Detransitioning - Discomfort Before Something Greater | Soren Aldaco
12 March 2026
With Soren Aldaco
Global
Recorded on Detrans Awareness Day, this episode features Soren Aldaco — researcher, Beyond Gender producer and Independent Women ambassador — tracing her own path through transgender identification, medical transition and detransition. Her account covers identity formation, algorithmic reinforcement of gender ideology, social contagion and the slow work of recovery. It maps closely onto the concerns documented in the Cass Review: bypassed psychological assessment, overvalued ideas and the long-term consequences for young people who later come to regret medical intervention.
Soren Aldaco came to public attention as both an insider and a critic of gender-identity culture. As a researcher and producer of the Beyond Gender podcast, she has spent considerable time examining the literature on gender dysphoria, detransition and the social dynamics that draw young people — particularly adolescent girls — toward the conviction that medical transition will resolve their distress. In this episode, recorded to mark Detrans Awareness Day on 12 March, she speaks from direct personal experience. The conversation opens with identity and how it is shaped in adolescence. Aldaco describes a progression that will be recognisable from the clinical literature: early exposure to gender-identity content online, a gradual entrenchment of the belief that transition is necessary, and what she calls pebble moments — small but accumulating recognitions that something was wrong. The Cass Review, published in April 2024, found that psychological exploration had frequently been bypassed and that clinicians had been placed in a position where affirmation was treated as the only acceptable clinical response. Aldaco's account tracks closely with that pattern. She addresses the role of algorithms and what she describes as overvalued ideas — beliefs that, while not delusional, become so dominant that they crowd out competing explanations for a person's distress. This is precisely the mechanism that independent reviewers in the UK identified as a systemic failure: adolescents experiencing depression, anxiety, autism or trauma were being routed through a single explanatory framework without adequate differential assessment. NHS England's 2024 service specification for its new regional gender services explicitly requires comprehensive psychological and psychiatric assessment before any clinical pathway proceeds, a direct response to these documented shortcomings. Aldaco also addresses social contagion — the documented clustering of transgender identification among friendship groups and online communities — and the difficulty of leaving a community that had become central to her sense of self. Rebuilding identity outside a medical category, she explains, is the core of what detransition demands, and the episode's later sections deal with practical questions: how to set limits on relationships that reinforce old patterns, how to resist the thought traps that can pull a person back, and how to find community with others who have made a similar journey. The significance of testimony like Aldaco's lies partly in what it contributes to a still-incomplete evidence record. The Cass Review called explicitly for long-term follow-up research into those who detransition, noting that this population had been poorly served by existing data. NHS England's commitment to prospective outcome studies for people treated under earlier clinical models reflects recognition that the consequences of that practice are still being lived. Personal accounts from those who have navigated the full arc — identification, transition and detransition — provide the longitudinal texture that policy documents and epidemiological studies alone cannot capture.
