Earlier today, my colleague Matt pointed out that the end of USAID coincided with a sudden shift in teenagers identifying as lesbian, gay, and bisexual. This is proof that much of the gay movement was not kids who were "born this way" — a favorite mantra of the Left — but a social contagion, much in the same way fashion trends and other pop culture movements come and go in waves.
Young teenagers are less likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual than a few years ago, according to a new analysis.
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 8, 2026
“It really does look like a free fall,” Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology, said. “But what’s causing it is unclear.” https://t.co/xyROpsrCsg
While this study deals with the LGB portion of the Left's alphabet soup, my mind went back to the letter T. Last October, we saw a sharp decline in the number of young adults identifying as transgender. A 2025 survey of 68,000 of students showed only 3.6 percent identified as a gender other than male or female. In 2024, that number was 5.2 percent and 6.8 percent in 2022 and 2023.
Many of the kids who were labeled "transgender" were gay and lesbian boys and girls who had gender non-conforming behaviors and preferences. This includes Jonni Skinner, who was a feminine gay boy dragged through the process of transition. To this day, he's dealing with the mental and physical fallout of that treatment and — as I reported last year — the so-called doctors who damaged him stopped taking Skinner's calls the second he questioned the "gender-affirming" treatment destroying his body and mind.
So what happens now?
For the kids who simply identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual life will continue as normal. They will date members of the opposite sex and move on. But what about the "trans" kids caught up in the political movement? The girls who had their breasts removed, their vocal cords destroyed by testosterone, their fertility stolen by puberty blockers? What happens to them?
What about the boys who will grow up with micropenises and an inability to form a sexual relationship with another person? What happens to them? What happens when the hormone replacement and puberty blockers cause cancers and other illnesses?
Especially when we learn that "trans" kids often outgrow the phase with time and actual gender-affirming care that supports their biological gender and addresses the underlying mental health issues.
And will anyone be held accountable? I think of the woman I wrote about the other day, who said parents had an obligation to become rainbow flag-waving loons if their child came out as trans. There was no consideration of the physical and mental repercussions of so-called "gender-affirming care." You had to blindly accept your child's decision to destroy his body or you were a "bad" parent. I think of Camryn Manheim who tried to socially condition her son into being gay and is disappointed — genuinely disappointed — he's not.
(What happened to "born this way"?)
I also think of the Democrats who have advocated for these policies, who have taken children from loving families to stick them with ideologues who will support the mutilation of their bodies, who have vowed to pass a "trans bill of rights" that means the doctors and psychologists who harm children will not face consequences.
For years, the United States had a well-documented history of state-sanctioned sterilization. Carried out under the banner of eugenics — an ideology championed by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and carried out by the Left to this day — some states continued sterilizing people without their consent well into the 1970s. The Supreme Court even upheld the policy in Buck v. Bell (1927), the ruling in which Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr. penned the line "three generations of imbeciles are enough."
At least 60,000 Americans were sterilized under these programs with laws operating in 30 states. Oregon was the last state to repeal its forced sterilization laws in 1983 — the year I was born.
We will look back on this era the same way that we look back on Buck v. Bell. But that doesn't restore the thousands of boys and girls who were harmed by what was a social-political movement. Where do they go to repair the damage — the irreparable damage — done to their bodies?
