The article was a great example of horrible reporting. And I don't mean, "Wow, these facts are horrible!" I mean, "Wow, that violates so many rules of valid journalism!"
Let me break it down for you.
First, let's look at the subheading of the article. It reads, "Conservatives have trumpeted the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but researchers say the reasons for the decline are unclear." That subhead and the article title together seem to say that medical researchers at the CDC have released an important new study, showing that there has been a plunge in the number of bisexual teens. Conservatives are elated! But "researchers" are befuddled and say the reason is a mystery.
I'll break this down for you in full, but first, let me just cut to the chase and rewrite that title and subhead for you: "One single psychologist who writes pop pieces about generational differences speculated about some online data in a Substack post! Her conclusions were strangely uninformed, but we're framing this as a major discovery, and homophobic fans of conversion therapy are elated."
OK, now let me explain what the blog post itself says, then how the article frames it, and finally what this all means for LGBTQIA+ people and the US.
The blog post itself is titled, "Younger teens are now much less likely to say they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual (especially girls -- and yes, that goes for sexual behavior, too)." The author is Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who regularly speculates on hot topics about generational differences in the media and on her blog. Other Substack posts of hers include, "Gen Z really does have a work ethic problem. Or maybe we all do?" and "Is immigration behind the decline in reading scores?" (to which her answer is no, instead it's young people spending too much time scrolling social media on smartphones).
So, what does she have to say in her Substack piece that the Washington Post has presented as a major discovery? Basically, she looks at the recently uploaded data from the 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (the YRBSS). YRBSS data have been collected every two years from youths in grades 9-12, to further the CDC goal of improved health and wellbeing. Students are asked about topics like drug use, experience with being bullied, and sexuality. Twenge looked at what the students reported in response to the survey sexuality questions, and found this:
The number of students reporting that they identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual went up for years, peaked during lockdowns for 9th and 10th graders, and in 2023 for 11th and 12th graders, and since then has fallen--dramatically so for students who were in the 9th grade in 2025 (the red line). But breaking down that decline, Twenge found that there was little decrease in students identifying themselves to researchers as lesbian or gay. It was mostly a decline in students saying they were bisexual, especially among girls:
So, Twenge concludes, "While 26% of 9th grade girls identified as bisexual in 2021, only 13%--half as many--did in 2025." She says that this is a mystery, and nobody knows why this is happening! Her take is that it is a mysterious generational effect: "These trends are especially striking given the relative stability of identifying as LGB among young adults ages 18 to 24." (Gen Z shows little change in reported sexual orientations, but the oldest members of Generation Alpha were in 9th grade when this study took place, and Twenge's interests focus on generational differences.)
Before I discuss the problems with the YRBSS data and explain why the reported drop isn't inexplicable at all, I want to note something Twenge herself mentions. While only 13% of 9th grade high school girls in 2025 told the CDC they identified as bisexual, and another 4% said they were lesbian, the percentage of sexually-active girls in the 9th grade in that year who reported having had at least one same-gender sexual partner was 29%. That is, 12% of 9th grade girls in 2025 told researchers that they had a sexual relationship with another girl, but didn't identify themselves as lesbian or bisexual.
And that's just the percentage who disclosed their sexual activities to the CDC.
America has a long tradition of people having same-gender partners but not identifying as LGB+. Basically, the more homophobic the time period, the greater the risks of coming out of the closet and being open about one's sexuality. So you can track the political climate for queer folk by how many people having relations that aren't heterosexual self-label as gay, lesbian, queer, homophile, etc.. The climate has gotten worse for LGBTQIA+ people, so the gap between how people feel and whether they proclaim that to the world has gotten larger again. No mystery there.
There's another possibility that Twenge doesn't consider. Excluded from her data are students who said "I have another identity"--that is, a sexual identity other than the YRBSS survey options of straight, lesbian, gay, or bisexual. As someone who teaches large numbers of first-year college students, I can tell you that there has been a big recent move toward students identifying themselves as "sexually fluid," or as saying that labels themselves are counterproductive as they limit both the way others see you and what you see as possible for yourself. And refusing to self-label is particularly understandable as it is also self-protective in an age in which LGBTQIA+ young people feel unsafe.
But there are other really vital factors that Twenge doesn't mention at all. And those have to do with the YRBSS itself. Notice, for example, that Twenge is only reporting on LGB identity. What about trans youth?
Oh! The YRBSS no longer asks young people any questions about their gender identities.
There is an elephant in the room that is going unmentioned in Twenge's Substack post, and in the Washington Post news piece based on it. And that is that the CDC today is nothing like the CDC as it existed for decades before. The Trump administration has made massive changes and fired huge swaths of career scientists. It has changed the CDC into an organization that kills vaccine mandates, cancels research that was supposed to close health gaps between privileged and marginalized groups, and declares that there is no such thing as a trans person, calling that intolerable "gender ideology."
Shortly after Trump was inaugurated for the second time, the CDC took down all the years of YRBSS data that had been publicly available for researchers to study for decades. The supposed reason was that it was intolerably flawed and biased by woke DEI political ideology, including a recognition of trans people and of gender identity as a concept. A Trump administration executive order issued on day 2 of his 2025 administration had declared that there is no such thing as gender, only sex, and that sex is a binary determined at the moment of conception that can never be changed. To believe anything else was proclaimed "unscientific" and in defiance of biological truth.
The YRBSS has produced a huge amount of data on many topics, but the CDC tried to throw all of those years of data away. A major emergency rescue effort was immediately organized by researchers who use YRBSS data to download and archive those masses of data before they were removed. And after they were taken down, a court ordered the data restored to the CDC website. They are there--complete with a CDC banner stating that "Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from truth. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology due to the harms and divisiveness it causes. This page does not reflect reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it."
The CDC continued to collect YRBSS data in 2025. But numerous questions had been changed, and the question about gender identity removed.
Young people today are intensely aware of the negative attitudes of this presidential administration and conservative state legislatures toward LGBTQIA+ youth. Queer and trans youth today have to be much more cautious than young people a decade ago needed to be. So when a government agent comes and asks them to declare their sexual identity, far fewer of them are going to trust the government and respond openly. They're not fools; they see the risks and act accordingly.
Maybe Twenge is unaware of what happened to the YRBSS. But that is a high level of ignorance for someone presenting herself as a scientific expert on this topic. The changes in the survey questions and the hostility of this administration and the larger society today are key to interpreting LGBTQIA+ youths' responses! And while she was just writing a Substack post for a small audience, you would really hope that the Washington Post, in turning this minor online piece into a national news story, would have discussed the YRBSS takedown and question changes. . . but no.
As a trans person, I've gotten depressingly used to terrible reporting on trans youth in US news today. Stories in which the voices of actual trans people and our organizations are completely missing. Stories that treat the transphobic opinions of the leaders of anti-LGBTQIA+ political organizations and the reports of medical experts as the two equally-weighted, sole sources of information. Flagship mainstream news stories that accept as a premise that trans middle-schoolers present a threat to their cis classmates. News articles and videos hosting debates over whether a 17-year-old can actually know what their gender is, or if gender identity even exists. Media reports on the "dangers of puberty suppression" that fail to mention that these drugs are used all the time on large numbers of cisgender children without any controversy.
And this has an impact. With this as our media atmosphere, 27 of the 50 US states have passed bans on trans youth accessing gender-affirming care. Laws ban teachers from treating trans students respectfully. School districts forbid schools from letting bullied and scared trans youth access a gender-neutral, single-stall restroom where they could be safe. Many schools that had GSAs--"Gay/Straight Alliances," student support groups for LGBTQIA+ students--now ban them.
We live in an era of "polarization," by which we really mean the generating of intergroup hatred for social media profit and personal and political power. In the LGBTQIA+ community, trans people have in particular been made a punching bag. As the November election in the US approaches, we are again bombarded with Republican political ads making wild and bigoted claims about Democrats putting "men in girls' bathrooms." The president is referring to a South Carolina candidate for office, Dr. Annie Andrews, by altering her first name to start with a T so it becomes a transphobic slur. And her response? She aired a political ad saying she opposes medical transition care for trans youth and "biological men in women's sports."
Americans young and old who are trans, nonbinary, intersex or otherwise variant in their sex or gender are exquisitely aware of what is happening. Republican politicians attack them; Democratic ones abandon them.
This context has given rise to a split, within LGBTQIA+ communities themselves, and among Americans generally. On the one hand, there have been trans people and our allies saying, "They're coming for us first, but that's just because we are the easier targets in a highly transphobic society. Look at what the organizations attacking us say in their own literature! They mean to take LGBQ people down next." On the other have been people who have brushed off the attacks on trans people as affecting a group that is either too small to get too worried about when everything is on fire, or as fine with them because they are transphobic too. (This includes groups like the Log Cabin Republicans, who this summer happily jettisoned support for trans people's rights in their ongoing campaign of respectability politics.)
What this article shows is that warnings from the trans umbrella community have been valid.
At this point there has been so much terrible reporting from flagship news sources like the New York Times and the Washington Post on trans youths and adults that it no longer gets much attention. And now we see what comes next: a flimsy excuse to feature a report that seems perfectly designed for rightwing virality. "Even that liberal rag the Washington Post is reporting that the rise in LGBT identity was just a fad generated by trans groomers and woke enemies of our timeless wholesome values!"
I did that unwise thing and read the comment section for the Washington Post article. It was full of gloating transphobes claiming that the article proved that being LGBT was a sick fad that had been pushed on America's children by adult LGBT groomers and woke teachers and administrators. But children could be cured, as this article proved! Many credited Trump. The Post article itself included a pretty bizarre such claim: "'Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID,' Terry Schilling, the head of the American Principles Project, wrote on X." How cutting American aid to hungry children living in refugee camps in other parts of the world is supposed to cure American youths of LGBTQIA+ identities is very much an open question. . .
That the Washington Post article doesn't ask that questions is more evidence of the terrible quality of the article.
What we are left to conclude is that publishing an article that meets the basic quality standards of news journalism was not the goal. Clickbait is almost certainly part of the goal. But the shifting of the Overton window on queer and trans rights by the billionaire class that has purchased America's media platforms is another. It started with mainstream news reports delegitimizing and stigmatizing trans people. But it's coming for LGB folks as well.
Be prepared! And remember: we the people continue to hold the power in our hands to change all this.
