Teen Identity Numbers Shift Sharply in Four Years

Volunteers assist people resting on mats in a temporary shelter — Photo: Pressmaster / Shutterstock

A new federal survey shows ninth-grade girls reporting lesbian or bisexual identities fell sharply in four years, raising hard questions about what schools are measuring and how culture shapes what teens say they are.

Story Highlights

Federal survey estimates show a large drop in ninth-grade girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual between 2021 and 2025.
The biggest change is in bisexual identity, which reportedly fell by about half.
The survey measures identity labels, not fixed orientation; different students answered in each year.
Experts urge caution due to response-rate limits and shifting answer choices across years.

What the new survey trend actually shows

Reports based on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey say the share of ninth-grade girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual dropped from about 30% in 2021 to about 17% in 2025, with most of the shift coming from fewer girls choosing the bisexual label. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey is a national school-based survey run with sampling and weighting methods and an overall response rate a little over 30% in 2025. The figures describe identities students selected on the forms, not private attractions or behavior.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2025 questionnaire offers several identity options, including heterosexual, gay or lesbian, bisexual, another identity, questioning, and not understanding the question. Analysts reporting the decline compared only three labels to match past years. That choice leaves out “another identity” and “questioning” responses that might change the totals if counted. Because the 2021 and 2025 surveys questioned different students, the decline shows a population shift, not confirmed changes by the same teens.

Why the measurement needs careful reading

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey methods document a complex sample and a modest response rate. Weighting helps fix differences, but it cannot remove all nonresponse risks. If students who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual were more or less likely to answer in one year, the totals could move. Commentators also note the published summaries do not include uncertainty ranges for the specific ninth-grade estimates that went viral, which limits how confident we can be about the exact size of the change.

Survey designers also warn that identity, attraction, and behavior are separate things. A teen can feel same-sex attraction, report opposite-sex behavior, and still choose a different label, or no label at all. The 2025 Data User’s Guide stresses how these measures capture related but distinct ideas. That means large year-to-year swings may reflect relabeling, comfort with disclosure at school, or broader social pressure, not only deep shifts in attraction. The data alone cannot pick one cause without further study.

What longer-term research says about teens and identity

Peer-reviewed longitudinal studies that tracked the same youths over time found several paths. Many kept the same identity, while others moved from bisexual to gay or lesbian, and some remained bisexual across waves. One recent three-year study of more than three thousand Canadian adolescents found groups that were mostly plurisexual and others that were consistently questioning or emerging sexual minority, alongside a large consistent heterosexual group. These patterns show that change in labels during adolescence happens in normal development.

The share of teenage girls who identify as lesbian or bisexual has dropped sharply in just four years in the US, per CDC data highlighted by The Washington Post.

Among ninth-grade girls:

Lesbian or bisexual: 30% in 2021 → 17% in 2025.

Bisexual alone: 26% in 2021 → 13% 2025.

— Straturka (@straturka) October 27, 2026

Researchers also link identity “integration” with mental health outcomes. Greater integration correlated with fewer depressive and anxious symptoms and higher self-esteem in a cohort of sexual-minority youth. That finding matters for policy. Adults in power—school leaders, health officials, and elected representatives—should read the new trend with care. Teens are signaling something changed in how they label themselves. Before anyone claims victory or blames an enemy, the country needs better data that follows the same students and reports clear uncertainty.

What to watch next and why it matters

Two steps could give clearer answers. First, a confidential panel that surveys the same students yearly could test whether teens keep, change, or drop labels, and why. Second, a public reanalysis of the raw responses could show if the decline holds when counting “another identity” and “questioning” the same way across years, with confidence intervals. These moves would serve families and taxpayers who feel the system hides the ball and spins numbers to fit a story.

For readers across the spectrum, the shared concern is trust. People see headlines swing from “free fall” to “nothing to see,” while government releases arrive without the detail the public needs. That gap feeds the sense that elites talk past parents and students. The clean takeaway today is narrow but important: the measured share of ninth-grade girls using lesbian or bisexual labels dropped, mainly in bisexual responses, and the reasons are not settled by the current data.