Bisexual Boom Vanishes – What Changed?

Students smiling while reading papers in a school hallway — Photo: Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock

Ninth-grade girls who once flocked to “bisexual” now say “straight” again—and the sharp turn is measurable.

At a Glance

Federal school surveys show a big drop in ninth-grade girls calling themselves lesbian or bisexual.
The fall is driven mostly by fewer girls choosing the bisexual label.
The survey measures self-identity, not attraction or behavior, which are separate concepts.
Year-to-year surveys question different students, so causes and individual shifts are still open.

What The New Numbers Actually Say

New analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s student health survey reports a sharp decline in ninth-grade girls identifying as lesbian or bisexual between 2021 and 2025, from about 30 percent to 17 percent. The largest change came from fewer girls choosing the bisexual label, dropping by roughly half. The headline trend rests on identity labels, not on romantic attraction or sexual behavior. The official survey guide treats each of those as different measures with different uses.

Readers who cheer the result or who fear it should care about how the survey works. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey asks students in school to mark how they identify. It also offers options like “another identity,” “questioning,” or “do not understand.” The reported comparison focused on heterosexual, gay or lesbian, and bisexual to keep categories aligned across years. That choice makes trends clearer, but it can change the totals when more teens select other options.

What The Survey Can And Cannot Prove

The survey compares groups of ninth graders in 2021 and 2025. It does not track the same girls over time, so it cannot prove that specific teens switched labels. Weighting adjusts for who answered, but the overall response rate was about 31 percent in 2025, which invites debate about who chose to participate and whether that changed by identity group. The analysis also did not present confidence intervals, so the exact margins of error and statistical tests remain to be shown.

These limits do not erase the core fact: fewer ninth-grade girls picked lesbian or bisexual. They do shape how to explain it. Americans should demand better measurement before spinning culture-war stories. The clean fix is simple and doable: analyze respondent-level data with consistent coding across all categories, report uncertainty, and, best of all, follow the same students over time to see who keeps, changes, or drops labels.

Why Bisexual Drove The Shift

Bisexual identification often sits at the center of teen identity churn. It allows room for uncertainty, exploration, or social signaling. When school climates, friend groups, or online trends change, that label can rise fast and fall fast. The recent decline came mainly from bisexual responses among ninth-grade girls being cut in half. That pattern fits past research showing that adolescent identity can move before it settles, especially in the first years of high school.

The share of teenage girls who identify as lesbian or bisexual has dropped sharply in just four years in the US, per CDC data highlighted by The Washington Post.

Among ninth-grade girls:

Lesbian or bisexual: 30% in 2021 → 17% in 2025.

Bisexual alone: 26% in 2021 → 13% 2025.

— Straturka (@straturka) October 27, 2026

Longitudinal studies back this picture. Researchers who followed sexual-minority youths over time found several paths: many stayed consistent, some moved from bisexual to gay or lesbian, and others remained bisexual. Identity integration—how settled the identity felt—linked to better mental health across time. Another three-year study of Canadian students found a large consistent-heterosexual group, a smaller “mostly plurisexual” group, and a steady “questioning or emerging” group, showing real variety rather than a simple on-off switch.

Sorting Real Change From Social Noise

The next debate is cause. Some claim political and school culture drove teens to drop labels. Others say the same forces once pushed labels up and now the hype cooled. Neither side has a direct causal test yet. The data show identity, not motive. A common-sense path forward serves parents and students: run a true panel design that follows the same teens across grades; include school context, family climate, friend networks, and media use; preregister the plan; and publish the confidence bands.

Policy talk should keep two truths in view. First, the drop is real in the survey data, especially for bisexual identity among ninth-grade girls. Second, identity is not the same as attraction or behavior, and teens often sort this out over time. That mix argues for humility in claims and for transparency in methods. Americans value both honesty and accountability. Better measurement honors both.