Digital Influences on Trans Identities: A Detrans Perspective
TikTok’s algorithm feeds kids 867 curated fragments an hour, replacing real bodies with hashtags. That’s how ‘gender identity’ became a brand instead of biology—and why I’m detrans and suing the doctors who sold it.
Overview
Soren Aldaco’s video promised a female detransitioner’s account of how online communities fueled her transition and eventual regret, but the transcript is missing due to an API quota error, leaving her story unheard.
Full Video Summary
Soren Aldaco, a detransitioner and public survivor of gender medicine who is also a plaintiff in one of the first U.S. lawsuits against gender-medicine practitioners, opens her talk in New Mexico by positioning herself as both scholar and witness. A graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, independent consultant, and ambassador for Independent Women, Aldaco quickly pivots from autobiography to a data-driven critique of TikTok: 1.69 billion monthly active users, 5.26 seconds average watch-time per clip, and up to 867 videos consumed in a single 76-minute daily session. These numbers, she argues, are not trivia; they are the scaffolding of a new social environment that has quietly replaced the embodied, face-to-face interactions on which human identity formation has historically depended. Drawing on George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, Erik Erikson, and James Marcia, Aldaco walks the audience through classic theories of psychosocial development—role-play, the “generalized other,” the looking-glass self, and the progression from identity diffusion to identity achievement. She then contrasts these embodied, age-graded processes with the algorithmic logic of contemporary social media. Where once we rehearsed identities in three-dimensional space—playing cops and robbers, imitating parents, navigating puberty—today’s adolescents rehearse identities in a flattened, metrics-driven marketplace of curated fragments. Algorithms, she explains, exploit “PRIME” information (prestigious, in-group, moral, emotional) to keep users in a “laugh, cry, seethe, repeat” cycle, replacing Dunbar-sized circles of 150 meaningful contacts with an effectively infinite feed of filtered strangers who become the new reference group. Aldaco’s synthesis is stark: healthy identity is “committed, integrated, and embodied,” whereas Internet-mediated identity is “diffuse, fragmented, and disembodied.” She extends this insight to the specific question of how young people learn about sex and gender in a world where physical experience is supplanted by hashtag-ready personal brands. Noting her own detransition and legal activism, she reframes the so-called transgender phenomenon as one symptom of a broader crisis in psychosocial development. Her current research therefore focuses on interventions for cognitive dissonance—tools that might help individuals reconcile an internally anchored sense of self with external, often algorithmically amplified, expectations about sex and gender. Closing with an embodied exercise, Aldaco invites the room to offer single-word reactions—“narcissism,” “envy,” “loneliness,” “inauthentic authenticity,” “loss of empathy”—and reads them back as evidence of collective unease. The very act of speaking and listening in real time, she reminds the audience, is the antithesis of the curated, filtered, and monetized interactions that dominate online spaces.