What comes after the insanity of the transgender moment?

The transgender moment, once hailed by many as a moral imperative and cultural breakthrough, is giving way to a reckoning as ideology is finally beginning to acknowledge reality.

A new study by political scientist Eric Kaufman found a marked decline in the number of students identifying as nonbinary or transgender between 2022 and 2025. At Brown University, the percentage of students identifying as nonbinary dropped from 5% to 2.8%, while at Andover, the figure fell from 9.2% to 3%.

The data for the study were drawn from three sources.

First, the massive annual Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) survey of American undergraduates, which covered over 68,000 students at more than 250 institutions. That data were then compared with data from Brown University, an elite private university that polls university students with about a 50 percent response rate, and Andover Phillips Academy (a private elite prep school), which conducts an annual student survey that is generally answered by 75% or more students.

All three data sources show the same declines in students, indicating a non-binary orientation. In addition to these three data sources, additional support for the declines in transgender identification is evident in the United States Census Bureau Pulse Study, which reported that transgender identification rose significantly after 2021 and then declined significantly in 2024.

These dramatic shifts are likely part of a broader cultural change—one that is willing to accept the reality that biological differences between men and women are fundamental and unable to be changed with the administration of hormones or surgical procedures. It appears that the gender-diverse identification movement may have peaked among Gen-Z as cultural norms have changed.

Kaufman suggests that the decline has nothing to do with political backlash or reduced social media use, but rather because of improved mental health and changing cultural norms.

It is about time. For over a decade, the transgender movement occupied a central place in cultural, legal, and institutional discourse. From “Dear Colleague” letters issuing from the Biden administration mandating that college administrators provide transgender students with locker rooms, bathrooms, and sports teams that match their gender identity instead of their biological sex, to prisons forced by federal mandates to accommodate transgender inmates in the gender specific prison of their choice, progressive politicians and media and medical enablers have attempted to deny the reality of the immutability of gender.

It appears that we are entering a new phase in the cultural norms surrounding gender identity, one marked less by celebration than by scrutiny and the acceptance of reality. From courtrooms to classrooms, the costs of uncritical affirmation of gender ideology are now clear. The lawsuits have already begun as increasing numbers of the families of teenagers are suing their medical providers who uncritically accepted their childhood claims of gender dysphoria and instituted draconian treatment programs without their knowledge of the full implications of such medical interventions.

In Florida, California, Texas, and Missouri, parents have filed suits or legal complaints against school districts and medical providers, alleging that gender-affirming care or social transitions (e.g., name/pronoun changes) were facilitated without their knowledge or consent.

For example, in Layla Jane v. Kaiser Permanente (California, 2023), a young woman filed a lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente and its affiliated doctors, alleging that she was prescribed puberty blockers and underwent a double mastectomy at age 13 without proper informed consent. In Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Permanente, also in California, the parents of Chloe Cole filed a lawsuit claiming that she was misled into undergoing “gender-affirming treatment” as a minor, including testosterone and a double mastectomy at age 15. Her parents allege they were not fully informed of the long-term consequences and risks. Both Chloe Cole and Layla Jane have “de-transitioned,” and Kaiser has paused all gender-affirming care for children and teens.

Faithful Catholics have always known that gender is immutable and can never be “changed.” Catholic World Report has been bringing attention to this problem for many years. For example, in February 2018, I wrote an article titled “Transgenderism: Semantic contagion or biological fact?”, in which I stated:

While there has been a dearth of reliable data on the surge in numbers of transgender children and adults in the United States, data from Sweden, Australia, and the United Kingdom indicates an explosion in demand for gender-identity treatment. According to the Guardian, the UK’s 14 gender identity clinics have seen referral increases of up to 100 percent in the past year. At London’s Charing Cross—the oldest and largest adult clinic—the number of referrals has more than tripled in 10 years, from 498 in 2006 to 1,892 in 2016, while a clinic in Nottingham reported a 28-fold increase in referrals in eight years, and a clinic in Exeter saw a 20-fold increase in a decade.

The increases are even more alarming for the UK’s clinic for children and adolescents, where there have been increases of 50 percent a year since 2011. In 2016, it had an unexpected and unprecedented increase of 100 percent, going from 697 to 1,398 referrals of children and adults. Similar increases were seen at the Sandyford clinic in Glasgow, which doubled its referrals in a year—from 90 to 178—in 2015; in Australia, there were 200 referrals to the gender clinic run by Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital—up from 18 referrals in 2012. In Sweden, the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital witnessed a 100 percent increase in numbers each year for the past several years, with a total of 197 children seeking treatment for transitioning in 2016.

We are experiencing a similar surge in the United States. UCLA’s Williams Institute, a think tank dedicated to conducting research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy, has revealed that the best estimate of the percentage of adults who identify as transgender in the United States is double that of the estimate produced in 2011, with 1.4 million adults identifying as transgender. Study authors suggest that “a perceived increase in visibility and social acceptance of transgender people may increase the number of individuals willing to identify as transgender.”

As I also noted, there was more likely a cultural cause for the trans-insanity. A quarter century ago, in December 2000, The Atlantic published an article titled “A New Way to be Mad,” by bioethicist Carl Elliott, which predicted all of this when he wrote that “once transsexual and gender-identity disorder and sex reassignment surgery became common linguistic currency, more people began conceptualizing and interpreting their experience in these terms. They began to make sense of their lives in a way that hadn’t been available to them before, and to some degree they actually became the kinds of people described by these terms.” I remarked:

Elliott was suggesting that it is possible that culture was not just revealing transgender individuals but was creating them. If so, we should have expected the tremendous growth we experienced, as an entire industry emerged to meet the growing need. From education specialists designing “safe schools” for transgender children, to transgender practitioners, publicly funded medical clinics, reimbursement schedules, and a growing body of academic work and activism, the transgender industry has exploded. Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking uses the term “semantic contagion” in his book Rewriting the Soul to describe the way in which publicly identifying and describing a condition like transgenderism creates the means by which that condition spreads.

The biological “born transgender” opinion was the dominant one, but that is changing because it contradicts common sense and reality. It also contradicts one of the main findings of a meta-analysis of other studies published in the fall of 2016 in The New Atlantis by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh, who found that the idea that a person might be a “man trapped in a woman’s body or a woman trapped in a man’s body is not supported by scientific evidence.”

Reasonable people who followed science and biology rather than sentiment and fads have always known this. In 2012, Cardinal Robert Prevost (now Pope Leo XIV) criticized what he called “sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the gospel”, including the homosexual lifestyle. While serving as a bishop in Peru, he opposed government efforts to include gender identity education in schools, calling the promotion of gender ideology “confusing” and claiming it “creates genders that don’t exist.” In saying so, he was not voicing Catholic doctrine but simply making sensible remarks. But common sense did not fare well for many years, as we well know.

As the cultural tide has begun to turn, it is time for society to catch up with both common sense and Catholic teachings on gender and to reckon with the consequences of medical and ideological overreach. There needs to be widespread acknowledgement that the transgender moment has been shaped far less by reality than by progressive narratives and radical ideologies created, in large part, by a powerful political and media alliance. Reality must once again be the norm.

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