A couple of weeks ago on X there was a kerfuffle that broke out after a professor named Eric Kaufman posted a tweet about an article he did for Unheard dot com and in the article, he asserts that trans identification among young people especially is dropping. Now, this was a statistical analysis and it created quite the food for all and it took me two weeks to kind of pin down our schedules because he is in the UK in London, and I, of course am in Denver, Colorado.
But this weekend we were able to connect and this is our chat with Professor Eric Kaufman. Hey, everybody, So last week I read an article at unheard dot com by a guy named Eric Kaufman. He's a professor and he wrote a I mean a tweet that he probably thought was like every other tweet he sent out, and it had to do with the rate of trans or
non binary identification falling in this country. I'm guessing that he was not expecting it to catch fire like it did and created so much debate on X and I have to say not just your a duty head debate, like real legitimate debate back and forth about the veracity of this information and how you interpreted it and all of this stuff. But I decided to reach out and
Professor Eric Kaffman joins me now to talk about. First of all, let's start with the data and then I don't want to get too far into the weeds about the statistical stuff because it's kind of boring for the radio. I'm not gonna not gonna lie, and I'm gonna share your substack that you did on the data analysis so people can do a deeper dive if they want on my blog so they can link to it there. But first of all, Professor Coppman, wait, welcome to the show.
Great to be here, Mandy, and I'm joining you from England.
I'm Canadian originally, but i've lived in London a long time.
Well, welcome to Denver. It's lovely here right now, as I'm sure it might not be in London today, but we'll find out. First of all, give my audience a little bit of your background so we have an idea of where you're coming from on this.
Yeah, I'm a professor of politics or political science at the University of Buckingham here in England, and I'm.
A social scientist.
I'm very interested in exploring questions that are in some ways difficult to explore amongst mainstream academics. And so I have a center at Buckingham which has some sort of free speech tradition for heterodox social science.
I've been interested also.
I'm a quantitative data analyst, and I'm always interested in the latest wave from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expressions annual undergraduate surveys, which are absolutely massive they reach. The last wave was almost seventy thousand undergraduates, mainly aged eighteen to twenty two, across two hundred and fifty of
the mainly higher ranking universities in the US. And I also look at some other surveys that are smaller, but where most of the target audience or a large chunk of it is is captured by the surveys, which isn't usual for surveys.
And I was just comparing these three sources.
And I have had an interest in cultural trends among young people for a long time, like Gene Twenge, who of course sort of came in after my tweets and
found something very similar. The long and the short of it is, I sort of noticed that while there was this very pronounced rise and fall particularly this decline pattern in the share of young people who say they are neither male nor female, that is, identifying as non binary, and that has dropped in half more or less in this massive sample of over fifty thousand a year from the fire data, but also in the smaller but higher targeted where you're getting a higher share of your target pool.
So the Andover Phillips elite prep high school near Boston, and then the university, the Brown University student surveys, they're all saying the same thing, telling the same story, which was of a dramatic decline in non binary identification. Now we can come into this question of the relationship doing trans and non binary, which is I would argue very close.
But that's a whole other question. I think it's arguing.
More or less that trans has declined a lot amongst young people.
Well, it's interesting because the Andover is obviously a very elite prep school, and then you have Brown that's not exactly a slouchy university. And in my experience, and maybe you have not observed this, or perhaps you have children of high achieving parents seem to have these trans identities
at a much higher rate. Look at Hollywood, you have Hollywood actresses who say all four of their children are trans, which is statistically ridiculous, but that's where we are, right, I mean, so it seemed to me that the surveys and andover and brown may hold more weight just from my I own observations in my mind, because you're dealing with the children mostly of elites. This does not seem to be a problem for people in poverty who are worried about how they're going to eat the next day.
Yeah, I think, well, I don't know, it's not as clear a cut as that, because I mean, you're right that the political trendiness of these things tends to break on the elite campuses and prep schools first. However, it is quite astounding to see that in fact, trans and also queer sexuality or bisexuality sort of nonconformists, so in other words, not gay or straight, but these other sexualities. I mean, they've gone through the same rise and fall
pattern in the data. Doesn't seem as though the elite are experiencing this more than people from a lower social class background. So it looks as though this is cutting across all class and in fact, a lot of the data even shows it's somewhat more likely from a lower class background that you will identify relay. Yeah, which surprised me, but it is really striking, and it's there also for bisexual and queer, and so it's I don't think this is just an upper class phenomenon.
No, Well, I would use I have a sixteen year old daughter and at her high school, we're in an upper you know, we're in a more affluent school district, and a lot of her friends are from more affluent families. Not all, you know for sure, but every one of my daughter's friends identify somewhere on the queer spectrum right now.
None of them are actually engaging in same sex relationships, but they identify on the queer spectrum because it's celebrated in schools, and if you want to be part of the in crowd, then you've got to have some kind of rainbow stripe, right, you can't just be a normal kid.
So I would be thrilled because I just think it's it's challenging to be a teenager anyway, right, It was challenging when you were a teenager, challenging what I was, and now we have thrown this gender sexuality stew at these kids and forcing them to sort of stake a claim in order to belong instead of it being authentic, right, And I think it's damaging, honestly to the gay movement.
Oh, I totally agree with you on that. And there are more and more gay people who are really upset about trends and also particularly the surgery aspect and kind of fixing, so called fixing kids who are gay, making them making them a different sex. But I think that where I think what I think is going on is certainly those who identify as politically liberal or ideologically liberal are more considerably more likely to identify as trends and queer.
So I think what I would say is where.
You have a school environment that is very kind of liberal, there, you're going to get higher identification. So I think that's the big difference, not so much the last background. So you could have somebody who's from a you know, whose family is relatively poor, the father is a librarian, and the mother maybe works in the post, I don't know, but as long as they're liberal, there's going to be a higher chance that, you know, the kid identifies as trans or queer or one of these other identities.
So yeah, that does seem to be a pattern. But what is really interesting.
I thought, and one thing I think that's occurred. You know, when these things came off social media and off campus in the twenty tens, mid twenty tens, you had everybody talking about trans and queer at the same time as they were talking about you know, white privilege. Yeah, some of the woke terminology.
What seems to happen have happened to over is these things have now decoupled to a certain extent. So for example, whether we look at red state campuses or blue state campuses, they show the same trend I mean, blue state campuses and in fact liberals as a whole were more likely to identify as trends were queer, so they were always higher than the conservatives. But there was a certain level of it even amongst conservative students and even on red state campuses.
And in both cases we've seen a big drop off.
So on the bluest of blue campuses, the Oberlins, you know, there's been a massive.
Decline in you know, like twenty point decline in the share of non binary at Oberlin in the last two years. So even in these very very liberal environments, it's become a lot less fashionable. So I don't think it is connected necessarily to political shifts, even though you're right that somebody who comes from a more liberal background is going to be more likely to identify this way.
I've been speculating about why this drop might have occurred. I've been spitballing myself since I read your tweet, and I think there's maybe a few things in motion here. One is that fads rise and fides fads fade, right,
So that's I think that's a choke of it. But I also think that the amount of information that is getting out now by d transitioners who are talking about the permanent, long lifelong effects that they are now dealing with because of their transitions, their medical transitions, I do think people are more knowledgeable about what the negative ramifications could be. And it doesn't seem like, yeah, I can get a piercing and.
It'll close up.
You know, it's far different now, and I do think that that maybe sort of factoring into it. Have you done any sort of introspection about why you think this is Yeah, I mean.
It's really difficult.
One thing we know is that over the last two three years, public opinion has turned against the transactivist position that people born males should have access to women's sports and women's spaces, and you know, gender surgery for reminders and all of that stuff has become less popular and substantially less popular, and that's true in Britain's well, and so there's been a turn against in public opinion, including
amongst young people. Now, what is not so clear, it's hard to know, is that part of the same trend. That is, because it's become you know, politically less popular to advocate for the transactivist position and gender ideology, has that had a knock on effect on how people identify, how young people identify, I mean, that could be what's
going on. Gene Twinkie's analysis was quite interesting because she did this, I mean, I also looked at generations and found the same pattern that the youngest generation were less trands than the older let's just say, the older gen Zers, who are aged twenty two, the seniors were a bit more likely to identify as trands than the freshmen.
She found the same thing even more dramatically.
So it seems like the newest, the youngest people, newest generation, if you want to call it, that are falling away from this more so, but I think it looks to me like a fashion that's kind of gone out of It's gone out of fashion. Exactly why that is is very difficult for me, because it doesn't look like these young people are moving to the right, are becoming more religious necessarily, but they've they've stepped away from the non conforming gender and sexual identities to a large extent.
And that's interesting.
I got to tell you, I I you know, we talk a lot about this, and I am one of those people who is loud and verbal about not saying that children should not have access to these surgeries. And to me, it's incredibly sad because, as I've been saying for years, part of this is a fad. Part of this is social contagion. I absolutely believe that part of this is social contagion. But it is going to have lifelong negative impacts on people who are just struggling with
their mental health. And that's not to say trans people don't exist, That's not what I'm saying at all. But I'm saying that we swept up all of these other people who just needed therapy and a lot of it, and maybe some help and assistance to sort of bring their their you know, disconcerted nature together and we've medicalized people,
and I find that very depressing. I do want to ask you something that's not directly about this story, but what must it be like to find out that you're a right wing professor after a tweet gets six million views and people are coming to attack you because they don't like the outcome of your data.
Well, Mandy, I have to say, because I aren't kind of already out as more or less.
A conservative professor, I've been used to this kind of thing in in my previous university. I got it pretty heavily during the Greater Wokening, so that on its own doesn't really bother me too much. It was interesting to see the hit pieces in the attack lines, and then to see that once the sort of attack line seemed to not be working where the pivot was so one of the pivots was okay, they tried to go after me for you know, not using the statistical tool of
waiting my data. Now, once that looked the guy, the person who sort of attacked me for that, once they are sort of graphs were looked at more closely, it was obvious that that attack line wasn't going to work.
One of the other pivots, however.
Is to say, oh, well, but the reason this is happening is because of DeSantis and.
Trump and you know, the discrimination.
Yeah, it's creating a hostile environment for people to be trans. So they're back in the closet again, and that's what's going on, and it's not about the fashion.
And that kind of prompted.
Me to sort of do another tweet thread where I kind of said, you know, it is kind of interesting because if you look at this fire data, people who identify as non binary are actually more open.
About they feel freer to talk about transgender issues than everybody else, and especially conservatives, they self censor less than the average student.
There's absolutely no evidence.
That there was a major shift in twenty between twenty twenty four and twenty and twenty five.
It was just a continuation of what was going on before.
So effectively, there's zero evidence there's a chillier climate to be trends on campus, you know, on these very liberal overall, the average campus is about five you know, fifty percent liberal twenty percent conservative.
So I think that argument really doesn't hold water at all.
Professor Eric Kaufman teaches at the University at Birmingham. I saw the greatest bar fight of my life in Birmingham one time, playing at a snooker hall. It was quite spectacular and just like you'd see in the movie. So I hope you get to see your your bar fight soon in Birmingham, maybe not at the university. Professor Kaufman, thank you so much for the time. I'm sharing both the sub stack that you did sort of to address these statistical accusations because as I said, it's it's very dense.
No way we could translate that on the radio, but it's easy to read if you want to understand kind of a deeper dive of what Professor Coffman was talking about. And I'll also share your X handles so people can follow you on X as well, because there's a lot of good information there. But I very much appreciate your time today and.
It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much.