I can't say that I had Richard Dawkins as the most likely candidate to make a case for moral sanity, but here we are.
The famed atheist just used his social media accounts to share a massive new study showing what many of us working in public schools have watched with our own eyes: transgender identity among young people is collapsing.
Not drifting or gently declining … collapsing.
According to multiple large-scale surveys, including those summarized by Jean Twenge, the nation's leading researcher on youth trends, non-binary and transgender identification among teens and college students peaked in 2023 and has fallen by half ever since. That's a cultural cliff dive.
While it's purely anecdotal, I can testify that from my own vantage point as a public high school teacher that the researchers are not imagining things. Not long ago, many schools across the country became pronoun battlegrounds, with students cycling through new "identities" every semester, and teachers instructed to oblige and rat out their colleagues who refused.
Today, pronoun announcements have all but disappeared. The once-growing cluster of self-identified non-binary students has shrunk dramatically. Whatever once felt like an unstoppable cultural wave now looks like what many warned it was all along: a disastrous social contagion.
While we can appreciate the relief that comes from the slow restoration of sanity, we should also be angry.
While the trend may be reversing, the damage remains. Adults who have been entrusted with the well-being of our children, who should have been a bulwark of stability and truth, instead bent the knee to ideas that were, from the start, patently unscientific and philosophically incoherent. Administrators, professors, teachers, board members, and counselors all treated biological reality as hateful. Feelings were elevated above facts, and the ideological whims of a political crusade were permitted to rewrite human nature. Worst of all, those who resisted were shouted down as bigots.
In that chaos, so many vulnerable kids who were already struggling with anxiety, depression, trauma, or the anxious uncertainty that accompanies adolescence, were ushered down life-altering paths. Some were encouraged to sever ties with parents who refused to play along. Some were funneled toward puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries before they could even legally drive a car. They needed compassion, boundaries, and clarity. Instead, they got applause, affirmation, and a shove further into chaos.
All of them were failed by medical, educational, and cultural institutions that were designed to protect them.
What can we take and learn from this disaster? This is the part where Skeptic magazine and Richard Dawkins would likely prefer I stop, but honesty requires one more step: None of this would have blindsided us if we had simply trusted God's Word rather than the ever-shifting beliefs of the age.
Scripture begins with a simple declaration: "Male and female, He created them." He didn't do that as a straitjacket or an insult. He did it as design. As reality. As a gift.
Had our society not tried to outsmart that design, we might have spared an entire generation:
The emotional trauma of confusing ideology and identity.
The deep division that has fractured families and communities.
The burden of being pawns in the political and cultural wars conducted by adults.
The data now says clearly what Christians, biologists, and common-sense parents have said for years: Reality can be ignored, but it cannot be denied. It will eventually reassert itself, leaving behind a fading social contagion, but a cleanup that will take a long time.
As "peak trans" continues its decline, may we listen to God's wisdom when the next big idea promises us "freedom."
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
