On a cold day in Kansas earlier this year, Chloe Cole testified in front of the state Senate Committee on Public Health and Welfare on Senate Bill 63, the “Help Not Harm Act.” It would prohibit healthcare providers from performing “gender-affirming” surgeries or prescribing puberty blockers and hormones for minors. She explained how she was given puberty blockers and testosterone at 13, had a double mastectomy at 15, and now she must wear bandages on her chest every day, among other complications.
“My parents were warned that if not affirmed in my identity and decision to transition, it was likely I would commit suicide,” said Cole, now 21, who was 20 at the time of her testimony. “Medical professionals did not provide my parents with any other option.”
A tomboy as a child, Cole started thinking about transitioning to a boy after creating an Instagram account and being exposed to a myriad of content on social media supporting the idea. “Very quickly, the algorithm of Instagram actually started recommending me a bunch of, like, a lot of LGBTQ content, particularly, like trans-identified females who were on my age, like trans boys,” Cole told NewsNation in a 2022 interview.
Cole received life-altering, irreversible treatments around the time that transgender identification was becoming more prevalent among young people. Thousands of her peers were doing the same. Data from the nonprofit organization Do No Harm showed that from 2019 to 2023, over 13,000 gender reassignment procedures, including puberty or hormone blockers, or surgeries such as mastectomies and penile reconstruction, were performed on minors.
A world away in Washington, D.C., the same day as Cole’s testimony, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.” Trump vowed that his administration would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
It was the first of many watershed moments this year, turning a movement that’s been harming young men and women on its head.
Abigail Shrier, a journalist and the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, described the Trump effect thusly: “Loving, naive parents believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. Now, with the stroke of a pen, a destructive ideology has been eliminated,” the subhead of Shrier’s article at the Free Press reads.
Now, 10 months later, things are shifting, either because of Trump’s policies or because of the cultural shifts that helped return him to the White House.
On Oct. 20, Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, shared new data that showed “identifying as transgender really is in free fall among the young in the U.S. So is identifying as nonbinary,” as she wrote at Generation Tech.
She cited one study with a short time frame as a sample and then another, more compelling one: the Cooperative Election Study, a survey by YouGov, administered by Tufts University, which asked about transgender identification among adults 18-22 from 2021 to 2024. From 2022 to 2024, transgender identification had been cut nearly in half. Between 2023 and 2024, nonbinary identification, identifying as neither male nor female, dropped by more than half.
“When I looked at adults of all ages in the survey … I found a huge increase in identifying as transgender from those born before 1980 (Gen X and Boomers) to those born in the early 2000s (who are now 21 to 25 years old),” Twenge told Fox News Digital. Twenge offered an explanation: “One possibility is changes in acceptance; as acceptance increased, more young adults identified as transgender and/or were willing to identify as transgender in a survey. When acceptance declined, identifying as transgender (or at least identifying as transgender on a survey) declined.”
Eric Kaufman, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, made waves when he revealed on social media that he found different data in a new report, published Oct. 10 by the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, showing that the share of college students identifying as nonbinary had also been reduced by half in just two years.
The new data appear to confirm suspicions that the extraordinary spike in transgender youths was not just evidence that Generation Z was more comfortable in expressing its true, innate, and immutable identity but a social contagion.
“Gen Z’s psychological frailty sets the stage for unique vulnerability to social contagion, suggested by the explosion of gender confusion,” Scott W. Atlas wrote at the Independent Institute on Sept. 23. “Transgender identification among young adults surged from 0.59% in 2014 to 3.08% in 2023 — a 422% increase.”
If it were not a contagion, and a reflection of comfort or liberation, the number of transgender youth would have grown slowly. But it now appears to have spiked out of nowhere, then dropped.
“The social-contagion hypothesis was never hateful,” Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, wrote at the Wall Street Journal. “It was purely descriptive: a recognition that social and cultural factors shape human behavior. For years, even hinting that such factors influenced transgender identities could end a career. Now, as data accumulate, this is becoming harder for anyone to deny.”
Wright concluded that the surge of youths identifying as transgender was “a social phenomenon shaped by imitation, ideology and institutional reinforcement.”
The Kansas bill Cole testified in favor of passed, was vetoed by Gov. Laura Kelly (D-KS), and then became law after the legislature overrode her veto on Feb. 18. Kansas joined a bevy of states, 27 total, that have enacted similar policies meant to protect the most vulnerable among us from surgeries and puberty blockers that are life-altering.
In 2021, when Joe Biden was president, just 18 bills dealing with transgender-related policy passed. Now, in 2025, 1,009 bills were introduced and 123 passed, according to one tracker, and 139 according to another. These are framed by some organizations as “attacks” on transgender people, but often, closer inspection shows they are protecting minors from harmful transitions framed as medical care or ensuring fairness for women and girls in sports. In June 2025, the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Skrmetti upheld Tennessee’s ban on so-called “gender-affirming care” for youth.
Several global sports organizations enacted policies that effectively banned or severely restricted the participation of biological males in female sports categories. Some were a direct response to Trump’s Feb. 5 executive order, put simply, “Keeping Men Out Of Women’s Sports.” It reads like a sequel to his January order and added a threat of cutting federal funding, which spurred organizations into action.
The U.S Olympic and Paralympic Committee barred transgender women from competing in women’s sports at the Olympic and Paralympic levels. The National Collegiate Athletic Association changed its participation policy to limit competition in women’s sports to biological women. USA Fencing and USA Swimming now only allow biological women to participate in women’s competitions. In May, World Boxing declared that all athletes must take a mandatory sex test to compete in events.
A BAKER’S NIGHTMARE COMES TO AN END
According to the draft text of a proposed rule by the Department of Health and Human Services, to be released to the public in November, the Trump administration is seeking to “prohibit federal Medicaid reimbursement for medical care provided to transgender patients younger than age 18.” This would significantly alter access minors have to sex-change surgeries and hormone replacements on a federal level. Such state and federal policy efforts may have helped girls such as Cole.
Trump’s bold, and sometimes controversial, transgender-related executive orders have been framed by liberals and their media allies as harmful to minors. But it’s clear that their ripple effect galvanized states, politicians, sports organizations, and medical facilities into finally doing the right thing for America’s youth.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist for USA Today. She lives in Texas with her four children.
