It’s no longer as much in fashion to be sexually confused.
According to a new survey from The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the percentage of undergraduate students in the United States identifying as other than their actual male or female sex has dropped from 6.8% in 2022 and 2023 to 3.6% in 2025.
Long suspected as being a social contagion as opposed to an inherent genetic or biological construct, the dramatic drop confirms what many of us have believed – the “trans” movement is a destructive fad.
So, what’s behind the shift?
“This is the biggest indicator yet that we aren’t just winning politically but the entire culture is shifting and waking up to the horrors of gender ideology,” wrote de-transitioner Chloe Cole on X. “Let’s finish the job! Every de-transitioner should sue their doctors for every penny they have.”
Elon Musk agreed.
“Yes, time to restore sanity and truth,” he responded. “What a terrible lie to tell a child they have the ‘wrong’ body.”
The new data also found that freshmen were less likely than seniors to fall for the delusionary labels – additional indication that the “trans” movement is akin to fading fashion trends like wide-legged jeans – only with deadly consequences.
Some have speculated that the drop is driven by a constellation of factors, including a corresponding decline in mental illness and depression, along with a successful or at least increasingly effective campaign against the woke propaganda infiltrating schools and social media.
While the trend is promising and revealing, it once again exposes the heartbreaking torture that far too many young people have endured and encountered over the years, often at the hands of adults who knew better but who refused to confront the cultural insanity.
“It’s horrific what they put me through when I look back on some of the things they told me and my parents,” Cole acknowledged. ‘Would you rather have a living transgender son or a dead daughter?’”
That manipulative and destructive line of defense and justification has enslaved thousands of young people in recent years.
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order banning the surgical mutilation of children. In June, the Department of Justice announced plans to target medical professionals and institutions experimenting on sexually-confused children with the use of drugs, hormones and surgeries.
Attorney General Pam Bondi stated: “There is a radical ideological agenda being pushed throughout every aspect of American life – from TV programming and Hollywood film production to children’s books and elementary school classrooms – that teaches children to deny biological reality. Gender ideology, masked as science, teaches that children should process adolescent stress and confusion as a case of mistaken identity and that the solution is not to root out and eliminate the underlying condition but to acquiesce in it permanently through life-altering chemical and surgical intervention.”
It can’t be coincidental that the significant drop in “trans”-identifying youth corresponds with the arrival of a president who unapologetically affirms the biological reality of just two sexes – male and female. Unconcerned with offending the deluded, Trump’s use of the bully pulpit to declare common sense has a cumulative effect on culture.
Highly impressionable young people, especially, are hungry for guidance and leadership. They are poorly served when their confusion is affirmed, enabled, and compounded by the lies and lunacy of radicals who make things up and try and destroy and redefine God’s perfect and exclusive creation of male and female.
Daily Citizen is a news division of Focus on the Family that provides a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.
