So many leftist issues and their policy prescriptions have been fully exposed as fraudulent the over past 12-24 months. Demand for artificial intelligence and cloud computing energy needs has decimated the green energy/climate change agenda (ask Bill Gates what he thinks this week). Net zero emissions and infinite circular recycling are fantasies that are scientifically impossible. DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is a dead acronym, if not yet an entirely euthanized policy.
Now the alleged science that supported one of their multitude of discrimination paradigms — in the case of “transgender” identity — has collapsed. Social scientist Eric Kaufman writes for Unherd.com:
A surprising shift is taking place in the gender and sexual identities of young Americans. Data from my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans”, shows that since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in that year, just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.
The findings confirmed observations made in 2020 by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who was targeted by cancel culture for his intellectual honesty. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal today:
I shared a link to an article from the Guardian with the accompanying quote: “Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare confirmed a 1,500% rise between 2008 and 2018 in gender dysphoria diagnoses among 13- to 17-year-olds born as girls.” My commentary was brief: “Two words: social contagion.”
Within hours, colleagues denounced me as a “transphobic” bigot. Anonymous activists emailed universities to poison my job prospects. A professional job board even published mock job listings warning others not to hire me. My academic career never recovered.
But I wasn’t making an offhand remark or comparing a group of people to a disease vector, as some accused me of doing. I was referring to research published by Lisa Littman, a physician and researcher formerly with Brown university, who had coined the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” in a 2018 peer-reviewed paper to describe a newly emerging cohort of adolescents—overwhelmingly girls with no childhood history of gender dysphoria or even sex nonconformity—who suddenly began describing themselves as transgender, often after friends in their peer groups did the same. Dr. Littman proposed that this pattern was best explained by social contagion, meaning the spread of ideas or behaviors through peer influence. The term isn’t an insult; it’s a well-established sociological concept used to describe how trends such as eating disorders and even suicide clusters can spread.
Wright’s experience undoubtedly mirrored that waged upon executives at America’s major corporations, who were bullied by LGBTQ activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign to adopt employment benefits policies to include insurance coverage for things like “gender transitions,” including for dependent children of workers. Companies eagerly implemented the policies in order to get a perfect 100-percent score on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index survey, after which their marketing departments would blast out press releases celebrating their achievement.
Yet, as Wright further added, the science behind the idea that “trans” is biological was always bogus:
The purported evidence for innate, immutable transgender identity is deeply flawed, however, as is clear upon closer examination. Studies of neuroanatomy, heritability and prenatal hormone exposure that claim a biological basis for gender identity are replete with small and selective samples, poor replication and uncontrolled confounding factors such as sexual orientation and cross-sex hormone treatment. Properly interpreted, they describe correlates of sex nonconformity and same-sex attraction, not proof of an innate transgender identity.
The notion that transgender identity is biologically hard-wired can’t explain why there has been a more than 20-fold surge in those identifying as transgender in the U.S. since 2010.
The social-contagion hypothesis was never hateful. It was purely descriptive: a recognition that social and cultural factors shape human behavior. For years, even hinting that such factors influenced transgender identities could end a career. Now, as data accumulate, this is becoming harder for anyone to deny.
In recent years NLPC confronted, through the shareholder proposal process, the unscientific basis upon which companies provided gender mutilation treatments and surgeries for employees and their minor dependents. We reiterated our call last month for Corporate America to reverse its policies for these benefits.
Sound science has overcome the propaganda — it’s time for companies like Disney and Pepsi to change course before the detransitioners and their lawyers come looking for reparations.
(Pictured above — Chloe Cole, who presented NLPC’s shareholder proposal at Disney in 2023).
