fewer ninth graders say they're gay or bi. the researcher who found it says she has "no idea" why. the right already knows, apparently.

via Jean Twenge's Generation Tech and The Washington Post, first spotted by Metro Weekly

"I have to confess: I have no idea." That is San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge, on her Substack, explaining why American 14- and 15-year-olds suddenly stopped telling a government survey they're gay or bi. Credit where it's due: that is more honesty than anyone else in this story manages.

what the survey numbers show

Twenge went through the raw data from the CDC's 2025 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a national survey of high schoolers. Among ninth graders, she found, identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual dropped from 17% in 2023 to 11% in 2025. "That really does look like a free fall," she wrote. Twelfth graders went from 18% to 16%, which is barely a stumble.

Almost all of the drop is younger girls, and most of that is bisexual girls. Among ninth-grade girls, LGB identity fell from 30% in 2021 to 17% in 2025, and bisexual identity alone went from 26% to 13%. Twelfth-grade girls went 26%, 28%, 25%. Her counts only include students who picked lesbian, gay, bisexual or straight; "not sure" and "another way" are left out, because the survey changed those options between years.

the part where everyone guesses

Online, a conservative activist credited the cuts to the Education Department and USAID, the Post reported. Twenge was unimpressed. "If it was politics, why would that only have an effect on ninth-graders and not 17- and 18-year-olds?" she told the Post. "It's a mystery."

Jody Herman of UCLA's Williams Institute pointed out the thing nobody tweeting about this checked. "The study doesn't provide confidence intervals to determine whether the differences are actually significant," she wrote to the Post, and "the evidence provided so far for a decline leaves more questions than answers." Twenge herself says it "could be a harbinger of a coming wave of change, or it could be a blip."

So the honest summary is: one survey, two years, one age group, no error bars, no explanation. Ninth graders in spring 2025 were born in 2009 or 2010, which means they have been teenagers for exactly as long as the current political climate has been telling them what happens to kids who say the word bisexual out loud. We have no idea either. We do have a guess about who is less likely to say it on a government form.