Detransitioning - Discomfort Before Something Greater | Soren Aldaco
12 March 2026
With Soren Aldaco
Global
Soren Aldaco is a researcher and detransitioner who examines how identity, online algorithms and insufficient clinical scrutiny can channel young people toward irreversible medical pathways. Released on Detrans Awareness Day, this episode weaves her personal account with analytical insight. Growing European evidence on detransition rates, the limitations of long-term follow-up data from gender clinics, and the absence of structured post-detransition care make her account directly relevant to current regulatory and policy debates across the continent.
Soren Aldaco is a researcher, writer and podcast producer who has also served as an ambassador for Independent Women. Released to mark Detrans Awareness Day on 12 March, the episode offers her space to describe, in her own terms, the sequence of events and influences that moved her toward gender-related medical intervention and, eventually, away from it. Her position as both a lived-experience witness and an active researcher gives the conversation an analytical dimension that sets it apart from straightforward personal testimony. A significant portion of the discussion is devoted to identity and what the episode calls overvalued ideas — the clinical concept describing a belief system that becomes so entrenched it resists correction by experience or by those around the person. This dynamic has been cited in several European clinical reviews as a reason why affirmation-only approaches can be inadequate for a proportion of gender-distressed adolescents. The independent Cass Review, published in England in 2024, found that psychological and psychiatric co-occurring difficulties were frequently underassessed, and that the evidence base for affirming social and medical transition in young people was markedly weaker than had been assumed. Aldaco speaks directly to the role of online algorithms in shaping her path, a mechanism that has attracted increasing attention from researchers and public health bodies. Recommendation systems on social media platforms can draw adolescents, particularly those already experiencing social difficulty or mental health challenges, into communities that frame gender transition as a resolution to broader distress. Sweden, Finland and Norway have each cited social-influence factors and a demographic concentration of referrals among adolescent females as partial grounds for restricting hormonal interventions for minors to controlled research settings only. The episode's chapter on moving from roleplay to medicalization traces how an exploratory online identity can become a clinical pathway without adequate gatekeeping at key junctures. This observation aligns with concerns raised in systematic reviews and by national health agencies across northern Europe about the speed of progression from first presentation to medical intervention in some gender clinics. Several countries have since introduced mandatory psychological assessment periods and explicit informed-consent requirements for minors that did not exist when many of today's detransitioners were adolescents. The later sections of the conversation turn toward what helps: finding community with others who have detransitioned, setting psychological boundaries and resisting thought patterns that sustain distress. These practical observations reflect a structural gap in European healthcare. The Cass Review recommended that NHS England develop dedicated clinical pathways for detransitioners, acknowledging that this population routinely encounters difficulty accessing care that treats their experience as medically legitimate. Comparable provision is, at present, largely absent in most other European health systems, despite growing numbers of people identifying as detransitioned. Detransition data has become a material factor in regulatory debates because long-term follow-up studies from established gender clinics have been found to suffer from high patient attrition, making it difficult to establish what proportion of those who underwent medical intervention ultimately discontinued or regretted it. First-person accounts from researchers who have themselves detransitioned carry documentary weight in that context — not as substitutes for clinical evidence, but as detailed records of the conditions and decision points that aggregate data have so far failed to capture.
