatures saw as overreach by the Biden administration and the transgender lobby.

In December 2024, Marshall introduced legislation at the national level, which would prevent “demented doctors and activists getting rich off of mutilating, sterilizing, and castrating children,” he said in a press release. Perkins praised him for leading on the issue, noting that he had “been speaking out all along.”

Yet more leadership is still needed, Marshall urged. “We need people to go to their school boards and say, ‘No, enough of this.’ And then, what can we do legislatively — state legislation, federal legislation? And then, the next thing we do is we say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to use federal funding for this,’” he listed. “After that, we say, ‘By the way, we’re not going to let any child, anyone under the age of 18, have these surgeries because, number one, they’re irreversible. And number two, they’re going to cause chronic physical as well as mental pain.’ And … the [cross-sex hormone] medications they were prescribing were also irreversible, leading to infertility among other things.”

America’s pivot away from gender ideology is a “case study in what happens when we lean into something and leaders lead,” said Perkins. “Our children who are impressionable. … They may not act like they’re listening, but they are listening. And they take their cues from adults.”

“I’m hopeful, senator, that your leadership on mifepristone, the abortion drug … can see the same type of outcome,” Perkins emphasized, “if we’ll stay at it, and we will speak boldly and courageously, as you have done.”

Marshall concluded by reminding Americans of the reason why Christian leaders must stand firm on truth. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness in this world,” he quoted from Ephesians 6:12. “This transgender issue is absolutely a spiritual battle. … It goes way beyond even politics.”