Has the rise of LGBTQ++ peaked?

For the better part of a decade, with the rapid rise in LGBTQ++, non-binary, and other forms of identification — especially among the young — the narrative rammed down everyone’s throats was that history had spoken: that gender fluidity was a moral revelation representing the right side of history. Homosexuality was on the rise because society had finally shed repression and came to the conclusion that people who are gay were “born that way.”

Unfortunately, reality has a way of throwing monkey wrenches.

Recent empirical work by Jean Twenge and Eric Kaufmann (“Increases in self-identifying as transgender among US adults, 2014-2022” [2024] Sexuality Research & Social Policy: A Journal of the NSRC, 22(2), 755–773. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-024-01001-7; “Increases in LGB Identification among US adults, 2014-2021” [2024] Sexuality Research & Social Policy: A Journal of the NSRC, 21(3), 863–878. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-023-00874-4; and “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity Among Young Americans” [2025] CHSS Report No. 5 The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans – Centre of Heterodox Social Science, respectively), analyzing large-scale survey data in the US and UK, show that the dramatic surge in non-heterosexual identification during the 2010s has slowed substantially. In some areas it plateaued. In others, declined.

But more telling than the plateau was the pattern of the rise itself. Twenge’s generational research found that Gen Z reported far higher rates of LGBTQ++ identification than Millennials or Gen X. But the increase was not evenly distributed across categories. A substantial portion of the growth came particularly among young women. Kaufmann observed clustering within progressive ideological and social environments.

What Twenge and Kaufmann both found is that the LGBTQ++ shift was cohort-driven, culturally concentrated, and quite abrupt. But biology does not behave that way.

If sexual orientation and gender identity were purely innate and fixed at birth in stable proportions, as it has been so for millennia, one would not expect such sharp specifically generational spikes. Human genetics did not suddenly mutate between 2012 and 2022. In other words, what changed was not chromosomes but culture. The social sciences have a name for this phenomenon: contagion.

Contagion is essentially a well-documented way behaviors, attitudes, and identities spread through peer networks. Adolescents, in particular, are quite vulnerable to this. When incentives abound to favor a certain identification, such as when institutions (i.e., corporate and the academe), media, and even one’s peers all celebrate a particular identity such as the LGBTQ++, then it’s no surprise there’s an uptake of people identifying or even pretending to be such. There are numerous similar past examples of this: self-harm, eating disorders, and even certain political identities.

What Twenge and Kaufmann suggest is that the 2010s represent a peak in LGBTQ++ identification. Which logically should be followed by a downward trend. And this is not because of repression but of simple exhaustion and reason establishing itself.

One finding even saw a 23% drop in young adults identifying as LGBTQ++ starting 2022-2023, which incidentally was when Elon Musk started taking control of Twitter.

This plateau or even downward trend is significant because pro-LGBTQ++ public policy, educational programming, and even medical protocols were justified by the supposed rise in LGBTQ++ numbers. The assumption was that the LGBTQ++ was a vast but suppressed demographic. But if that rise was merely an illusory peer-induced contagion, that the commonly recognized LGBTQ++ population of 1-5% still holds true, then a re-evaluation of policy becomes necessary.

Philippine law has thankfully been quite stable so far. The Supreme Court consistently treated sex as a biological reality and immutable, not a self-declared variable (see Silverio vs. Republic and even Republic vs. Cagandahan). The underlying principle being that the law must align with reality and biological constancy rather than cultural fluctuation.

Obviously, these rulings are not theological pronouncements. They’re legal judgments rooted in statutory interpretation and scientific reality. They reflect a jurisprudential understanding (the strange ruling in Josef v. Ursua, notwithstanding) that sex is not a matter of subjective identification but an objective characteristic.

Yet, with the debunking of the “born this way” narrative, the only other argument left for the LGBTQ++ movement is to divest sexual identity from biology, with the former supposedly shapeable by the environment and peer influence. But if that were the case, then society retains a legitimate interest in the norms it promotes.

If Twenge and Kaufmann are correct, to claim then that gender identity is not rooted in biology (as progressives claim) but rather with cultural fluctuations, then society has the right to defend itself and encourage only such culture and behaviors that are truly for the good of society.

This thus highlights the importance of free speech rights, correct information, and the importance of democratic governance over, for example, judicial legislation.

Conservatives have long argued that human beings — aside from immutable characteristics such as biology and sex — are socially formed. Families, churches, schools, media, and the academe, and particularly legislation, all have a responsibility in ensuring citizen formation is for the common good.

And yet the common good naturally has to be rooted in reality. And reality, unlike fashion or contagions, is not conditioned on the ups and downs of the algorithm.

Jemy Gatdula is the dean of the UA&P Law School and is a Philippine Judicial Academy lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily of the institutions to which he belongs.