The percentage of ninth-grade girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual fell from 30% in 2021 to 17% in 2025, according to an analysis of federal survey data, with researchers reporting that the decline is concentrated among younger girls and that its underlying causes remain uncertain.

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom

WASHINGTON — The percentage of American teenage girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual has declined substantially over the past four years, reversing a sharp increase recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic and prompting researchers to examine whether changing social attitudes, generational differences or other factors are influencing how adolescents describe their sexual orientation.

The most pronounced change occurred among ninth-grade girls, whose reported lesbian or bisexual identification fell from 30% in 2021 to 17% in 2025, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey data by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge.

The decline was particularly significant among girls identifying as bisexual. That percentage dropped from 26% in 2021 to 13% in 2025, representing a reduction of half in four years.

The findings were highlighted in an Oct. 8 Washington Post report examining changes in teenage sexual identity, which found that the downward trend was concentrated among younger adolescents rather than occurring uniformly across all high school students.

Although ninth-grade girls reported substantially lower rates of lesbian or bisexual identification, the percentage of boys identifying as gay or bisexual has remained relatively stable over the past decade. Older teenage girls also showed comparatively modest changes, with their reported rates remaining above levels recorded before the pandemic.

The differences have complicated efforts to explain the decline, particularly because the trend appears strongest among students entering high school rather than among adolescents approaching adulthood.

Twenge, who has studied generational changes in attitudes and behavior for decades, described the decline as striking but cautioned against drawing conclusions about its causes.

“It really does look like a free fall,” Twenge told The Washington Post. “But what’s causing it is unclear.”

Twenge published her examination of the 2025 figures through her Substack publication, Generation Tech, drawing on the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which collects information about the experiences, behaviors and health of American high school students.

The federal survey is conducted every two years and provides researchers with information about subjects ranging from mental health and substance use to sexual behavior and personal identity.

The latest findings show that sexual identity reporting among adolescents has not followed a consistent pattern across age groups or between boys and girls.

During the years surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers documented an increase in the percentage of teenage girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual, particularly among younger students. That increase subsequently began to reverse, with the latest figures indicating an especially pronounced decline among ninth-grade girls.

The percentage identifying as bisexual accounted for most of the change. In 2021, approximately one in four ninth-grade girls selected that identity, compared with roughly one in eight in 2025.

The broader category of girls identifying as either lesbian or bisexual declined by 13 percentage points during the same period, from 30% to 17%.

Those figures describe the percentage of students selecting particular sexual identity categories on a survey. They do not independently establish that adolescents’ underlying attractions or experiences changed at the same rate.

Researchers distinguish between sexual identity, attraction and behavior because those measures do not always correspond directly, particularly during adolescence, when some young people are still exploring how they understand and describe themselves.

Changes in survey responses can therefore reflect several influences, including evolving personal understanding, social environments, willingness to disclose an identity and differences in how students interpret available categories.

The CDC’s survey data document the reported changes but do not identify which of those possible explanations contributed to the latest decline.

Twenge said the timing and age distribution of the trend make a single political explanation difficult to establish.

The decline began while former President Joe Biden remained in office, before President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. That timeline complicates claims that the change resulted primarily from policies adopted during Trump’s second administration.

“If it was politics, why would that only have an effect on ninth-graders and not 17- and 18-year-olds?” Twenge asked. “It maybe has something to do with it, but it’s clearly not the only thing going on. It’s a mystery.”

Her comments reflect the difficulty of identifying a cause when survey results vary substantially among students who are only a few years apart in age.

If changes in national politics were the principal factor influencing sexual identity reporting, researchers would need to explain why younger teenage girls showed a considerably larger shift than older girls and why boys’ reported identities remained comparatively stable.

The data do not rule out political or cultural influences, but they also do not establish that government policies or changes in public discourse produced the observed decline.

The findings have nevertheless attracted attention from conservative commentators and organizations that have criticized the growth of LGBTQ identification among younger Americans.

Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, attributed the development to changes made under the Trump administration.

“Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID,” Schilling wrote in a post on X.

Schilling’s statement suggested that reductions in federal government programs contributed to the decline, although the survey findings do not establish a causal relationship between those policy changes and the percentage of teenage girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual.

Other conservative commentators have suggested that social pressure encouraged some adolescents to adopt LGBTQ identities during a period when public discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity became more prominent.

During an Oct. 12 Fox News segment discussing the latest findings, commentator Tomi Lahren argued that cultural expectations and progressive political activism may have influenced how some Generation Z teenagers identified themselves.

Lahren suggested that some adolescents adopted bisexual identities to demonstrate social or political affiliation rather than exclusively to describe their sexual attractions.

Those interpretations remain contested because the reported survey data do not measure whether students selected identity labels because of political beliefs, peer pressure or a desire for social acceptance.

Researchers say such explanations would require additional evidence, including information about students’ motivations and how their responses change over time.

Jody Herman, a senior scholar at the Williams Institute, a research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, that studies sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, questioned whether the available analysis was sufficient to establish the statistical significance of the reported changes.

“The study doesn’t provide confidence intervals to determine whether the differences are actually significant,” Herman told The Washington Post.

“The narrative around a decline in LGBT identity among youth has been around for a while now. We’ll continue to look at trends over time in our work, but the evidence provided so far for a decline leaves more questions than answers.”

Confidence intervals are statistical measures that help researchers evaluate the precision of survey estimates. They are particularly relevant when examining smaller demographic groups or comparing results collected in different years.

Without those measures, it can be difficult to determine how much confidence researchers should place in a particular percentage-point change or whether differences could partly reflect sampling variability.

The size of the reported decline among ninth-grade girls has attracted attention, but additional statistical analysis would help establish its strength and consistency.

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System relies on surveys administered to students rather than a continuous record tracking the same individuals throughout adolescence.

Consequently, the ninth-grade girls surveyed in 2021 were not the same group of ninth-grade girls surveyed in 2025. The results compare successive groups of students at similar ages, not changes in the identities of individual participants over four years.

That distinction matters when interpreting the findings. A decline between survey years could indicate differences between incoming groups of high school students rather than widespread changes in how the same teenagers identify over time.

Longitudinal research following individuals across multiple years would provide additional information about whether adolescents maintain, revise or change their descriptions of sexual orientation as they grow older.

The latest results also differ from the longer-term pattern among older teenage girls.

Although the percentage of girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual increased after the pandemic and subsequently declined, older students’ rates have remained comparatively stable and continue to exceed those recorded before 2020.

That difference suggests the broader trend cannot accurately be described as an equivalent decline across the entire teenage population.

Instead, the strongest documented change involves younger girls, particularly those selecting bisexual as their sexual identity.

Among boys, the relative stability of gay and bisexual identification over the past decade presents another question for researchers studying adolescent identity.

Social influences, developmental experiences and patterns of self-identification can differ between boys and girls, but the latest survey analysis does not establish which differences might explain the contrasting trends.

The role of social media is another possible area of investigation.

Adolescents have experienced substantial changes in online communication during the past decade, with social platforms influencing how young people encounter information, discuss identity and interact with peers.

The pandemic also disrupted schools, friendships and other social environments during an important period of adolescent development.

Researchers have examined how those disruptions affected teenage mental health, social relationships and behavior, but the specific relationship between pandemic experiences and subsequent changes in sexual identity reporting remains uncertain.

The timing of the increase and subsequent decline has made the pandemic a possible subject for further study rather than a confirmed explanation.

Twenge said she intends to examine several hypotheses involving pandemic-related changes, politics and social media to determine whether they help explain the results.

Her proposed work reflects the need to distinguish between observing a trend and identifying the mechanisms behind it.

Although the decline in ninth-grade girls’ reported lesbian or bisexual identification is substantial in the published figures, the data alone cannot establish whether it represents changing attractions, different identity preferences or altered willingness to report a particular label.

The distinction is especially relevant because public discussion of LGBTQ identification has become increasingly political.

Conservative organizations have criticized policies involving sexual orientation and gender identity in schools, while LGBTQ advocacy groups have emphasized the importance of supportive environments and students’ ability to describe their identities without discrimination.

Those competing positions have contributed to different interpretations of the same survey results.

Some commentators view the decline as evidence of changing cultural attitudes, while researchers caution that the available numbers do not identify why particular students selected different responses.

The CDC data also do not establish that all students experiencing same-sex attraction identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, or that individuals using those labels necessarily report identical experiences.

Researchers therefore generally caution against treating sexual identity categories as interchangeable with measures of attraction or sexual behavior.

The latest findings are notable because they reverse a relatively recent increase among younger teenage girls while leaving other groups largely unchanged.

The 2021 figures showed that 30% of ninth-grade girls identified as lesbian or bisexual, with 26% identifying specifically as bisexual. By 2025, those shares had fallen to 17% and 13%, respectively.

Meanwhile, older girls continued reporting higher rates than before the pandemic, and boys’ identification patterns remained comparatively stable over the longer period.

Those differences provide important context for assessing the scope of the decline and whether it represents a temporary fluctuation or a more sustained generational change.

Additional survey cycles will help determine whether the lower percentages among ninth-grade girls persist as those students move through high school.

Researchers will also be able to compare future ninth-grade groups with earlier cohorts to assess whether the decline continues, stabilizes or reverses.

For now, the analysis identifies a significant shift in how younger teenage girls report their sexual identities, but the factors responsible remain unresolved.

Twenge and other researchers say further statistical analysis and investigation into social, cultural and developmental influences will be necessary before drawing firm conclusions about what caused the change.

The data document a sharp reversal among ninth-grade girls between 2021 and 2025, while leaving open the central question of why that reversal occurred.

Original article