Students un-coupling from the trans train

Intriguing to see the data out the USA in which there is a sharp decline (an almost fifty point drop) in the numbers of college students identifying as trans. The stats show a drop to 3.6% in 2025, compared with 6.8 per cent in 2022, and again in 2023.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) polled some 60, 000 students and the figures all point southward.

Writing on the UnHerd news media website, author, and professor of Political Science at the University of Buckingham in Canada, Eric Kaufmann, noted that the reasons for why this is occurring are less clear than the fact that it is.

It’s easy to pull out our most cherished ideas as to why (the vibe shift, the end of wokeness etc, the heat coming off the social contagion around trans issues), but Kaufmann, while welcoming the drop, takes a more measured eye to the data.

So he states:

It’s tempting to speculate about the reasons behind the rise and fall of trans and queer identities. Mental illness among American teens, for example, has fallen since 2021-22 — a pattern confirmed in the FIRE data from 2023-25. My analysis indicates that changes in mental health over time, especially depression, made a significant difference to the trajectory of trans and queer identities over this period. But the drop in mental health issues encompassed all social groups, including trans and queer youth.

Kaufmann then steadily goes through the other factors attributed, and comes to the conclusion that there is no hard and fast rule as to why, just that there is. It may take some time to fully figure out why.

He lists a graph of two elite institutions, Andover Phillips Academy and Brown University, and compares it with the wider FIRE sample of 60,000. And here it is (courtesy of UnHerd):

The train is definitely coming into the station on this one.  Kaufmann observes that even matters such as religious revival, the challenge to “woke” ideologies, etc, don’t seem to be contributing factors, simply because on campuses, the number of those identifying as religious or as “progressive/woke” hasn’t shifted:

Yet FIRE and other data show little change in students’ political ideology or party identification over the past five years. “Woke” attitudes — such as support for shouting down speakers or punishing those perceived as hostile to transgenderism or Black Lives Matter — have not receded much since 2020. It’s a similar story for religion. Despite hints of a youth religious revival, FIRE survey data shows no major drop in the share of non-religious students, who still make up nearly half of the sample in recent years.

My own take on this would be that it’s hard to battle against natural law for a sustained period of time. It’s very hard to keep up saying something that is not aligned with reality.

It takes a lot of effort, government money, self-will and affirmations. It takes a lot of coercion to make people say something about you that they plainly don’t believe is true of you. That requires a level of government intervention that – I’m thankful to say – most governments aren’t willing to completely enforce.

This break with natural law is why there has been less acceptance of trans ideology in the wider community (think sports fairness) than of that other great Sexular Age issue – gay rights. While I also believe that same-sex practices break God’s natural law boundaries, they seem less obvious to those uninitiated with God’s good design for sex in the Bible.

And of course there are the brave souls who are detransitioning, who have finally found voice despite the threats and doxxing they receive, and are online telling young people “Don’t let the adults convince you of this!”

There’s also been a sharp division between many in the gay community and the trans communities. Sexual practice is no longer seen on a continuum with gender identity. For a while there they were co-belligerents, but increasingly less so. It seems that once the Sexual Revolution was won, the tribes started the civil war amongst each other. That’s how revolutions work, they end up eating their young.

And of course, I do think there was a deep social contagion issue going on. For all of the supposed individuality we express, we do so in herds. Which is, of course why the journal UnHerd is so called: First it is about going in the opposite direction to the herd, and there’s a nice play on the fact that a voice that was once less heard (due to the gatekeeping by progressive media) is now able to be more heard.

There’s something nicely ironic that the medium that seemed to launch the trans blitzkrieg – namely social media – is the same medium that many voices opposed to this ideology are able to get their voices heard. Fewer and fewer young people are allowing themselves to be gate-kept by MSM.

Kaufmann concludes with this:

Whether trans and queer identities will drop to 2010 levels is an open question. But the fact both have declined sharply in just two years is a startling and unanticipated post-progressive development that the education and media establishments will be reluctant to acknowledge.

Exactly. Case in point being the state of Victoria in Australia, a state burdened by debt, but unburdened, seemingly, by the impending toll that many of its social experiments will prove to have.

So today we witness the Victorian Premier, Jacinta Allen’s refusal to dampen down speculation that her state’s education system will have an open and honest dialogue with parents concerned that the state’s schools will hide from them the fact that their children are socially transitioning.

In yet another reminder of what progressive legislative over-reach looks like (as well as flat out rejection of psychological data), Allen has scoffed at the concern, and trotted out again –  the shocking, but untrue, statistic that trans-identifying children are fifteen times more like to commit suicide than their peers.

As reported in The Australian, when pressed on the issue publicly, she retorted today:

The serious and deeply personal matters around kids who are working through the challenges of being a kid today, their adolescence, they might be questioning their identity, they might be thinking about their gender, and how they fit into our community. We should come to all of these debates and discussions in a responsible way, one that does not put reckless misinformation into the public debate, that causes harm.

Several times she was asked about parental consent, and each time she refused to answer that question. As we know, in the most progressive state in Australia, the education system is increasingly being used as a handy indoctrination tool on all matters sexual. The more progressive a state, the more it believes that children belong to the state and not to the parents.

Allen went on (and on):

I’ve talked to some of these families. I’ve understood what goes on in the Respectful Relationships programs in our schools, and it’s about making a difference and supporting them. That’s why I get, and I do, I get very angry, I get very, very angry when kids are put at greater risk because of reckless, dangerous commentary.

But not angry at reckless and dangerous surgery that puts young lives in the path of irreparable damage, apparently

Perhaps the good Premier needs to read the Cass Report from the data collected in the UK that saw the gender-affirming Tavistock Clinic shut down.

Professor Patrick Parkinson, always a level and sanguine voice in these matters, is quoted thus in The Australian:

…Parkinson described the policy as “grossly unethical”, warning that schools are “not qualified at all” to make such decisions and that future negligence suits are likely from children harmed by secret transitions.

Lawsuits will come, that is for sure. But as the data is showing from the US already, the time could come when the rates of identifying as trans will drop among college aged students to 2010 levels.