39
DiscussionInteresting Pew poll, is the tide turning amongst teens?
Hello! So as part of my general poll-watching, I stumbled across this very recent piece by Pew Research U.S. teens are less likely than adults to know a trans person, more likely to know someone who’s nonbinary. (ignore the title - it's a bit spin-y. According to the data, fewer 15-17s say they know a non-binary person than 18-29s.)
So, for context, my interest here is getting a sense of if and how much the youth-fad element of TRA is fading. Ultimately, policy and legal change is good, and the general public peaking is helpful, but whether this phenomena truly fades will be determined by whether the next generation of young people pick it up as well.
In my last post I talked about recent time-series YouGov data comparing Jan 2024 to Dec 2024, and noted the very large swings in public sentiment. Of relevance here, the proportion of 18-29 year olds who either identified as trans or had a close friend who did fell from 16% to 9% over the period.
This Pew data extends the picture to 13-17 year olds. It's looking like more teens reject TRA rhetoric than 18-29s, and when it's split out more 13-14s than 15-17s (+11 pts on discomfort with they/them pronouns). The teen polling is from September-October 2024. I really wish it was time-series (and split by sex, given teen TIFs are disproportionately common), but if you assume teens would have been more pro-TRA a year or two ago, as the other polling suggests, then this is very positive.
In terms of practical effects, I would have predicted minor transition rates go down anyway in 2025 due to legal/policy/litigation changes, in both the US and Europe. But this suggests there will probably be less demand as well. I'm also expecting that trans influencers will decline in relative popularity (although, half of them are on TikTok, if the app down in the US that'd have an effect as well), and we might start to see shifts on campuses.
Thoughts? What other socio-cultural changes would we expect to see if indeed the fad is fading amongst teens?