Detransitioned Woman Survives Gender Affirming Care & Speaks Out
At 19, I bled internally after my mastectomy. The gender team ghosted me; ER doctors cut me open awake. They’d pay my $400 bill only if I stayed silent. I refused. This is what “informed consent” looks like.
Overview
Sorin Aldaco shares how online fandoms, grief, and body shame at age 11 led her to identify as trans. She obtained testosterone at 16 after a single brief consultation and underwent a double mastectomy at 19. Post-surgery bleeding was ignored until emergency surgeons had to reopen her chest without pain medication; the clinic offered $400 only if she agreed to remain silent. Now detransitioned, she continues to suffer from weather-triggered chest pain and is suing in Texas, arguing that no patient can consent to undocumented harms.
Full Video Summary
In a candid two-hour conversation, 23-year-old Texan Sorin Aldaco traces for host Maya Poet the textbook-like path that led her from an 11-year-old girl sketching anime on a Nintendo DS to a 19-year-old lying awake as ER doctors drained blood clots from her chest. The turning point, she explains, wasn’t gender dysphoria but a toxic mix of early-puberty body shame, the sudden loss of the grandmother who raised her, and chaotic online fandom spaces where adults played spin-the-bottle with minors. Homestuck cosplay forums introduced her to the idea that "awkward, sporty, artistic" girls could actually be boys; a 15-year-old girlfriend from those same circles gave her the label "trans boy" and later sparked the envy that drove her toward hormones. When her mother initially refused to support her, Sorin used a psychiatric hold—imposed after a family fight—as leverage. A nurse-practitioner at a Fort Worth support group prescribed testosterone the day they met. A year later, with her newly reconnected, more liberal father’s approval, she began weekly injections in the family kitchen. The pandemic meant she started college—and her ‘male’ social life—entirely online, so no one witnessed the bruising after her June 2020 double mastectomy at Austin’s Crane Clinic. When bruises spread to her hips (a classic sign of internal bleeding known as Grey-Turner’s sign), her gender clinic refused to see her. Finally, an oncology unit at UT-Southwestern reopened her incisions and inserted drains—while she was awake and unmedicated. The clinic offered to cover her $400 ER bill only if she signed a non-disparagement clause. She refused, and still suffers chest pain triggered by weather changes—pain ER doctors can’t distinguish from heart issues. Sorin emphasizes that every professional who enabled her transition—therapists, nurses, surgeons—identified as transgender themselves and lost medical interest when complications arose. Now, she channels the same activist drive that once led middle-school Gay-Straight Alliance protests into a pending Tarrant County lawsuit and campus speaking engagements. Her argument? No patient, regardless of age, can consent to outcomes doctors neither document nor understand.