CDC Numbers Jolt: Teen Labels Plunge

Students with backpacks enter a school under a balloon arch — Photo: Ringo Chiu / Shutterstock

When you ask teenagers who they are, you don’t just measure identity; you also measure the conditions under which identity is declared. That is the central fact to keep in view as new federal survey cycles show a sharp, recent drop in ninth-grade girls selecting lesbian or bisexual labels, concentrated in “bisexual,” within an instrument designed to capture self-identification rather than a fixed underlying orientation.

The Short Version

The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) captures sexual identity, not attraction or behavior; those constructs are related but distinct.
Across survey waves, the share of ninth-grade girls selecting lesbian or bisexual fell sharply, driven largely by fewer choosing “bisexual.”
Cross-sectional surveys compare different students over time; they cannot prove that specific girls changed labels.
Longitudinal research shows adolescent identity can be fluid and context-dependent, so label shifts are neither rare nor inherently inauthentic.

What the YRBS actually measures—and why that matters

The national YRBS is a biennial, school-based survey that asks students about health behaviors and includes a direct question on sexual identity. In CDC usage, sexual identity is one of three distinct constructs—alongside sexual attraction and sexual behavior—that together describe sexual orientation in population health work. The constructs overlap but are not synonyms: identity is the label one chooses; attraction catalogs patterns of desire; behavior records contacts or partners. That design choice is not academic hair-splitting; it shapes what any trend can and cannot tell us. A change in reported identity can reflect genuine development, relabeling, disclosure choices, or measurement conditions, without presuming a single causal mechanism.

Against that backdrop, an outside analysis of the latest YRBS cycle highlighted an unusually steep drop between 2021 and 2025 in the share of ninth-grade girls selecting lesbian or bisexual, with the decline concentrated in “bisexual.” The reported figures—30% to 17% in the combined lesbian/bisexual category, and roughly 26% to 13% for bisexual—rest on the survey’s identity question and a denominator limited to heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual response options to harmonize across years that offered additional categories. The YRBS 2025 technical documentation confirms the instrument, categories, sample size, and weighting approach used to produce national estimates, including an overall response rate near one-third for that cycle.

How to read a steep decline in identity labels without over-reading it

Two guardrails keep interpretation honest. First, YRBS is cross-sectional: each wave samples different students. That means the 30%-to-17% contrast is an aggregate shift in who selected which labels, not a record of the same girls changing labels over four years. Second, identity is measured in the presence of peers, teachers, and a broader political culture. Any shift can therefore reflect real developmental change, the adoption and abandonment of labels, or differences in willingness to disclose in school environments from one period to the next. Both caveats are intrinsic to how the instrument works; neither erases the descriptive reality that fewer ninth-grade girls checked “bisexual” or “lesbian” in the more recent wave.

Method choices also matter. Because the response options in 2025 include “some other identity,” “questioning,” and “do not understand,” restricting the denominator to heterosexual, gay/lesbian, and bisexual—while defensible for comparability—necessarily excludes students who might previously have selected “bisexual” but now prefer “queer,” “pansexual,” or “questioning.” Analysts should test whether the headline decline persists when all categories are handled consistently across waves. The YRBS user’s guide provides the scaffolding for precisely that work: harmonized coding, uncertainty intervals, and sensitivity analyses to adjudicate how much of the movement is about relabeling rather than a contraction of sexual-minority identification per se.

What longitudinal research contributes that cross-sections can’t

If cross-sections tell us what labels teens choose this year, longitudinal studies tell us how individuals move among labels across years. Multiple peer-reviewed cohorts of sexual-minority youth document several trajectories: stable identification, transitions from bisexual to gay/lesbian, consistently bisexual, and continued development with growing integration of identity. Crucially, identity integration—how settled and coherent one feels about one’s identity—correlates with better mental health, both at a point in time and over time. These findings cut against any blanket claim that earlier minority labels were “wrong” if they later changed; instead, they show that change itself is a normal part of adolescent identity development for a meaningful minority of youths.

Large school-based panels add another layer. A recent three-wave study of more than 3,000 Canadian adolescents identified classes that were consistently heterosexual, mostly plurisexual (attraction to more than one gender), and consistently questioning or emerging sexual-minority. The very existence of a stable “questioning/emerging” class illustrates how identity categories function during adolescence: not as fixed endpoints but as waystations some teens occupy while attraction, experience, and social meaning settle into place. Members of that questioning/emerging group also reported higher desire than consistent heterosexual peers, underscoring that “questioning” is not a synonym for “undeveloped”.

Competing explanations: social influence, safety, and the measurement environment

Public debate often jumps from a descriptive trend to sweeping causal stories—peer contagion, school messaging, changing political winds. The YRBS evidence at hand cannot adjudicate those narratives. It does, however, outline what a competent test would require: longitudinal designs that link individual identity trajectories to school climate, local policies, peer networks, family attitudes, and media exposure; careful nonresponse analysis to rule out differential participation; and preregistered specifications that show the trend’s resilience under alternative coding of “other,” “questioning,” and similar categories. The CDC’s technical materials and item rationales equip analysts to do this transparently, but causal claims need to be earned, not intuited from a single cross-section or a two-point comparison.

One mundane but potent explanation always on the table is disclosure: adolescents report differently when they feel safer or less safe doing so. Because YRBS is administered in school settings, shifts in perceived stigma or institutional climate can change the willingness to select minority labels even if underlying attractions are stable. That is not special pleading; it is a standard measurement concern when asking teens to self-identify across sensitive domains in institutional environments.

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

How to move from headline to understanding

Three analytic moves would convert the current controversy into knowledge. First, replicate the trend with respondent-level data under multiple coding rules, and publish confidence intervals alongside point estimates. Second, conduct a nonresponse-bias assessment using school participation and weighting documentation to probe whether LGBTQ-identifying students were differentially likely to complete the survey in either year. Third, run longitudinal cohort studies with annual measures of identity, attraction, behavior, and context so the field can see whether today’s ninth-grade labels persist, evolve, or are replaced—and why. The YRBS user’s guide and methods reports supply the template; it is up to researchers to execute it.

What to conclude now

On the descriptive claim, the evidence is clear: across recent YRBS waves, fewer ninth-grade girls selected lesbian or bisexual labels, with the decline concentrated in “bisexual,” within an instrument that measures identity. On the interpretive question—what that decline means about adolescents themselves—the honest answer requires humility. Identities in adolescence are not marble; they are worked clay. Longitudinal science shows that movement among labels is common for a meaningful minority of youths and that increasing identity integration tends to coincide with better well-being. Treat the cross-sectional drop as a real measurement outcome worthy of explanation, not as a referendum on the authenticity of teens’ past or present selves. The project now is to do the harder work that distinguishes relabeling, disclosure, and development from true changes in underlying orientation—and to do it with designs up to the task.