Soren Aldaco
Detransitioner, researcher and podcast producer
Soren Aldaco was eleven when online roleplay began reshaping her sense of self, and eighteen when a double mastectomy left her with serious complications her surgeons denied. Now a graduate student, researcher, and producer of the Beyond Gender podcast, she brings rare rigour — and serious personal cost — to a conversation Ireland has barely begun.
Soren Aldaco was eleven years old when online roleplay began reshaping her sense of self. By eighteen she had undergone a double mastectomy — a procedure that left her with serious complications her surgeons subsequently denied. Her path from that surgery to detransition, and then to research and advocacy, is among the most clearly documented accounts of how gender medicine can fail young patients, and why legal accountability matters.
Now a graduate student and producer of the Beyond Gender podcast, Aldaco brings lived experience and analytical precision to the subject in equal measure. In Soren Aldaco Just Wants Texas Detransitioners To Have Their Day In Court (episode 35, September 2025), Stella O'Malley explored the landmark legal case Aldaco is pursuing against the medical providers who treated her. The case is significant far beyond Texas: Ireland has no comparable legal route for detransitioners seeking redress, and regulatory frameworks for addressing gender-related medical harm remain underdeveloped here.
She returned to the microphone in March 2026 for Detransitioning — Discomfort Before Something Greater, recorded for Detrans Awareness Day and this time speaking in her own voice rather than as a producer. Aldaco named the mechanisms that shaped her adolescent identity: social contagion, algorithmic influence, and the slow accumulation of doubt that eventually broke through. For Irish listeners, her account is pointed — those forces are active here too, on the same platforms and in the same schools, yet they are rarely examined openly in Irish media or Irish policy debate.
Taken together, Aldaco's two appearances on Beyond Gender offer something that is almost entirely absent from Irish public conversation: an honest, grounded reckoning from someone inside the research as well as inside the experience, pressing a question Irish healthcare and Irish law have yet to seriously engage with.
