Following studies released in October that found a decline in young Americans identifying as “transgender” since 2020, another recent analysis has drawn the same conclusion from the data and found that levels of trans identity five years ago were unusually high to begin with.

Statistician Ryan Burge investigated data from the last five years of the Cooperative Election Study (CES), finding that in 2020, 8.6% of 18–22-year-olds identified as “transgender.” He called the 2020 figure “without question, the high-water mark,” and found that in 2021, just 5.6% of the same demographic identified as “transgender.” In 2022, the result was 6.1%, and in 2024 — the CES did not ask about “transgender” identity in 2023 — 3.2% said they were “transgender.”

Burge found similar trends across larger age groups. “Transgender” identity declined by 4.1 percentage points between 2020 and 2024 among 18 to 25-year-olds, 3.4 points among 18 to 30-year-olds, and 3.2 points among 18 to 40-year-olds. He discovered that 2.5% of all U.S. adults considered themselves “transgender” in 2020, but that just 1% said the same thing in 2024.

“So the sharpest decline is clearly concentrated among the youngest slice of the American electorate — and the share keeps dropping as older respondents are included,” he wrote on his Substack, Graphs About Religion. He later found that while young adults are mostly responsible for the decline, “The drop was widespread, showing up even among people born as early as 1985.”

Burge questioned whether politics, education level, or religion could have driven the decline in “transgender” identification and found a drop in “transgender” identity across every subgroup. 

“But as I worked through the data, I kept coming back to the same thought: 2020 was an outlier when it comes to transgender identification,” he remarked. “You can see it clearly across all these graphs.”

“Maybe it was COVID. That was such an odd time in America — for a whole bunch of reasons,” he continued.

Zeale previously reported that young adults’ tendency to identify as “transgender” was first noted by political scientist Eric Kaufmann, who found that “transgender” identity fell by 50% between 2023 and 2025. Psychologist Jean Twenge found a similar trend, writing in a Substack post, “The peak of trans identification is in the past.”