Professor Eric Kaufman shared a series of posts on social media about his investigation into a decline of transgender young people, speculating on what might be causing this shift.

“My analysis of the raw data shows that in (2025), just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female,” Kaufman wrote in his piece for Unherd. “By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.”

The professor suggested it was “similar to the fading of a fashion or trend,” something that happened largely independently of shifts in political beliefs and social media use, though improved mental health played a role” in his analysis on X.

On Tuesday's Rebel Roundup livestream, hosts Sheila Gunn Reid and Lise Merle weighed in on Kaufman's findings.

“It's like the social contagion wave is receding,” Sheila said, comparing it to the “Satanic panic of the early 80s.”

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It's no longer “popular to identify as something other than your gender,” Lise said, pointing to the rise in radical gender ideology during the COVID-19 pandemic. “If trans kids have always existed, then we would have the stats for that.”

The decline is happening while “society has never been more tolerant of this stuff,” contended Sheila, “and it is following the same drop-off no matter where you examine it.”

The pandemic-era “tsunami” of transgenderism “that came into shore and destroyed everything is now receding back out into the ocean,” she added.

“Parents became aware that something weird and gender related was happening in schools at the early onset of COVID,” Lise said. “And you can see this, a year or two later after the children were being influenced by the radical gender activists in Canadian education, that number peaking at the top several years after.”

Not everyone is convinced, however.

Chris Elston, an activist known as “Billboard Chris” for his peaceful dialogue-based challenging of radical gender ideology, said those fighting back are “educating the populace and making inroads,” but suggested Kaufman's data was “misrepresented” in a post on X.

In his view, “it shows a decline in kids being treated, not in those identifying as trans.”

“We’re winning on stopping the medical malpractice in a few countries, but that’s different than the underlying social contagion,” Elston wrote.