Comment by derbOac

This was interesting to read but didn't pass the sniff test for me. I strongly believe there are secular trends in sexual and gender identity, and it's worth noting that the trends they discuss — real or spurious — predated the current US administration. At the same time I'm not sure I trusted this data and it seems to be misinterpreted a bit.

First, the surveys in the article are kind of odd and idiosyncratic in terms of samples, and not exactly top of the line in terms of methodology either.

Second, relatedly, the rates of non-cis-hetero endorsement are super high in some of those figures, way higher than makes any sense. The absolute rates themselves are enough to call into question anything that is said about them.

Sure enough, the article mentions that when you apply weighting, the trends disappear:

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/fact-check-no-there-is-no...

All in all it suggests there's something about these surveys and their participants that is affecting things.

To their credit, the authors of the article mention a lot of their problems. They address the fact that not endorsing gender isn't the same thing as endorsing being trans, and they also cite the weighting issue. But they have this kindy of hand-wavy response to it that isn't really a response. The idea that weights aren't necessary or can be misleading is a ridiculous response in this kind of situation. And who cares if nonbinary-type response rates correlate 0.7 with trans identification? Maybe that rest of the variance is what accounts for changes at any given period.

I'd be more convinced by a series of rigorous surveys with rigorous methodology. Admittedly it's kind of hard to measure this sort of thing, but clearly something isn't working with this.

Also in the end, even if you take these data at face value, what should you conclude other than that secular trends are influencing the way people respond to, and maybe think about, questions about their sexual or gender identity? That's interesting but let's say the trend lines go back to what they were pre-2010 or so. Ok, the rest of the endorsers are still there, it's not 0% endorsement, and even if it were that would be a bit suspicious. And how do we interpret survey responses among the rest? That they're being open-minded about their sexual or gender identity a bit? How much? Did the respondents themselves change? What does this matter in terms of policy? That sexual and gender identification is more fluid than people might think, or that it implies something about freedom of speech?