Detransitioners (Ex-Trans) Discuss The Realities of “Gender Affirming Care”
A double mastectomy nearly killed Soren before she realized the medical path was built on ideology, not truth. Transition’s harms are lifelong—flat chest, altered voice, no going back.
Overview
Soren Aldaco shares how years of testosterone use and undergoing a double mastectomy nearly cost her life before she decided to detransition. She attributes her transition to childhood social difficulties and online communities that promoted a comprehensive transgender narrative. The turning point came when she encountered "detrans fetish" content, and a gender-critical post made her realize that "woman = female, and that’s all there is to it." Now, she encourages parents to foster resilience in gender-nonconforming children rather than hastily pursuing medical interventions.
Full Video Summary
In this second installment of Maya Poet’s interview with Soren Aldaco, Soren recounts her journey from living as a trans-identified female on testosterone—having already undergone a double mastectomy that nearly cost her life—to ultimately detransitioning. She describes this shift as “a little bit of everything”: medical trauma, intellectual discovery, family reconnection, and even an accidental epiphany while browsing “detrans fetish” content on Tumblr. The turning point came when she read a gender-critical post stating, “woman = female and that’s it.” During a sexual role-play scenario, she suddenly realized that the “TERFs” she had dismissed were articulating a truth she had avoided confronting elsewhere in her life. From that moment, she could no longer ignore the dissonance between her body and the ideology she had embraced. Soren traces the deeper roots of her transition to a childhood marked by social difficulties and the isolation of online spaces—particularly Tumblr cosplay and fandom communities—where broad, horoscope-like criteria for being “trans” offered an all-encompassing explanation for adolescent discomfort. COVID lockdowns intensified this dynamic: already an online high school student, she began testosterone in 2020 and found that the pandemic’s disruption of normal socialization made the trans narrative even more appealing. When campuses reopened in 2021-2022, she noticed that everyone’s social skills had declined, leveling the playing field and allowing her to re-socialize without the same sense of failure that had once driven her toward transition. College courses in sociology and anthropology then reframed her distress as a problem of socialization rather than identity, convincing her that discomfort with womanhood could be unlearned, much like her earlier difficulty making eye contact. Both women discuss how detransition is often misunderstood as a simple reversal, when in reality it involves ideological desistance, bodily changes that cannot be undone, and complex emotional calculations around regret. Soren emphasizes that she will “always be materially trans”: her mastectomy and years of testosterone have permanently altered her body. She and Maya agree that the categories “desister,” “detransitioner,” and “regretter” are better viewed as overlapping points on a spectrum rather than discrete boxes. They propose replacing the medical/non-medical binary with “high-tech” versus “low-tech” interventions—binding and social transition being low-tech steps that frequently lead to high-tech medical ones. Finally, Soren shares the lessons she has learned from her journey: listen to bodily intuition, accept that sex differences are real and not inherently oppressive, and recognize that language is both powerful and limited. She urges parents to prepare gender-nonconforming children for social friction without pathologizing their behavior or rushing to medical solutions, arguing that resilience and realistic expectations are more protective than ideological affirmation.