The share of young teenagers identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual has dropped sharply in just four years — and nobody is quite sure why. As the Washington Post’s Casey Parks reports, a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data finds the steepest decline among ninth-grade girls: 30 percent identified as lesbian or bisexual in 2021, compared with 17 percent in 2025.
The numbers come from Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who published her analysis of the CDC’s 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System data on her Substack, “Generation Tech”. “It really does look like a free fall,” Twenge said. “But what’s causing it is unclear.”
Most of that drop comes from bisexual identity. While 26 percent of freshman girls identified as bisexual in 2021, just 13 percent did in 2025. Boys’ rates have stayed roughly flat for a decade, and older teens remain more likely to identify as lesbian or bisexual than their pre-pandemic counterparts.
Conservative activists were quick to credit the Trump administration. “Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID,” Terry Schilling, head of the American Principles Project, wrote on X.
Twenge isn’t convinced, noting the declines began under President Joe Biden. “If it was politics, why would that only have an effect on ninth-graders and not 17- and 18-year-olds?” she asked. “It maybe has something to do with it, but it’s clearly not the only thing going on. It’s a mystery.”
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Others question whether the shift is meaningful at all. Jody Herman, senior scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute, noted that “the study doesn’t provide confidence intervals to determine whether the differences are actually significant,” adding that “the evidence provided so far for a decline leaves more questions than answers.”
Twenge says she’ll next test hypotheses tied to the pandemic, politics and social media to pin down what’s driving the change.
