UnHerd: Why are fewer young people identifying as trans?

[Signalbox]

Is the transgender trend amongst our youth finally fizzling out? Let’s hope so!

https://unherd.com/newsroom/why-are-fewer-young-people-identifying-as-trans/

Archive…

https://archive.ph/6a5fR

Twitter…

https://x.com/epkaufm/status/1978074195767480659

“The fall of trans and queer seems most similar to the fading of a fashion or trend. It happened largely independently of shifts in political beliefs and social media use, though improved mental health played a role”

adults going through gender transition, often going through several years of psychological and hormone therapy before actual gender reassignment

My/our concerns are about children undergoing medical and surgical procedures without appropriate investigation beforehand.

someone just going to have leg lengthening or breast enlargement or facial reconstruction to look like their favorite movie star

Most people would consider at least two of these examples unusual, unwise and extreme. “Just”?

no one is complaining about all of these other people having body mutilations spending an estimated nearly $57 billion in all of 2024

I don’t think it’s true that no one is concerned or complaining, but if the people concerned are adult, uncoerced and it’s legal, not much can be done about it, nor will it in what seems to be an unregulated market.

Yes a few regret it, like any elective procedure, which is why it's a process over several years that includes a psychological analysis

Except where this is emphatically not the case, especially when it involves children.

Shame we can't do the same with people having children - it's embarrassing.

What a surprising remark on a parenting website.

There will be an underlying number because there have always been trans individuals, documented 200 years ago and continued long before the internet existed but small in numbers, the fashion seems to be changing though, thankfully it’s so slow to get surgery in the uk, few will have received it from the “bulge” years, my dn has only just had second surgery despite coming out over 10 years ago to medical profession and told his family aged 3 years old that he wasn’t a girl!

I disagree. There have always been people who crossdress. The case for gender dysphoria having always existed (as opposed to persecution for being homosexual) is much weaker. And the concept of 'gender' vs. sex is entirely modern.

There was a terrible news story last year about a couple of unspeakable idiots who had 4-year-old boy / girl twins.
The girl didn’t like having long hair, dresses & ‘pretty shoes’ - she wanted to have short hair & comfy clothes like her brother. So these idiots decided she must be a boy.
People like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep their children.

I saw this on Twitter and have now read the UnHerd piece and agree that this appears to be about non-binary ID only. Which personally I believe to be the preserve of the privileged.

We know in this country Blackpool (home of the largest % of looked-after children, I believe) has the highest numbers of children referred to gender clinics. I’m going to posit that those children don’t end up at elite universities, or any university for that matter.

I think that non-binary, which is 100% a trend, is dying a welcome death. Kids are fed up with these narcissistic bullying attention-seeking drama llamas telling them what to do and say. Obviously the grown ups have been rolling their eyes about them for a long time, and more so when it’s adults pretending they’re not male or female.

But I don’t think this means what Kaufman says it means.

I saw this on Twitter and have now read the UnHerd piece and agree that this appears to be about non-binary ID only. Which personally I believe to be the preserve of the privileged.

It also had data about sexuality, showing homosexuality and heterosexuality both being stable but the various varieties of queer experiencing the spike and decline corresponding to non-binary identity. Referring to the point I made earlier, the data is not great , in part because the thing it measures is not really a thing. But Kaufman is aware of its limitations and makes a strong case that the data does indeed say what he says it does.

Also worth noting that those casting aspersions on it are not well known for their intellectual integrity or analytical rigour, e.g. our own howie and Erin Reed.

I would - in an ideal world - ban all cosmetic surgery other than things like pinning back sticky-out ears, or removing large facial growths.

I would do this for many many reasons.

‘I would - in an ideal world - ban all cosmetic surgery other than things like pinning back sticky-out ears, or removing large facial growths.
I would do this for many many reasons’

Out of interest, and I’m not saying I disagree, but why not ban all cosmetic surgeries. Why is it ok for people to get their ears pinned back?

Pinning back ears is potentially very dangerous so I'd ban that too. It's mildly entertaining watching American TV shows from about 20 years ago when all the minor actresses went out and got the same nose, but the whole cosmetic surgery fad is deranged, even when all that gets harmed is flesh. Stretching and shaving bone? Risking general anaesthesia for no medical reason?

Even when there's a quasi valid reason I'd avoid it - I'd love to have perfect eyesight, but I'd sooner have my own imperfect non-messed with body until I have to do something about cataracts.

I've seen the studies on sexual orientation, which Kaufman has also tried to make sense of - difficult given they're often quite differently worded and not measuring precisely the same thing, but if treated with caution, the trends indicate something.

The most obvious thing in the sexual orientation studies is that among college students - specifically left leaning female students and especially at elite universities - identification as something other than heterosexual has reached statistically impossible levels, but also this seems to be very weakly linked to the much smaller uptick in homosexual activity.

Kaufman's hypothesis, which makes sense to me, is that when young women at Ivy League colleges say they aren't straight, some of them will actually be lesbian or bi, but most are adopting 'queer' identities as a political statement rather than a description of their sexual orientation, and that will be subject to changes in fashion.

Ditto with NB identities, which aren't the same as trans but are trans adjacent.

Guessing you have sticky out ears? Or used to lol.

In the comments I noticed this further rebuttal

^FIRE provides post-stratification weights to correct for differential nonresponse and using them materially changes the trend. The weighted series does not show evidence for the claim: https://jacobeliason.com/posts/2025-10-14-fire-survey-analysis-correction/^

But I could not fully understand the point. On first reading it seemed like the author felt that the raw survey data for various gender identity rates should be adjusted based on prior knowledge of gender identity rates.

This seems a little like pulling yourself into the air using your own boot laces. Maybe I have misunderstood the point

Worth noting (I forgot in my most) that whether NB = trans is contentious. I assume that Kaufman is operating under the definition that NB is a type of trans identification, in particular one that's easy to measure.

I don't think it's ever as simple as "it was a fad" or "we've won" as some prominent right wingers have been declaring.

There are so many reasons I can think of for why the numbers might be dropping.

First of all, you will have the people who genuinely experience a strong sense of disconnect between what their body looks like and what they feel inside. People who genuinely believe that they should be male / female and want to be male / female and that there's an incongruence between that and how they were born - "true" trans people if you like, regardless of how you think they should be addressed legally, that's one category of people. I think it's incredibly small, but I do know people who I'd say fit that category.

You have people who are trying to identify out of something else or escape something totally different, and the idea of being trans came along at the right (or wrong, depending on your stance) time. I've detransitioned; I fell into this category. I wanted to change myself completely so I was no longer the child that was abused and the young adult defined by that abuse - changing my name and my hair and my clothing had become totally socially acceptable, and I didn't have to deal with questions as to why. I convinced myself that I was trans, because why else would I feel so compelled to change everything about who I was?

It took some massive deconstructing and therapy to realise the real source - but that isn't always easily available to people, and that's something I think we need to fix before we criticise people who identify as trans. I think this is a huge category of trans people, and writing them off as either attention seekers or pervs pushes them further into the trans community and makes them more likely to cut off those who can help them.

I think there are girls and boys (and men and women) who genuinely prefer things associated with the opposite sex, and it's a confusing time to fall into that category. The tradwife/gender roles movement is growing exponentially, especially in the US. There's still stigma in the UK about women deciding not to have children, or about men and women wearing clothes associated with the opposite sex. Then you have the other side which is, you can't be a cross dresser anymore without identifying as trans. The reason the pull of that side is so strong is that, in exchange for saying you're trans, you can continue to ignore sex based stereotypes and wear/do what makes you comfortable, so of course the pull to say "yeah whatever I'm trans" is there. There's nothing to draw them to the other side.

There are kids who are chronically online, who have very little community outside of their phone, who find a community and make it their entire identity. When I was their age it was filling your Bebo with quotes from My Chemical Romance songs that could be interpreted as a cry for help and self harming. The way the system responds is different - obviously no one at the time was saying "yes, go on, keep cutting", and that needs looking into - but the psychology is the same; there's nothing new about it. Many of those same teens might still have pronouns in their bio, but it's far less important to them than making their fur suits because they watched that show on Netflix (I can't remember for the life of me what it's called). They'll grow up and look back on that phase and cringe like we cringe at the emo phase and something else will have filled its void for the kids crying out for a community and a bit of attention.

Obviously, the elephant in the room, there are people - and they are usually male at birth - who identify as the opposite sex to enable them to carry out or get away with sex based crimes and unacceptable behaviour. To ignore this is foolish and by denying that this faction exists, the trans supporting community alienate a lot of people.

How trans people should be dealt with legally and socially and medically and all of that is another matter, but I do think both sides need a lot more critical thinking and to acknowledge that it isn't just a dichotomy of attention seekers and criminals.

Well, the most obvious fallacy would be that you assume the mix of genders to constant. In that case you would re-balance the survey and find there was no change in NB (or any other) gender identification. Presumably they didn't do something as silly as that. But depending on what weights Eliason used, you could still end up with similar weighted variables that aren't really independent of what's being measured.

I'm wondering on rereading if the compensation is for the likelihood of a particular cohort responding accurately

e.g. 100% biological women asked will respond (or respond truthfully) but only 55% of NB asked will respond (or perhaps respond truthfully). So scale up the NB responses to reflect the full size of the cohort

It does beg the question - how do you know that only 55% are responding? If you are using a compensation like this then it would be necessary to re-evaluate the correction factor each year as NB become more socially acceptable

All very fraught - a very rickety statistical bridge

I wish some of our local families would read the room.

There's a local family with a son and twin daughters (both autistic) who has recently announced that she has 3 sons.

She's been flying the rainbow flag for years, previously one twin said she was non binary.

Poor girls never stood a chance.

How about a woman who has had her nose badly broken by being repeatedly punched in the face by a man?

Reconstruction after injury, whether caused by a violent attacker, a bomb, or a car crash, is NOT the same thing as cosmetic surgery.

I agree, that was a silly comment. I am very amused that the original posters exception was ear pinning though!

Thing is, when I asked for reconstruction the NHS refused, saying it was cosmetic, so I had to pay for it myself.

That is outrageous.

Correcting "obvious faults" or "obvious damage" is not cosmetic in my view . Neither is breast reduction for a woman whose mobility is restricted / back problems.

I think it's too soon to celebrate.

https://x.com/VincentPsychSE/status/1978162273312022789?t=4K1rjwcOnwG2BqJvMhQ3vQ&s=19

SUMMARY 🧐
There is no conclusive evidence that transgender identification among youth and young adults has declined since 2023. Data compiled from multiple Western nations—including the United States, Australia, Sweden, Finland, and broader European surveys—shows a continued upward trend or stabilization in reported transgender identity through 2025.
However, to be fair it’s important to recognize that survey-based data may not fully capture the reality. In 2025, college-age individuals might underreport transgender identification due to circumstantial factors such as:

• Socioeconomic pressures 💵

• Shifting political climates 🗳️
• Changes in public discourse and visibility 🗽

- Privacy, stigma, or institutional response 🏦 These influences can lead some individuals to withhold or delay disclosure of their gender identity in formal surveys, even as online engagement and community participation continue to grow. Sorry to disappoint everyone, I do wish the 'trend' was over. But you would be very wrong, and any apathy now will play into the hands of those who want to continue pushing children into trans ideology. 9/9 End.

It’s the kids job to get into fads & trends. It’s what they do.

unfortunately for them, with the body modification gender cult the adults all jumped on board with it and affirmed them. And enabled them, and supplied them with drugs, binders, surgeries etc.

adults just needed to say “no Claudia, you were born a girl & you will be female for your life long. Suck it up!” So many didn’t.

many adults are still doing it & unfortunately some will never give it up. Not just the “lost soldier” types, but the do gooder be kind idiots - they will keep pushing this forever on the poor kids unfortunate enough to encounter them.

I think that cosmetic surgery is not in any way compatible with a do no harm approach to medicine, and shouldn't be something doctors are allowed to be involved with. If it is allowed at all it should be done by a completely differernt kind of practitioner. It's not medicine, it's part of the beauty industry.

I do realise there is a fuzzy line between cosmetic and reconstructive surgery, but I think that can be dealt with in the same way we manage other fuzzy lines.

However, it also seems to me that there is now a real move away fro a health model of medicine to a consent model. I'm not sure what medicine really means under that approach but if that trajectory continues, it could mean a radical change across many areas of practice.