A POST AND graph shared widely on social media misleadingly suggests that up to 23% of young adults identified as transgender in 2022.

The post was first published on X, where it was promoted by Elon Musk and quickly garnered 14,200,000 views, as well as spawning dozens of identical posts on other social media platforms, such as Facebook.

“The graph of people, but especially kids, identifying as transgender literally nosedives as soon as Elon buys Twitter,” the post begins

The image appears to show figures peaking in 2022, when Musk bought X, with the corresponding figure for 18-24-year-olds falling to just under 18% last year.

“Almost like it was a social contagion…” the post continues

“…and people couldn’t talk about it because they were being censored

“Imagine that.”

Less than 5 minutes after it was posted on 8 March, it was reposted by the head of X, Elon Musk, with a caption decrying “the lunatic left”, Jack Dorsey, who co-founded the social media company, and OpenAI, a rival to the company that owns X.

That post has accumulated an additional 16 million views, according to statistics on X.

Musk has a long history of disparaging comments about transgender people, saying that they are victims of a “woke mind virus”. He has also said he was tricked into approving medical treatment to help his child transition, saying he considers his child to be “killed” or “dead”.

(Vivian Jenna Wilson is alive, and estranged from her father, Elon Musk).

However, the graph has nothing to do with transgender people. It appears to have originated on the Substack of Jean M. Twenge, an American psychologist.

Analysing survey data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which included sexual orientation, the Substack post included three graphs, none of which are about trans people.

While Twenge does mention other research on the prevalence of trans people, her graphs are all about sexuality, specifically the proportion of people who identify as “lesbian, gay, or bisexual”.

Twenge mentions that other categories are also included in the data, such as “other” or “something else”, but for methodological reasons she treated these as missing data.

In particular, the chart that was posted on X purporting to show the proportion of trans people in the general population actually shows something else: “U.S. women identifying as bisexual, by age group, 2014-2025.”

The description of the chart was removed, and replaced with a captions falsely suggesting it showed the proportion of transgender people in the general population.

While the researcher notes that it is remarkable that the number of American women identifying as bisexual surged to almost a quarter and then dropped again in just a few years, this is a very different claim than saying that 23% of adults under the age of 24 identified as transgender.

Large-scale surveys of the US population indicate that less than one percent of the adult population identify as transgender (though in younger cohorts the proportion is higher, though still nowhere near 23%).

A culture war has grown around trans people in recent years internationally, including in the UK and the US, where the Trump presidency has focused on the rules of transgender people competing in sports.

In Ireland, Enoch Burke and his supporters have tried to claim that the teacher was arrested for refusing to “endorse transgender ideology” or to refer to a trans student by their preferred pronouns (he was arrested for repeatedly trespassing at a school).

There has also been considerable outrage expressed online in recent days due to the use of a comedy drag act in a Dublin Zoo ad, which detractors say erases women. 

The Journal has previously debunked claims by comedy writer Graham Linehan about “nearly 38,000 girls who are raising money” to remove breast tissue on a British crowdfunding site; and that changes to the Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) curriculum were an attempt to “impose transgender ideology and pornography classes on all Primary and Secondary schools”.

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