Over the past few years, the number of young Americans identifying as transgender or nonbinary has plummeted — a collapse that challenges the absurd cultural narrative that gender ideology represents a stable or permanent social shift. According to new data from the American College Health Association, just 3.6% of college students now identify as a gender different from their biological sex. That’s a sharp drop from 5.2% in 2024, and an even steeper fall from the 6.8% recorded in both 2022 and 2023.
The downward trend is consistent across nearly every demographic. Incoming freshmen — the group most likely to reflect new cultural trends — are now less likely than older students to identify as transgender or queer. In other words, the youngest generation on campus appears to be rejecting the gender confusion that was so heavily promoted in recent years. Meanwhile, the percentage of students identifying as heterosexual has begun to rise again, signaling a quiet return to normalcy after years of ideological pressure.
Importantly, the data show that this reversal isn’t being driven by religion or politics. The report found that rates of religiosity and political conservatism among students have remained largely stable. Instead, the shift appears tied to improvements in mental health. Anxiety and depression rates — both of which spiked during the pandemic — have begun to decline, and with that decline has come a steep reduction in the number of young people rejecting their biological sex. As psychological stability improves, gender experimentation is losing its grip.
For years, cultural elites, school systems, and social media platforms pushed the narrative that identifying as “trans” was brave, authentic, and liberating. But the truth is emerging: many young people were simply caught up in a socially contagious ideology. The more society normalizes mental health recovery and real self-acceptance, the less appealing the radical idea of “changing gender” becomes. This data doesn’t reflect a “loss of rights” — it reflects a generation waking up.
The transgender movement sold itself as a permanent revolution, but the numbers tell another story. As the fad fades, what remains are the tragic consequences of irreversible medical interventions, social division, and institutional betrayal. The collapse in trans identification should serve as both a warning and a call to action: it’s time to protect children from ideological experimentation and restore truth, stability, and biological reality to public life.
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