There’s been a pretty grand assumption over the past decade or so that every new generation of American kids would identify as more sexually “fluid” than the one before it. That’s been really discouraging for a lot of folks who believe in faith and tradition.
But it looks like that’s not what’s happening after all.
New CDC data shows something very interesting is happening among American teens, and the trend is moving in a direction many didn’t expect… especially with the non-stop barrage of pro-LGBTQ propaganda that’s been stuffed down kids’ gullets.
As it turns out, fewer teens are identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
And the drop is especially noticeable among the youngest kids in the survey.
That’s surprising for a lot of reasons. Like we said, young people have grown up surrounded by LGBTQ propaganda in schools, entertainment, social media, advertising, and just about every other corner of modern culture. For years, the numbers seemed to be moving steadily in one direction. Up, up, up.
Now they’re suddenly moving the other way.
The share of American teenagers who self-identify as homosexual or bisexual is on the decline, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC has released its biennial National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which “provides a snapshot of the health and well-being of high school students in the United States in 2025 and changes over the past 2 and 10 years” in the areas of diet, physical activity, sleep, online behavior, mental health, and suicide risk.While the report only highlights a cross-section of issues the CDC considers statistically significant, San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge reviewed the full data available through the CDC’s data system and found that “younger teens are now much less likely to say they are lesbian, gay, or bisexual.”
Sixteen percent of 17-18 year olds identified as “LGB” (lesbian, gay, or bisexual), which was the highest amount for any subset of teens but a two-point drop from 2023. All younger groups were smaller and showed a bigger drop, with the most significant being 14-15 year olds, 17 percent of whom identified as LGBT in 2023 down to 11 percent in 2025.
The numbers we like to see going down are the 14- and 15-year-olds. That group fell from 17 percent to 11 percent in only two years.
Big numbers.
And it gets even more interesting when you break the numbers down by sex, because girls are driving a huge chunk of the change.
For years, teenage girls were responsible for much of the explosive growth in bisexual identification. Now that trend is reversing just as quickly.
Twenge herself called the decline a “free fall.”
LifeSite:
Twenge, who noted she’s been on both sides of whether past data supported such claims, said that the “striking” result “really does look like a free fall,” which “appears to be driven almost entirely by girls.”
She added that the shift was largely due to girls ceasing to identify as bisexual, from 26 percent of 9th grade girls in 2021 to just 13 percent in 2025.The prior sharp increase shows how stark the change has been. “Between 2015 and 2021, the number of high school-aged girls identifying as LGB increased by 128 percent, while the self-identification of boys as LGB nearly doubled, increasing by 99 percent, between 2015 and 2023,” the Daily Caller notes. “Thus, 9th grade girls were the largest factor in the latest drop, with the percentage of girls identifying as LGB nearly cut in half, decreasing from 30 percent in 2021 to 17 percent in 2025.”
Ninth-grade girls went from 30 percent identifying as LGB in 2021 to 17 percent four years later. Bisexual identification among that same age group fell even harder.
So, now we’re wondering how much of that “huge increase” we saw over the previous decade was really about fixed sexual attraction and how much was influenced by culture, social trends, peer groups, or the way young people were encouraged to think about identity.
Probably most of it.
But when a number can shoot upward that dramatically and then start collapsing just a few years later, things start looking sketchy.
Gen Z has already turned out to be a strange little generation in that regard.
They grew up more online than any generation, but many of them are now looking to get offline. They romanticize old technology, physical media, records, CDs, flip phones, older fashions, and pieces of life from generations they never even experienced.
There’s a certain “looking-back” quality to them that’s really endearing.
There’s another piece of the CDC data we thought was interesting, because while teen LGBTQ identification was dropping, teen mental health was improving at the same time.
LifeSite:
The data also show that reported feelings of sadness or hopelessness declined from 40 percent in 2023 to 33 percent in 2025, and poor mental health from 29 percent to 23 percent. More significantly, students planning for suicide declined from 16 percent to 12 percent, and actual suicide attempts fell from 9 percent to 6 percent.
Twenge declined to offer a possible cause for the shift in sexual self-identification, but others suggested it was further evidence that such trends among impressionable youth are at least partially attributable to cultural influences, rather than being innate, hardwired sexual attraction.
Fewer kids reporting hopelessness, fewer suicide plans, and fewer kids who are sexually confused.
It’s good news that kids aren’t going where everybody assumed they were headed… off the LGBTQ cliff.
But for a generation that seems more and more curious about the world their parents and grandparents left behind, it might be the least surprising twist of all.
Source: https://revolver.news/2026/09/american-teens-are-rejecting-the-lgbtq-lifestyle-big-time/
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