Soren Aldaco
Detransitioner, researcher and podcast producer
Soren Aldaco occupies a rare double role in the Beyond Gender world: she helps produce the show and has sat in the guest chair to give one of its most candid accounts of detransition. A researcher and Independent Women ambassador, she joined Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to examine not just what happened to her, but why.
Soren Aldaco brings an unusual combination of perspectives to the gender debate. As a producer of the Beyond Gender podcast she understands the show's ethos from the inside; as a detransitioner and researcher she has spent real time interrogating the forces that made her own medical pathway feel, at the time, not just possible but necessary. That dual vantage point — analytical and autobiographical at once — is what makes her episode such a distinctive entry in the catalogue.
Her conversation with hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, titled Detransitioning – Discomfort Before Something Greater, was recorded for Detrans Awareness Day in March 2026. The timing was deliberate. Rather than letting the date become a moment for simple testimony, Aldaco used it to do something harder: trace the structural conditions that accelerate a medical pathway. She examined how algorithmic culture shapes identity formation in young people, and how communities built around overvalued ideas can make transition feel not merely available but inevitable.
What distinguishes her account is the refusal to stop at personal narrative. Aldaco contextualises her experience, names the mechanisms, and is honest about the discomfort that preceded clarity. The episode title captures her outlook precisely — detransition is not a defeat but a passage through difficulty toward something more grounded. She arrives at that conclusion not by dismissing what came before, but by understanding it.
As an ambassador for Independent Women, she carries that analytical rigour into her advocacy work, making the case that protecting young people requires engaging seriously with the cultural and algorithmic environments that shape their self-understanding. For listeners new to the detransition conversation, this episode is an exceptionally clear-eyed place to start.
