According to the left, if you're LGBTQ, you were "born that way." Well, sort of. If you're transgender, you were supposedly born in the wrong body, which means you weren't “born that way” at all. Honestly, the slogan never held together, and it’s easily disproven. On top of that, LGBTQ identification has exploded in recent years, a clear sign that this was never a naturally occurring thing. Inborn traits don't double in a decade. They just don’t.
Even people on the left have acknowledged it. Back in 2023, Bill Maher admitted that social contagion was a huge factor in LGBTQ identification, particularly among young people.
"I think most who do it, you know I've talked to parents about this, a lot of times you just know that kid is not gay, you know, there was just, the factory installed equipment didn't match, ok, that's a real thing, it happens, it's rare but it happens," Maher said. "But, and you're talking about, there are other ones now because it is also somewhat trendy, I know people hate to hear that but it's obviously true, there is an element of social contagion, or else it wouldn't be so prevalent in here [California] and not in Indiana. It wouldn't be regional."
He'd made the same point the year before. "If we can't admit that, in certain enclaves, there is some level of trendiness to the idea of being anything other than straight, then this is not a serious, science-based discussion," he said. "It's a blow being struck in the culture wars using children as cannon fodder."
Of course, plenty of leftists look at the rising numbers and see no anomaly at all. To them, more kids identify as LGBTQ because society got more accepting, and people finally felt free to be who they always were. It's a cute theory, but the new CDC numbers disprove it. Fads are cyclical. Whatever is "in" eventually wears out and stops being popular.
And the signs show that’s what’s happening with LGBTQ identification.
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The figures come from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, and Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, did all the number crunching. She said the number of LGB-identifying students "plummeted" in 2025 and called the trend a "free fall." Among 9th-graders, ages 14 and 15, non-straight identification sank from 17% in 2023 to 11% in 2025. Other grades fell too, 10th-graders especially, while 12th-graders slipped only two points, from 18% to 16%.
Girls drove almost all of it.
"Identifying as LGB dropped from 27% in 2023 to 22% in 2025 among girls and from 9% to 7% among boys," Twenge wrote. "The previous increase in identifying as LGB was also larger among girls, with a 128% increase (more than doubling) from 2015 to 2021 among girls and a 99% increase (doubling) from 2015 to 2023 among boys."
That's exactly what you'd expect from a social contagion that mostly hit girls, the one the “experts” dismissed or downplayed. The steepest fall came among ninth-grade girls, who went from 30% non-straight in 2021 to 17% in 2025. Much of that is the collapse of the "bisexual" fad. Only 13% of ninth-grade girls called themselves bisexual in 2025, down from 26% four years earlier.
That’s a huge drop.
Twenge stayed cautious about what comes next. "The sharp turn downward in identifying (and acting) as LGB among Gen Alpha teens could be a harbinger of a coming wave of change, or it could be a blip — it's hard to say," she wrote.
I think we all know what’s really going on.