If you were born in the late 1930s, the chances of you declaring yourself to be what we call “transgender” or “nonbinary” as an adult were almost zero. For the next 60 years, that number hovered around 0.4%, despite dramatic changes in sexual equality and sexual morality. This number rose suddenly after 2008, when the cohort born in 1990 came of age. The late millennials were “digital natives”: the first children of the internet and social media. They were 13 years old in 2003, when the pioneering social networking site Myspace launched, and 16 years old when Twitter arrived in 2006. They were 17 years old in 2007, when the delivery system was upgraded by the release of the first iPhone and the refashioning of online personality refined by the microblogging website Tumblr.
They voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2008. That was the first election in which a majority of the adult population connected to politics online (55%, nearly tripling the 18% who waited for the dial-up tone in 2000). The Obama campaign capitalized on the uptake of the internet and especially on young voters. The turnout increase among 18- to 29-year-olds was more than double that of the overall electorate. But the pollsters noticed something even more interesting.
Traditionally, young voters trended the same as voters older than age 30, albeit with a Democratic lean. In 2008, they didn’t lean. They collapsed into the arms of the Democrats. Young voters preferred Barack Obama to John McCain by 68% to 30%, the highest share of the youth vote since exit polls began reporting by age in 1976. The digital natives belonged to a different, digitally mediated culture. The post-1990 cohorts grew up in that culture and followed the path that the first generation trod. They continued to declare for the Democratic Party (59% for Joe Biden and 36% for Donald Trump in 2020). And more of them declared against what is now called “heteronormativity.”
By 2008, transgender and nonbinary self-identification among digital natives had more than doubled to around 1%. Their numbers rose sharply from 2008 to 2022, when more than 6% of 18- to 24-year-olds said they were “transgender” and over 3% claimed to be nonbinary. Among American adults as a whole, a 2024 paper published in the Sexuality Research and Social Policy journal found that between 2014 and 2022, the number of self-identifying “transgender” adults rose from 0.59% of the population to 2.78%. Self-identification as transgender “nearly quintupled among 18- 24-year-olds and quadrupled among 25- to 34-year-olds.”
And then, just like that, the number of people who believed they were born in the wrong body collapsed. On Oct. 20, 2025, Jean Twenge, one of the authors of that 2024 paper, published new data. Transgender affiliation among 18- to 22-year-olds halved between 2022 and 2024, from 6% to 3%. Nonbinary affiliation declined even more sharply in the year from 2023 to 2024 (from 5% to 2%). If transgender and nonbinary children are really “born that way,” then the cohort born after 2002, who came of age in 2020, is biologically divergent from their older siblings. Either that, or biology has nothing to do with it.
This was a social contagion. The digital natives were socialized by digital technology. They were brainwashed by pornography and addled with prescription drugs. Even their voting patterns were hermetically sealed from prior generations. Their online “second life” wagged the dog that used to be called “real life.” They learned to express themselves through politicized panic. The Democrats learned to exploit them as voters and foot soldiers. The casualties weren’t just marched into the voting booths and the streets.
Between 2017 and 2021, diagnoses of gender dysphoria among children between the ages of 6 and 17 nearly tripled from 15,172 to 42,167. About a third, 14,726 minors, started hormone treatment. The most common surgery among 13- to 17-year-olds was “top surgery,” cutting off the breasts. In the three years between 2016 and 2019, 48,019 “gender-affirming” surgeries were performed on 31,668 individuals in the United States. For comparison, around 50,000 unnecessary lobotomies were performed in the name of mental health between 1936 and 1972. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study infected nearly 400 black men with syphilis between 1932 and 1972, of whom more than 100 died.
The transgender madness is a cruelty without parallel in the history of American government and medicine. The state and its servants encouraged children to delude themselves and become partners in their injury. At the peak of the panic, the typical age for a gender dysphoria diagnosis was 6 years of age. Democratic politicians, transgender lobbyists, junk scientists, health insurers and providers, the teachers union, almost all of the media, old and new, and a sex reassignment industry that was valued at $2.1 billion in 2022 all colluded to perpetrate a crime against America’s children. There must be a reckoning.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
