A new report from political scientist Eric Kaufmann has sent a shockwave through the cultural conversation: after a peak in 2022–23, the share of college students identifying as trans or nonbinary appears to have fallen sharply by 2025. Kaufmann’s analysis pulls from large student surveys and finds dramatic drops at elite campuses and in a nationwide FIRE dataset, suggesting the sudden boom in gender experimentation among young people may already be receding.
The numbers are blunt and hard to ignore — in some datasets the nonbinary share roughly halved from around 6.8–9% in 2022–23 to near 3–4% in 2025, with places like Phillips Academy and Brown showing steep reversals. These declines were not limited to one school or a single poll; Kaufmann triangulated across multiple sources and found converging evidence that this is a real cultural shift rather than an isolated blip.
That said, the broader picture of transgender identity in America remains sizeable: reputable estimates from the Williams Institute still count millions of Americans who identify as transgender, and youth identification was elevated in the early 2020s. Conservatives should not pretend the phenomenon was never real — many families and individuals have legitimately struggled through identity issues and deserve compassion and care. But trends change, and the recent data suggest the runaway cultural endorsing of gender radicalism may be slowing.
Other national polls paint a nuanced backdrop: Gallup and other surveys documented an overall rise in LGBTQ identification through 2023 and 2024, meaning the 2025 campus drops are a reversal within a longer, more complicated trajectory. This is exactly the kind of nuance conservatives must both acknowledge and exploit: trends rise and fall, and a retreat from fashionable ideological experiments is an opportunity to restore common-sense norms.
Of course the left reflexively screams “methodology!” — critics have accused Kaufmann of misweighting some datasets and selectively highlighting polls that fit his thesis. Those critiques deserve airing and examination, but they do not erase consistent declines visible across several independent surveys; the conservative response should be to demand rigorous transparency and then use whatever truth the data reveal. The takeaway for patriots is simple: when multiple indicators point to cooling enthusiasm for radical gender identities, that is the moment to press for policies that protect children and sanity.
What responsibility falls to conservatives now is unmistakable. We must speak for parental rights, insist on robust mental-health support for troubled youth, and oppose the medicalization of adolescence — especially irreversible interventions that can’t be undone. Other democracies are already confronting the harms of rushed pediatric transition care; American conservatives should seize this cultural turning point to legislate safeguards, support families, and push schools back to teaching reading and arithmetic instead of ideology.
This moment calls for steady stewardship, not triumphalism. Celebrate the retreat of a dangerous fad if you must, but more importantly organize, pressure local school boards, elect lawmakers who will defend children, and make compassion real by funding mental-health services instead of signaling virtue on Twitter. The nation’s youth deserve clarity and protection — and conservatives now have both the mandate and the chance to deliver it.
