Over 5 Percent of High-School Students Struggle with Gender Confusion, First-of-Its-Kind CDC Survey Finds

More than 3 percent of American high-school students now identify as transgender while just over 2 percent are questioning their gender, according to the first ever CDC survey on teen gender identification.

The survey, released this week, was administered in 2023 to a nationally representative sample of public and private school students in grades 9–12 in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The share of high-school students who identify as transgender (3.3 percent) is up 1.9 percent from 2022, according to a report by the Williams Institute, an LGBT research nonprofit in California.

LGBT activists and other proponents of progressive gender ideology argue that more teens now feel comfortable openly expressing their trans identity, which accounts for the increase in reported gender dysphoria among minors. An alternative explanation, posited in 2018 by then-Brown University professor Lisa Littman, is peer and social contagion.

The American Psychological Association defines the phenomenon as “the spread of behaviors, attitudes, and affect through crowds and other types of social aggregates from one member to another.” In the view of Littman and many likeminded mental-health professionals, the mainstreaming of transgenderism in popular culture, and the introduction of gender ideology in schools as early as kindergarten, has encouraged more young people to identify as transgender, many of whom would have otherwise gone on to identify as gay or lesbian as adults.

Littman’s study in science journal PLOS One examined parental reports of “sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria” during puberty. The symptoms appeared to occur after prolonged social-media and internet use and “in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe.”

Dr. Marci Bowers, a surgeon specializing in transgender genital surgery, admitted in 2022 that social contagion could be contributing to the sudden explosion of LGBT-identifying youth.

“As for this ROGD [rapid-onset gender dysphoria] thing, I think there probably are people who are influenced,” Bowers told journalist Abigail Shrier in a interview. “There is a little bit of ‘Yeah, that’s so cool. Yeah, I kind of want to do that too.’”

The 2023 CDC study also reported that transgender-identifying students experience a higher prevalence of poor mental health, possibly because of perceived discrimination and hostile treatment. A higher prevalence of bullying was reported by transgender and questioning students than those who did not identify that way. Those groups also reported higher rates of persistent sadness and hopelessness, as well as suicidal thoughts and behaviors, according to the survey. About one in four transgender students said they had attempted suicide in the past year, compared with 11 percent of cisgender girls and 5 percent of cisgender boys.

Kathleen Ethier, the director of CDC’s adolescent and school health division and one of the authors of the study, told the New York Times that the combined gender-uncertain and transgender-identifying students have a higher risk for suicide and mental health struggles because they are stigmatized and “made to feel unsafe.”

However, a groundbreaking Finnish study from March found that mental health distress among gender-dysphoric youth is likely driven by underlying psychological problems, undercutting the activist narrative that the gender medicalization of minors constitutes “lifesaving care.”

The research paper in BMJ Mental Health produced by a group of Finnish scientists supported that psychiatric distress could be an antecedent to gender dysphoria, rather than a by-product. The study solidified that comorbid psychiatric conditions, a well-known risk factor for suicide, are prevalent in gender-dysphoric youth. Clinical gender dysphoria does not appear to be predictive of suicide or other causes of death when psychiatric-treatment history is accounted for, according to the study.