In 2021, twenty six percent of ninth grade girls called themselves bisexual.
Four years later, that number has been cut in half.
The professor who found the drop says she has no idea why.
The Four Year Surge That Made Ninth Graders the New Face of Gender Politics
San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge has built a career tracking American teenagers through federal survey data, including the government's Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
What she found this time stopped her cold.
Ninth grade girls identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual collapsed from 30% in 2021 to 17% in 2025.
Bisexual identification among that same group of girls fell from 26% to 13% – cut exactly in half.
Twenge described the plunge as "a free fall."
This wasn't a slow drift.
Between 2015 and 2021, LGB identification among high school girls rocketed up 128%, riding a wave of "Pride" curricula and a Biden Department of Education that treated gender fluidity as settled science.
Boys barely moved the entire time – up from 5% to 9% at the peak, then back down to 7%.
Only girls got swept into the surge, and only girls are now walking it back.
Eric Kaufmann Says the Identity Numbers Never Matched Who Girls Actually Dated
Buckingham politics professor Eric Kaufmann has been tracking this same pattern in trans identification and found the same ugly truth Twenge's data now confirms for sexual orientation.
Kaufmann argues the shift tracks fashion, not biology.
Girls who called themselves bisexual on a government survey were not matched by a similar rise in girls who actually reported dating other girls.
The label spread faster than the behavior it claimed to describe.
Writing in The American Mind, Claremont Institute fellow Adam Ellwanger pins the spike's origin to the 2020 "Great Awokening" sparked by George Floyd's death.
Identifying as a sexual minority bought status in a culture obsessed with victim hierarchies, while identifying as straight meant settling for the bottom rung.
By the time Twenge's survey caught up, that culture was gone, and so were the girls who had traded on it.
Terry Schilling Says Cutting the Education Department Is Already Paying Off
Twenge herself will not connect her data to the Trump administration's policy reversals.
Asked what caused the ninth grade collapse, she admitted, "I have no idea."
Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, has a theory she will not say out loud.
"Amazing what happens when you cut the Department of Education and USAID," Schilling wrote on X.
Those aren't random targets.
Biden's Department of Education pushed Title IX guidance that redefined sex discrimination to include gender identity, pressuring schools nationwide to affirm whatever identity a teenager claimed that week.
USAID, meanwhile, funneled taxpayer money overseas into gender-identity programming that had nothing to do with foreign aid and everything to do with exporting the same ideology Biden's agencies pushed at home.
Trump's administration unwound both in 2025, and on September 28, 2026 – just days before Twenge's numbers came out – Education Secretary Linda McMahon signed the Title IX repeal, saying it "clears the Biden Administration's illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations."
The Reward Schools Built for Bisexual Identity Just Disappeared
Adults built this trend, and adults are the reason it's unwinding.
Fourteen and fifteen year old girls do not independently discover a sexual identity at triple the rate every few years and then abandon it just as fast on their own – they absorb what the adults running their schools, their curricula, and their federal agencies tell them is rewarded.
Claiming to be bisexual paid off for exactly as long as schools and federal agencies said it would.
Now that the Department of Education is smaller, the Title IX rule is gone, and the culture has moved on from the "Great Awokening," the payoff is gone too, and so is the behavior it bought.
Twenge can act mystified if she wants.
Parents who watched their daughters' schools run this experiment already know the answer she won't give.
Sources:
- Rachel del Guidice, "Teen Girls Identifying Lesbian, Bisexual Plummet in Stunning Reversal, New Data Shows," Fox News, October 12, 2026.
- Glenn T. Stanton, "New CDC Report: Teen Sexual LGB Identity Drops Dramatically," Daily Citizen, October 1, 2026.
- Adam Ellwanger, "The LGBTQ Tidal Wave Was Never About a Social Contagion," The American Mind, March 20, 2026.
- Jeff Johnston, "Department of Education Defines Sex in Title IX to Mean Male and Female," Daily Citizen, September 28, 2026.
- Terry Schilling, X post (@Schilling1776), October 2026.
