Bye-bye bisexual women: Young adults move away from LGBT identities

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.