A man who lived as a woman for eight years before detransitioning is questioning whether newly highlighted federal data showing a sharp decline in teenagers identifying as gay or bisexual reflects a real shift in sexual orientation or a change in what young people are willing to say out loud.
Walt Heyer, who detransitioned roughly four decades ago and is now a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, said in an exclusive video interview that social media and peer pressure may be shaping how American teenagers describe themselves. He said he does not accept the idea that the numbers represent a dramatic collapse in gay and bisexual identification among young people.
«I don't really believe that there's a big dramatic free fall,» Heyer said. «I think what's happening is that, because of social media, there's a lot more influence on people who may not want to fall into that classification on a social media level and will withhold the fact that they are gay or bisexual but really don't want to openly admit it.»
His comments follow reporting by The Washington Post on CDC data showing that the share of ninth-grade girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual fell from 30 percent in 2021 to 17 percent in 2025. The percentage identifying specifically as bisexual dropped from 26 percent to 13 percent over the same period. The share of boys identifying as gay or bisexual has remained largely unchanged over the past decade, while the proportion of high school girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual rose after the COVID-19 pandemic before beginning to decline.
Heyer, an author and co-author of several books, including «Trans Life Survivors» and «Paper Genders,» has spent years working with people who question their gender identities. He argued that social dynamics among students complicate any straightforward reading of the survey results.
«I've had actual people in school saying that they're bullied into identifying one way, or they're bullying and bullied to not identify that way,» he said. He described peer and societal pressure as significant factors in how young people choose to identify, adding that many students are «sort of coerced by their peers to say things one way or the other.»
Heyer said his skepticism extends beyond the recent figures. He argued that adults should focus on affirming what he considers to be true, and he disputed the idea that a person can change gender. «We know now and have evidence, factual evidence, that nobody has ever changed their gender,» he said, describing his own experience with hormones and surgery as a cosmetic and social appearance rather than a biological change.
He also called for more thorough research before anyone treats the declining numbers as a lasting shift in sexual identity. «I just think it's important for us to be much more thorough and go to other areas before we come to some conclusion that there's a giant, giant drop in these identities,» he said. «I don't think we're there yet.»
The debate over how to interpret the data comes amid broader public disagreement over gender identity, medical treatment for minors, and the language used by schools and advocacy organizations. Heyer's position places him among those who argue that social influence, rather than an underlying change in orientation, may be driving the reported decline. Researchers and advocates who support transgender youth, by contrast, have generally warned against drawing broad conclusions from single-year shifts in survey data, noting that adolescent self-reporting can be affected by stigma, school climate, and changes in how questions are asked.
For now, Heyer's central claim is that the story behind the numbers is more complicated than a headline decline. He said the experiences of students who feel pressured to adopt or avoid a particular label should be part of any serious effort to understand what the data actually show.