October 8, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDTYesterday at 5:00 a.m. EDT
By Casey Parks
Young teenagers are less likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual than they were a few years ago, according to a new analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
The decline is particularly striking among ninth-grade girls, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University who published her analysis of the 2025 data on her Substack “Generation Tech.” In 2021, 30 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual. Last year, 17 percent did.
“It really does look like a free fall,” Twenge said. “But what’s causing it is unclear.”
Twenge has been researching generational differences for decades. As part of that work, she regularly analyzes data from the CDC’s biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System.
The rate of boys who identify as gay or bisexual has remained roughly the same over the past decade. But a few years ago, after the pandemic shutdowns, the CDC data showed big upticks in the percentage of high school girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual. Within a few years, those rates began to drop, but only by a few percentage points. Though the overall numbers have continued to decline, older teenagers’ sexual orientation has held relatively stable. They are still more likely to identify as lesbian or bisexual than teenagers were before the pandemic.
The “free fall,” Twenge found, mostly comes from a huge drop in the number of freshmen girls who identify as bisexual. While 26 percent of ninth-grade girls identified as bisexual in 2021, only 13 percent — half as many — did in 2025.
Online, conservative activists celebrated the news as a win brought on by the Donald Trump administration.
“Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID,” Terry Schilling, the head of the American Principles Project, wrote on X.
But Twenge said the initial declines began during Joe Biden’s presidency, and the data doesn’t explain why a change in administration would affect one age group and not another.
“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.”
Jody Herman, senior scholar at the Williams Institute, a research center at UCLA on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, questioned whether the data revealed a meaningful shift in behavior.
“The study doesn’t provide confidence intervals to determine whether the differences are actually significant,” she wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “The narrative around a decline in LGBT identity among youth has been around for a while now. We’ll continue to look at trends over time in our work, but the evidence provided so far for a decline leaves more questions than answers.”
Twenge said she will next test a variety of hypotheses, related to the pandemic, politics and social media, to better discern what is driving the change.
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