Soren Aldaco Just Wants Texas Detransitioners To Have Their Day In Court (#35)
Soren Aldaco was eleven when online roleplay began shaping her sense of self, and nineteen when a botched double mastectomy at the Crane Center shaped everything that followed. Now a detransitioner, graduate researcher, and legal advocate, she joins the Beyond Gender hosts to discuss medical malpractice, ideological capture, and the Texas lawsuit she is determined to take to the Supreme Court. Personal testimony and analytical rigour in equal measure.
Soren Aldaco arrived at this conversation carrying something most guests don't bring with them: an active lawsuit working its way toward the Supreme Court. A detransitioned woman now in graduate school, she speaks with the precision of a researcher and the directness of someone who has had to reconstruct her own story from the ground up — medically, psychologically, and legally. It makes for an episode that is both intimate and genuinely consequential. Her path into a trans identity began at eleven, in the online fandom spaces that were already rewiring adolescent social life in the early 2010s. A tomboy in Texas who struggled to fit comfortably among her female peers, she found in those spaces a way of being that felt more coherent — at least for a while. What Stella, Mia, and Bret tease out carefully is the underlying mechanism: the way creative roleplay and real identity began to overlap, and how a community built around imagination can gradually become something more fixed and far more consequential. By fifteen, following a mental health crisis, Soren was being steered toward medicalization rather than toward support for her underlying difficulties. The providers involved, she tells the hosts, each had trans-identified family members — a pattern she noticed only in retrospect. At eighteen, during the early months of the COVID lockdowns, she had a double mastectomy at the Crane Center in Texas. The surgery produced massive hematomas. The surgeons, she says, denied they were happening. It is one of the episode's most striking passages: institutional confidence meeting its own physical evidence, and losing. The lawsuit that followed names the psychiatrist, nurse practitioner, therapist, and surgeons involved. Soren walks through the legal landscape with uncommon clarity — including the malpractice statutes in Texas that have made it extraordinarily difficult for cases like hers to advance, and why she believes the question ultimately needs to reach the highest court. The discussion of survivor bias, and the way elective chest surgery is culturally packaged against the reality of serious complications, is among the most sobering stretches of an already sobering hour. What gives this conversation particular depth is everything it does beyond the courtroom. Soren is a graduate researcher whose work focuses on digital technologies and human development, and the hosts draw that thread out carefully — asking what it means that young people now form identity in spaces where fantasy and reality are deliberately blurred, and what a different quality of adult attention might have changed. Her emphasis on mindfulness-based approaches and the female socialisation she felt excluded from gives the episode an unusual forward-looking quality amid so much that has gone wrong. The question Soren says she wishes someone had asked her — raised quietly in the episode's final minutes — lands with weight that lingers. This is a conversation that trusts its guest to be both witness and analyst, and she is fully equal to both roles.
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