Are young Americans becoming less likely to identify as trans?

This claim is getting a lot of attention on social media after two researchers published survey data appearing to show a shift in youth gender identity.

The first analysis came from Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom, and a longtime anti-PC and anti-”woke” crusader. In early October, Kaufmann published a report titled “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity Among Young Americans.”

“The transgender share among university students peaked in 2023 and has almost halved since, from nearly 7 percent to under 4 percent,” Kaufmann writes in that report.

A few days later, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, posted on X that “trans identification really is in free fall among the young,” citing data from the Cooperative Election Study, a long-running survey of voting behavior and public opinion. Unlike Kaufmann, Twenge is known most recently for relatively apolitical work on kids and smartphones.

It turns out … trans identification really is in free fall among the young. So is nonbinary identity. See below from a nationally representative survey (the CES). @epkaufm was right. 🚨👀 (1/2) 👇 pic.twitter.com/q2W2ZTFunJ

Several scholars have raised significant methodological questions about Twenge’s and Kaufmann’s work, which has not been peer-reviewed or published in academic journals. The Williams Institute, a think tank at the UCLA School of Law that has studied the number of Americans identifying as transgender since 2011, has not seen a similar drop in its data.

The debate has bigger implications for trans rights. Social conservatives have already touted Kaufmann and Twenge’s work as evidence that trans people have ceased to exist, or that trans identity has always been suspect. “Transgenderism is effectively over. We destroyed it,” right-wing podcaster Matt Walsh posted on X in response to Kaufmann’s report.

At the same time, accurate data is important for representation, scholars and activists say. If trans people aren’t counted in surveys, “it almost leads to a sense of isolation,” Marlin Xie, an 18-year-old activist with the nonprofit Advocates for Youth, told me. “It’s almost like there are less of my community........

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