How Can Flagship News Reporting on LGBTQIA+ People in the US be This Bad?

 

 

 

On October 8th, 2026, I opened the Washington Post app to see how the day's list of bad news would be presented. One of the first stories I saw was titled, "Number of teens who identify themselves as gay or bisexual is in 'free fall.'"

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 gay and 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:

There's the graph just showing what percentage of high school girls identified themselves to researchers as bisexual over the same time period.

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, quite a large number 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.

Don't Give Up Hope!

 

Just waving my little trans flag. Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 margin that states have the right to ban puberty blockers and any other gender-affirming care being provided to minors. Its supposed reasoning was that the science is unsettled and the topic controversial, so the matter must be left to the states to decide how best to protect trans children.

 

The Court treated flawed, biased, and debunked research by transphobes that has been rejected by all of the major American medical associations as being as valid as reputable, peer-reviewed research. The "medical controversy" it centered is not a controversy within the reputable medical science community.

 

Nor did the Court mention that the Trump administration has cancelled the funding of every single scientific study of trans health, gender affirming care, and the experiences of discrimination of trans, nonbinary, and intersex Americans. (Such funding made up less than 1% of the NIH budget, but has accounted for half of all grant dollars cancelled.) How can such research be considered both vital and determinative by the Court, yet the fact that the federal government is doing everything it can to terminate any such research go unmentioned?

 

The Court also did not care that puberty blockers have been prescribed to thousands and thousands of children who are not trans for decades, with zero controversy, and that this continues today, again without controversy. Nor did the Court note that intersex children who do not request puberty blockers regularly have them imposed--and not only is this accepted by the transphobes who have banned trans care, but framed as obligatory.

 

And all of this is supposed to be to protect trans kids. The youths themselves are thus framed as having no true self-knowledge. The parents who see how gender-affirming care has markedly improved their children's mental health are told that states may hold they are wrong, and are actually abusively exposing their children to harm, when they are in fact doing everything in their power to protect their children's wellbeing.

 

This is not about the government protecting children. It is about the state controlling them, based on bigotry against people like them, like me, like my wife. Want a little proof? On the same day that the Supreme Court announced this decision, the Trump administration ordered the Trevor Project, which provides suicide-prevention hotline services to queer and trans youth, to cease its work. The cruelty is, as ever, the point. They want us to know they don't care if we die.

 

But I care! I see you, all you lovely trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex folks out there, of every age. And so do so many other people! I wave my little trans flag for you. We cannot be erased--not by some ludicrous executive order, not by some wrongly-decided SCOTUS case, not by all the bigots who blather about their freedoms while blatantly denying freedom to others to live and love as their hearts urge them to do. 

 

Don't give up hope, and never stop fighting and shining!

The Real Problem When it Comes to Trans Kids and Athletics

 

At the time I write this, 12 states now ban either trans girls, or all trans youth, from participating in school athletics. Eight more currently have bills pending, and others have bills waiting to be introduced.

Attacking trans youths, especially trans girls, is all the rage in America's "red states." This is claimed in the most outraged tones to be necessary to protect cis girls. Trans girls are misgendered as "males" and framed as barging into girls' spaces. Lawmakers say the people of their great states are panicked over the need to protect cis girls' privacy, and outraged that "biological females" participating in sports will no longer be able to win trophies or ribbons, because of "males' natural advantage."

Context

Generating sex panics to energize conservative culture warriors is nothing new. Between 1998 and 2012, the same states now banning trans girls from sports banned same-gender marriage. These discriminatory laws were called "Defense of Marriage" acts, and it was claimed that allowing people of the same gender to form legal families would somehow imperil the family as an institution and destroy moral values. My own lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, stated, "This is a slippery slope. . . at what point are we going to be OK marrying inanimate objects? Can I marry this table, or this, you know, clock? Can we marry dogs?" To allow same-gender marriage was to condone bestiality and table-marrying.

The movement to ban same-gender marriage was bigoted and ridiculous--as bans on trans kids' sport participation are bigoted and ridiculous. Allowing two people of the same gender to marry actually strengthens investment in families, protects children, and does exactly zero to harm marriages between women and men. But claiming that supporting LGBTQ+ families would somehow destroy society was extremely effective in generating political energy and funds for conservative political candidates.

And before the panic about same-gender marriage on the right, there was panic about laws that would prevent job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The 1970s and 80s saw the "Save Our Children" movement and its spinoffs, which claimed that because "homosexuals cannot procreate," they sought access to children to "convert" to homosexuality via pedophilic abuse, and were seeking bans on discrimination so they could access vulnerable children as teachers or scouting leaders. This slander about pedophilia was very useful in funneling evangelical Christians and large amounts of money into Republican campaigns, and so Republican politicians keep stoking it, decade after decade. Consider what Gov. Ron Desantis' press secretary Christin Pushaw recently tweeted, in defending Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill that bans discussions or children's books mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary schools. She claimed, "The bill that liberals inaccurately call 'Don't Say Gay' would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill. If you're against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don't denounce the grooming of 4-8 year-old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn't make the rules." The term "grooming" refers to preparing a child to be sexually abused-- recycling the same old claim made by "Save Our Children" decades ago. LGBTQ+ people are seeking to get at your children, to abuse and convert them. 

And before sex panics about LGBTQ+ people, America had developed a long tradition of justifying racial segregation and racial terrorism as necessary to protect white women and girls from Black men, framed as monstrous sexual predators. I've written before about how tactics deployed against trans people in the U.S. today are heavily modeled on those developed to oppress African Americans, after the end of slavery and the withdrawal of Reconstruction. 

The Problem

So, America has a long history of using panics about sex, gender, and sexuality to keep the conservative masses politically engaged. I know it's nothing new. But I hear a lot of cis people who mean well say that as if it is supposed to be comforting when it comes to state bans on trans youth participation in sports. "Don't worry, they're always saying this about someone." Either I'm told that they'll lose interest eventually and turn their attention to some other target, or I'm served some narrative about progress being inevitable. And anyway, I'm told, there aren't really a lot of kids being affected--the bans are symbolic. Basically, we're being trolled and should just ignore the trolling.

OK, let's look at these claims one by one.

Progress is unfortunately not inevitable; it requires a deep investment of time and energy. But even if it were, this blasé mindset ignores the tremendous damage done to people's lives during the long years while that progress is being fought for--including years in which other hate campaigns take center stage. It's true that to keep levels of political outrage high, conservative politicians and influencers shift their focus around to keep the news fresh. But when news cycle is focused elsewhere, the discriminatory laws and policies don't fade. Nor do the negative interactions marginalized people have with bigots go away because the particular flavor of hate aimed at them isn't a media focus at that moment.

Then there is the idea that not many people are affected, or the impact isn't serious. The spotlight in evaluating the impact of bias gets focused on the many who do not survive. Over 4000 Black people were lynched in acts of white supremacist racial terrorism between the end of Reconstruction and 1950. More than half of all trans youth reported that they had seriously considered suicide in 2020, and about 1 in 5 trans youth of color reported having attempted to kill themselves.

But I think the focus on mortality both understates and misstates the problem. Well-meaning cis allies are correct: very, very few trans kids are getting kicked off of their school athletics teams now as these bans are being passed. And nobody dies of being kicked off a team.

But the reason so few kids are getting kicked off teams is because, formally or informally, almost all trans youths are already being kept out of school athletics. Tennessee passed a law banning trans youth from sports, despite the fact that the transphobic activist organizations and legislators could not find a single example of a trans girl ever participating in Tennessee school sports. Neither could North Dakota, or Indiana, but their legislatures passed bans. Utah found exactly one trans girl participating in school sports. 

This demonstrates the real problem, which is that trans girls aren't overrepresented in sports--they are drastically underrepresented.

Trans boys and nonbinary kids assigned female at birth are also deeply underrepresented--even though the "logic" of trans sport participation bans doesn't apply to them at all. The claim is that "biological males" inevitably beat "biological females," giving all trans girls, trans women, and nonbinary folks assigned male at birth an unfair advantage. This myth has been debunked at length elsewhere. (And that one trans girl athlete in Utah? She works hard, but her performance is totally middle of the pack.) In any case, by that "logic", transmasculine youth should be at a sport disadvantage, with cis boys having an innate advantage over them. But because bigots like to cloak their bigotry in an appearance of fairness, many of the trans sport participation bans apply to all youths.

So, trans kids of all birth genders and all identities are being kept out of sports. Individual principals or coaches or school boards may have formally banned their participation. But it's rarely necessary. Because trans kids see clearly what is going on. It has been made crystal clear to them that if they try to participate in school athletics, peers will attack them in locker rooms, adults will spit at them in school board meetings, their parents will be targets of hate and perhaps death threats, and now that they might be removed from their family homes, because familial support of trans youths is being framed as child abuse by right-wing culture warriors. 

Trans girls do not present a threat to cis girls in sports. But because they are claimed to do so, almost all of the many thousands of trans youth around the country do not participate in athletics. As usual, conservative culture warriors reverse victim and offender, and abuse the marginalized. 

I don't really think I need to tell you this, but participating in athletics is healthy for children and adults, while being inactive is not. 

So: these bans may just formalize what is already the praxis. Trans kids are already kept from sporting participation. But the same was true of same-gender marriage bans. States passed them despite the fact that same-gender marriages weren't being performed. The importance of this legal discrimination is that the act of campaigning about and passing discriminatory laws is meant to create fear and silence. To cause people to stay in the closet. For the privileged to erase and "cancel" the marginalized, while claiming that it is they, the privileged, who are the real victims, the real targets of "cancellation."

Telling trans folks to just ignore these bills as trolling because there are few trans kids affected ignores the fact that the vast majority of trans kids, of every birth sex and every gender identity, are already affected.

It's really important that we see the real problem here for what it is. Because framing transfeminine people as a threat generates energy for right-wing politicians and for TERF influencers addicted to the "culture war," trans kids are vastly underrepresented in school sports. They have been segregated out formally, and terrorized informally into self-segregation. 

Young people need our support and encouragement, not to be terrorized. People who recognize the humanity of trans kids should be pointing this out every time some bigot starts with the TERF/right-wing claims that their actions are motivated by care about girls' and their participation in sports.