🔻The Trans Movement Was A Social Fad. And It’s Now Unraveling - Cypher News

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Trans identification didn’t “normalize.” It peaked, then collapsed.

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Schools didn’t guide kids. They amplified a fad.

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Better mental health didn’t end the movement. Losing cultural momentum did.

BRIEFING

Grant here. As many of us could see coming from a mile away, the entire trans movement is collapsing faster than a thrift store sweater after one wash. The data is finally catching up to reality. What the media sold as a civil rights revolution was mostly a social fad, and the numbers now show that the trend is basically dunzo. Let’s break it down.

Across six major datasets, from FIRE to Brown to the Census Pulse, the pattern is exactly the same. Non-binary identification peaked in 2023, then dropped by half almost immediately. Trans identification among eighteen- to twenty-two-year-olds fell nearly fifty percent between 2022 and 2024. Even the broader category of “queer” identities, which surged during the culture boom, is now in steep decline.

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The survey captures over 50,000 students per year from nearly 250 leading American universities. Its size guarantees statistical power and enables us to look at small subgroups like trans or queer people. FIRE data is a random sample, a small percentage of each university’s student body, and I wanted to be sure it triangulated with two surveys capturing a much greater share of the total. One comes from the elite Andover Phillips prep school near Boston; the other is run by Brown University’s student newspaper. Both interview a far higher share of their target pool than FIRE surveys (up to 50 percent for Brown freshmen, and 75 percent in the Andover case). As Figure 1 shows, these surveys corroborate the “peak trans” pattern in the FIRE data, revealing a rapid decline since 2023.

I expand more fully on these findings in my University of Buckingham Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, which also found that the decline in non-binary identification was matched by a 10-point drop in unconventional sexual identification. Namely, in students identifying their sexual orientation as something other than heterosexual or homosexual—such as pansexual, queer, questioning, bisexual, or asexual. Many students who identify as neither male nor female also identify as sexually non-conforming, so the correlation trend is unsurprising.

Sexual orientation has been measured in more youth surveys for longer than gender identity has been. While gay and lesbian share remained flat through 2020 to 2025, Figure 2 shows that the broader non-heterosexual group—covering bisexual, queer, pansexual, asexual, questioning, and other labels—rose steeply to 2023 and then fell across a wide range of surveys. The non-heterosexual proportion peaked at around 30 percent overall, reaching as high as 40 percent at progressive-leaning Ivy League schools like Brown and 50 percent in liberal arts colleges such as Smith College. Importantly, the decline in non-conforming sexual orientation parallels the decline in non-conforming gender identity, suggesting a common underlying dynamic.

What is really crazy is that the sharpest reversals are happening at the most extremely liberal and progressive institutions. Brown, Oberlin, Andover, and the Ivy campuses all show the steepest collapses. If politics or fear were driving this decline, the numbers would be moving in the opposite direction.

And let’s be clear, the youth didn’t suddenly become religious or conservative. Their views on speech, ideology, and social issues clearly look the same as they did in 2020. Nothing ideological shifted. The trend just simply burned out.

So before anyone pretends this decline came out of nowhere, look at the people who warned about it years ago. Dr. Paul McHugh, former chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, spent decades calling out ideological fads dressed up as medical truth. He lived through the multiple personality disorder craze in the 80s, watched it collapse, and said plainly that gender ideology was following the same path.

Now, at ninety-four, he is still making the case with total clarity.

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Today’s trans epidemic is no different from the epidemic of multiple personality disorder in the 1980s.

Yet, it’s more harmful because during MPD, it was only a gang of unethical therapists who colluded with the disorder whereas with trans, our governments, schools, legal system and medical world all reinforce this dangerous false belief. 

Dr. Paul McHugh fought the madness of MPD, and the madness of trans in its first wave and more catastrophic second wave. 

At 94 years old, his mind is sharp, his memory exceptional, and his stories fascinating. Truly a privilege to interview him twice.  

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BRIEFING

As we’re seeing here, the trans movement isn’t dying off because of resistance. Instead, it just simply has run its course, like any other social fad. What looked like a cultural wave was really a youth trend that burned hot, spread fast, and then collapsed as soon as it ran out of social fuel. The data across FIRE, Brown, Andover, CES, and the Census Pulse all point to the same curve. A steep rise, a hard peak, and a rapid decline.

The most progressive campuses show the sharpest reversals, which really tells us everything. If politics or fear were driving this, elite campuses would be doubling down, not bailing out. Instead, the Ivy League is reporting the fastest drop in non-binary and trans identity. Ideology did not change. Mental health did not magically improve. The just fad simply reached the point where it stopped providing social payoff.

Again, this entire decline with the trans movement is clearly generational. The youngest are already walking away in droves, and the institutions that helped inflate the movement are now documenting its fall.

NOW YOU KNOW

The trans movement didn’t die of political causes. It just ran out of social steam.