Are there really fewer queer teens than there used to be?

You’ve probably seen the myriad headlines claiming that LGBTQ2S+ identification among young people is in supposed “free fall.” If you haven’t, bless your soul. But as a recap: this claim is based entirely on a Substack post (yes) by Jean M. Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University. She echoed politics professor Eric Kaufmann’s use  the term “free fall” to describe her observations on data drawn from the Center for Disease Control’s Youth Risk survey, which surveys American teenagers in grades nine through 12, though Twenge notes that the decline in LGBTQ2S+ identification among that demographic is particularly notable for 14- and 15-year-olds, primarily girls. (Kaufman’s original post was in relation to his own research, which Twenge also cites.) Obviously this figure was like candy to the right-wing media, with Fox News, the Christian Post and the blog for the conservative Evangelical organization Focus on the Family pouncing on the story. 

It’s worth noting that Twenge’s analysis of the CDC data does not paint a complete picture—in their independent newsletter, Outsourced, longtime queer journalist Mary Emily O’Hara found that the same dataset reveals that lesbian self-identification among teenage girls who reported having both female and male sex partners actually increased significantly from 2021 to 2025. Even so, a decline in queer teenagers telling the U.S. government about their sexualities wouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. According to the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that tracks anti-LGBTQ2S+ legislation, 12 states currently have so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws on the books, which ban all discussions of LGBTQ2S+ people and issues in schools; four more states have restrictions on discussions of “homosexuality” in specific curricula, such as sex education. The proliferation of this kind of legislation also led to an astronomical rise in online discussions referring to queer and trans people as “groomers,” which has also been arguably the dominant right-wing narrative about us for the entirety of the 2020s. (Though of course, LGBTQ2S+ teens have always been the subjects of media fascination and moral panic—earlier this month marked the 21-year anniversary of a TIME magazine cover feature with the headline “The Battle Over Gay Teens.”)

 

@xtramagazine There were no trans characters in films released by major studios in 2025. That’s according to GLAAD’s Where We Are in Film study, which examined LGBTQ2S+ representation across 225 films released by 10 major studios in 2025. Not only did none of the tracked films include a single trans character but LGBTQ2S+ representation declined overall. Of the 225 films tracked, only 20.4 percent contained LGBTQ2S+ characters, a decrease from the 23.6 percent inclusive films counted in 2024. Representation has been trending down across the board. LGBTQ2S+ characters are not only in fewer films but they’re also getting less screen time and have less narrative significance. GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis warned that the overall decline in LGBTQ2S+ characters on screen will have long-term impacts. “If the industry doesn’t prioritize investing in films with LGBTQ2S+ characters, it risks losing a generation that will go elsewhere to find entertainment that does include our community.” We break down what you need to know from the annual report. #lgbtqnews #film #glaad #filmnews #lgbtq ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

It’s important to remember amid all the noise that even despite the veneer of legitimacy that is granted by using government data, this is still ultimately a battle of narratives. Of course the right wing blew up a singular Substack post with a clickbaity title, because they are pushing the narrative that being LGBTQ2S+, especially among young people, is a fad. They cling on to this notion of “free fall” because they are afraid of us. They want desperately to believe that they are winning the culture wars, that the unruly threats of queerness and transness can be eradicated through law and order. Certainly, these laws and their resulting effects on popular discourse have made the lives of queer and trans Americans much harder, and that’s not even to mention the devastating material effects of the myriad attacks on access to transition-related care, especially for young people. That’s also exactly why it’s a fool’s errand to draw any kinds of conclusions about queer people from government data collected under the Trump administration. And given that there have been reports that states like Texas have created literal lists of people who have requested a gender marker change on their driver’s licence, there are, once again, many reasons why people might not feel entirely comfortable telling the truth about their genders and sexualities to government entities right now. 

We also have to remember that our existences are so much more vast and rich than data and statistics could ever capture, regardless of who’s in power. Queer and trans people have existed at the margins of society for far longer than the brief window of relative acceptance that followed the legalization of same-sex marriage in America. Homophobes and transphobes have never and will never manage to get rid of us, no matter how hard they try. I’m thinking of the Hays Code, for example; for those unfamiliar, this was a set of guidelines that effectively censored American mainstream film from 1934 to 1968. This included banning “any inference of sex perversion,” which meant that depictions of open homosexuality were forbidden in Hollywood for nearly four decades, though this began to wane by the 1960s. That didn’t mean that queer characters disappeared from Hollywood films entirely—the term “queer coding” was originally used to describe how filmmakers snuck queer themes into their films anyway, even though much of this ended up being in the form of villainy and monstrosity. Still, queerness persevered, and many of us have found ways to embrace and reclaim those negative associations. 

Queer and trans existence has always been about hiding in plain sight, and seeking one another out regardless. In Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, a seminal 1977 gay manifesto that’s served as a personal touchstone, he writes, “The faggots lived with the men without ever being part of the men. It was necessary to develop secret ways to know each other. Once they learned to find each other anywhere they went, they learned that they were everywhere. Then they began to talk to each other and love each other in earnest.” Beyond identification and kinship, queer and trans people have also always looked out for one another’s material needs. There’s a long tradition of trans people finding ways to access hormones and other forms of transition-related care regardless of their legal status, which necessarily requires utmost secrecy. I’m not arguing that queer and trans people should have to conduct our affairs in secrecy, or that active government suppression is a good thing. But rather than succumbing to despair when I see conservatives rejoicing over the notion that our numbers are lessening, I take comfort in knowing that we will always find ways to flourish in the shadows, and that our flourishing can necessarily never be fully accounted for.