Since November, much of the media coverage of 2024 election cycle has focused on Generation Z—especially the Gen Z gender gap, and how young men in particular seem to be swinging further and further right.
At the same time, Gen Z—people born between the mid 1990s and the early 2010s, so right now between the ages of 13 to 28—have grown up during the age of the Internet and social media, Trump’s two presidencies, the rise in school shootings and COVID-19 and the dramatic shifts in society that the pandemic caused. Gen Z is also the most diverse generation in American history… which might be why so many of the Trump administration’s recent actions, like attacks on higher ed, seem to be targeting them specifically.
Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, or URGE, is a national reproductive justice organization that specifically centers the voices of young people. The organization hosted a panel last month featuring Gen Z panelists from a range of backgrounds and identities in conversation about Trump’s first 100 days in office and how his presidency has been creating unique hurdles for this generation.
Education Attacks and Digital Book Banning
The Trump administration has received a lot of media attention for picking fights with colleges and universities. Harvard and Columbia have gotten most of the headlines, but Trump’s war on higher education is much more widespread, with the administration threatening to redirect billions of federal funding dollars and grants away from universities, disrupting crucial research in technology, public health, climate science and AI.
A few days after URGE’s panel, executive director Kimberly Inez McGuire spoke with Ms. about the challenges facing higher ed and Gen Z in general.
“What we know from history and stories from all over the planet is that when an authoritarian regime is trying to seize power, one of the most formidable fronts of opposition is university students,” she told me. “And so at this point, the authoritarian playbook includes attacking higher education because they know how powerful student activism is, because they are afraid of young people’s power to transform society.”
URGE panelist Larissa M., a fellow in URGE’s progressive content-creating program Our Folks, shared their worries about looming cuts to the DEI and accessibility programs that many colleges make possible. They described their own experience in high school programs helping low-income students: “I know that without those resources, I would have not known how to navigate the higher education system. And I possibly would have not even had the chance to go to college and continued getting an education.
“And so it’s really misleading to hear that these programs that were created to help us navigate and survive these institutions that were not created for us are being twisted into something harmful,” Larissa said. “These initiatives exist because of systemic exclusion. They’re not the ones causing it.”
At the same time the administration has been attacking colleges, Trump’s executive orders have been attacking information in other ways, including taking down thousands of government web pages earlier this year. These purges have included information from the CDC, NIH and HHS office for Human Rights about public health, LGBTQ+ health, vaccines, hate crimes, scientific research, reproductive rights, maternal health and HIV treatment and many other topics.
Regarding this digital erasure, panelist Ai Star, another Our Folks fellow, said, “Speaking as a trans individual myself, I think that this act sends the message that our lives, our history, our struggles, our triumphs, our existence as a whole is being seen as a threat to the administration, but more specifically to this cis hetero patriarchal nuclear lifestyle that is being incentivized and idealized under this administration specifically, but under white supremacy as a whole.”
Another panelist, Texas organizer Denisce Palacios, described some of the antiabortion bills from the most recent legislative session that would have tried to similarly stop the spread of information about abortion. Texas’ Women and Child Protection Act—SB 2280 in the Texas Senate and HB 5510 in the House—ultimately failed to advance, but would have made it illegal to share certain information about abortion on websites and social media and criminalized abortion funds that help women find transportation and lodging.
Palacios pointed out that just banning abortion isn’t enough for Texas legislators: “We look toward organizations and toward community to be able to inform ourselves. And so this is a way of trying to cut out all of that information and break those bonds. People in rural Texas who don’t have folks who have information around reproductive justice are able to inform themselves, they’d be cut off from these information shares.”
Online Misinformation
URGE’s Our Folks program works to help young people get their voices out into the world and on social media, offering a year-long fellowship providing training, compensation and support to help Gen Zers get their voices in the media and create content centering around themes like over-the-counter birth control, self-managed abortion and sex ed.
It’s especially important that this social media content is medically accurate, since the last few years have seen a rise in misinformation and disinformation on platforms like TikTok about birth control and reproductive health. A study from 2023 found that a growing number of online influencers are spreading inaccurate information about birth control—saying it causes issues from weight gain to cancer—while promoting “natural” or non-hormonal forms of birth control such as the “rhythm method” that have not been proven to actually be effective.
This kind of misinformation is dangerous for young girls just learning about their bodies; however, many young people seem to believe what they’re seeing online. As McGuire pointed out, “Gen Z has very little trust in institutions. So Gen Z is not looking to doctors and government actors and other kinds of institutional spokespeople for their understanding of repressive sexual healthcare. They’re looking to their peers.”
McGuire also told me in our call that progressive social media content is more important now than ever, since the right wing has been effective in using social media and Gen Z influencers to win more young people over to conservative ideas.
“Decades ago, right wing extremists saw young people as a prime target for radicalization,” she said. “And as much as I hate to say it, the right has outspent and outmaneuvered the left in terms of using online spaces to talk to young people … so you have the Ben Shapiros and the Jordan Petersons and the Joe Rogans. You have all of these figureheads peddling really toxic masculinity, really toxic ideas about gender, with legions of young male followers.”
The Dreaded Gender Gap
While young women seem more liberal than ever, young men are moving far to the right—or so a great deal of articles during and since the election would have us believe.
However, McGuire suggested that this media coverage of men’s rightward swing misses some of the nuance of young people’s viewpoints.
“Yes, there has been a very visible right defection by some young men, including some young men of color, to more conservative values,” she said. But young men aren’t necessarily more conservative than men in other generations. It’s really young women who are more progressive than ever, thanks to growing up during the era of #MeToo, the fall of Roe v. Wade, Trump’s first presidency and Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ historic candidacies. As always, though, media attention tends to focus more on men than women, hence the huge number of headlines in the last year about how Gen Z men are swinging far to the right.
At the same time, there is a very clear gender divide between young men and women, which has isolating effects. McGuire’s hypothesis is that a growing lack of daily connection and relationships among young people is affecting this growing ideological gender gap. A recent poll from Harvard suggests that fewer than half of Gen Z feel a sense of community, while only 17 percent report having deep social connections, a trend that the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated.
“Folks who were entering high school or college during the pandemic really lost critical opportunities to make friends, to have jobs where you’ve got your work bestie and that becomes a lifelong bestie,” McGuire said. “So this is a generation that has missed out on key milestones for social connection.”
As opposed to previous generations, Gen Z is also dating less, and are slower to get married and have kids. This change is partially due to shifting social norms over time—it’s no longer so common for people to get married right out of high school or college—and partially because of the sheer cost of raising children right now (despite the Trump administration’s goals to encourage procreation with incentives like $5,000 baby bonuses and Nazi Germany-era medals for mothers).
Although in the past, relationships and marriages across political affiliations were more common, most Gen Zers are unwilling to date someone with different political beliefs. More broadly, post-pandemic, many young people tend to make friends online instead of IRL, which helps them meet people with similar interests and identities but may limit connections to in-person communities and different generations. “For very understandable reasons, many young people are looking for people who share their identities, whether that’s race, gender, sexuality, interests,” McGuire said.
This sense of community offers a feeling of security—a feeling that cuts to DEI programming, along with resources like online information about reproductive health, takes away from many young people.
“It is exhausting to have to fight the government to simply exist,” Denisce Palacios said in URGE’s panel. “But we’re grounded in community … and even if it’s not in a formal way, we are still going to gather and we’re still going to protest and we’re still going to take care of each other because at the end of the day, all we have is community.”
