Soren Aldaco Just Wants Texas Detransitioners To Have Their Day In Court (#35)
4 September 2025
With Soren Aldaco
North America
Soren Aldaco underwent a double mastectomy at nineteen following years of online-mediated identity development and a medicalization pathway that began at fifteen. Now detransitioned and pursuing litigation against the psychiatrist, nurse practitioner, therapist and surgeons involved in her care, she is also fighting Texas tort reform rules that threaten to prevent her case from reaching a court at all. Her testimony illuminates failures — inadequate informed consent, unaddressed co-occurring mental health needs, post-surgical complications denied in real time — that systematic reviews across Europe have identified as characteristic of gender medicine pathways for minors.
Soren Aldaco was eleven when she began building an alternative identity through online roleplay communities — spaces where, as she describes, the boundary between fantasy and reality was never clearly drawn. A tomboy in Texas who struggled to find her place among peers, she found belonging in digital environments that increasingly affirmed a transgender identity as the explanation for her sense of not fitting in. By fifteen, a mental health crisis brought her into contact with clinicians who moved her toward medical intervention rather than addressing the underlying difficulties. What followed is now the subject of a lawsuit. A psychiatrist, a nurse practitioner, a therapist and the surgical team who performed her double mastectomy at the Crane Center in Texas are named as defendants. Aldaco alleges she was not adequately informed of the risks, that serious complications including large hematomas were denied by the surgical team as they were occurring, and that the care she received fell below reasonable clinical standards. She was nineteen at the time of the surgery. Her account arrives at a moment when the evidence base for paediatric gender medicine is under sustained scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, found that evidence underpinning hormonal interventions for gender-distressed minors was of low quality — studies were small, uncontrolled and characterised by high dropout rates. Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway have each moved to restrict such interventions for minors on the basis of comparable evidence assessments. What Aldaco describes — rapid affirmation, insufficient exploration of co-occurring mental health difficulties, absent long-term follow-up — maps closely onto the patterns those reviews identified as systemic clinical failures. Her legal battle faces structural obstacles that extend beyond the facts of her individual case. Texas tort reform caps on medical malpractice damages reduce the financial incentive for plaintiff attorneys to take such cases, while procedural barriers have so far prevented her case from being heard on its merits. She is pursuing a route toward the Supreme Court, arguing that these barriers deny detransitioners a remedy that would be available in other medical contexts. Whether legal systems in any jurisdiction are yet equipped to handle a growing category of iatrogenic harm from gender-related procedures remains an unresolved question. Aldaco also reflects on the ideological dynamics she observed in her own care, noting that multiple providers involved in her transition had trans-identified family members — not a conspiracy, she says, but an illustration of how confirmation bias can distort clinical judgment. The concern that certain gender clinics have become ideologically captured is one that several European health authorities have now formally acknowledged in their policy reversals. She raises survivor bias as a further distorting factor: those who experience harm or regret are less visible than those reporting satisfaction, skewing both the narratives clinicians encounter and the data that policymakers rely upon when assessing whether the system is working.
