Bye-bye bisexual women: Young adults move away from LGBT identities
- Joanne Jacobs
- Mar 8
- 1 min read
Young people are deciding they're heterosexual after all, writes psychologist Jean Twenge on Generation Tech. Fewer young adults identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual, according to her analysis of the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which includes 2025 data.
Twenty percent of 18- to 24-year-olds chose a non-heterosexual identity in 2022. By 2025, that dropped to 15 percent.
By far, the biggest change is in young women calling themselves bisexual. In 2015, 8 percent of young women were bisexual. That soared to 23 percent in 2022, and fell by 18 percent in 2025. This could be a culture shift, writes Twenge.
Last fall, when researcher Eric Kaufmann wrote that “trans identification is in free fall among the young,” Twenge thought he was "a little premature." He was relying on data for non-binary identification that was not nationally representative. "But after digging into the best data I could find, I concluded he was probably right: Identifying as transgender and non-binary really did decline among U.S. young adults after 2023, and even among teens as young as 13."
On the Brown campus, many bisexual females are "non-practicing," writes Ivy Rockmore for the Brown Daily Herald. They date only males, but see bisexual as more socially acceptable. "I feel like bisexual has become the new straight," a friend told her.
Somewhere around the year 2018 (if I remember correctly), I would overhear young female 9th graders discussing their 'sexuality' with each other, in those minutes before the bell rang for class to start. Some were lesbians, some were non-binary, one memorably was 'pansexual.' I was able to observe these students for several years (I was the only teacher of the subject, so they stayed with me), and I believe that 1) they were encouraged/required by the ambient culture to make these overt declarations, and 2) they were not willing to participate in the heterosexual 'dating' culture as they understood it. They had smart phones, social media was already a thing, kids (we were told) were all looking at porn--so …
You need to have some empathy for women students at an institution like mine (small, non-elite, under-endowed private, overwhelmingly undergraduate). They may want boyfriends, but they run into a demographic issue right off the bat: a 60-40 female-male ratio. A good chunk of those boys are more interested in their Playstations and X-Boxes than the dating scene. Another chunk of boys have been warned off college women by the freshman orientation skits onward that they are suspected predators and a "Dear Colleague"-style Star Chamber, guilty-until-proven-innocent proceeding awaits them if they so much as annoy the wrong woman. It's not unusual in my classes that they sort themselves spontaneously into men on one side of the room and women on th…
Wait till they say they are super straight!
Cue the stories of teachers and professors feeling unsafe in their classrooms and schools because students have abandoned the dogma of "educators".