How One Detransitioner Found Peace Outside of Medicalization
At 19 they reopened my mastectomy wounds to scoop out infected blood clots. I lost the ability to breastfeed and may never conceive. Kids can’t consent to trading away their future bodies—affirmation isn’t care, it’s harm.
Panoramica
Soren Aldaco began identifying as transgender at 11, was prescribed testosterone at 17 by a nurse-practitioner on the first visit, and underwent a double mastectomy at 19 that left her with life-threatening infections and permanent loss of breastfeeding and uncertain fertility. After a sociology class prompted her to imagine her 10-year-old sister hating her body, she detransitioned and now warns that unquestioning “affirmation” is enabling, not helping, and predicts a coming wave of regret stories.
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Soren Aldaco, now 20 and approaching her 21st birthday, recounts how she began identifying as transgender at 11, started testosterone at 17, and underwent a double mastectomy at 19. Raised by a loving but overwhelmed single mother and a disabled step-father, Soren felt largely on her own. Meeting her father and his new family at 15 provided emotional relief; seeing her distress, they embraced the “dead daughter or living son” narrative they encountered online and took her to a local support group. There, a nurse-practitioner whose own child was trans prescribed testosterone on the first visit, eventually managing 11 concurrent medications for Soren. The youth subgroup fixated on who was “next” for hormones or surgery, and Soren admits she felt competitive envy toward peers already accessing those steps. The surgery itself became a medical and psychological crisis. In June 2021 surgeons reopened her incisions in the emergency room to manually extract infected blood clots, an ordeal she endured without adequate pain management while clinicians minimized her suffering. For six months afterward she continued living as male, but a sociology course in Austin introduced her to theories of identity formation. Imagining her beloved 10-year-old sister expressing the same bodily hatred she once voiced cracked open a new self-compassion. Soren began medically detransitioning first—vaginal atrophy and erratic hormone swings made continuing intolerable—and only later embraced an ideological shift away from trans identity. She now faces uncertain fertility and the permanent loss of capacities like breastfeeding, outcomes she believes children cannot meaningfully consent to relinquish. Reflecting on the systemic failures that enabled her transition, Soren argues that unquestioning “affirmation” often amounts to enabling rather than helping. She anticipates a coming wave of regret stories akin to the Me-Too movement and finds daily stability through mindfulness: when dysphoric or anxious feelings arise, she leans into them with the compassion she once sought from medical transition, discovering that self-acceptance—not surgical alteration—has finally brought her peace.