Detransitioning - Discomfort Before Something Greater | Soren Aldaco
12 March 2026
With Soren Aldaco
Global
Recorded on Detrans Awareness Day 2026, this episode gives researcher and podcast producer Soren Aldaco space to trace her own path from online identity immersion and medicalisation to detransition. Her account is both personal testimony and analytical inquiry, examining social contagion, algorithmic influence and the slow accumulation of doubt. For Ireland, where the HSE provides no published pathway for people wishing to discontinue or reverse gender-related medical treatment, Aldaco's experience highlights a serious gap in evidence-based care.
Soren Aldaco is a researcher, a producer of the Beyond Gender podcast, and an ambassador for Independent Women. She is also someone who has lived the detransition process herself, which lends this episode a dimension that literature reviews alone cannot supply. Broadcast on 12 March 2026 — Detrans Awareness Day — the conversation allows Aldaco to move between personal account and analytical framework, examining how she came to pursue medical gender transition and how she came to step back from it. A central strand of Aldaco's account is the role the online environment played in shaping her identity. She describes a progression from roleplay and digital immersion to the adoption of a fixed gender identity, and from there to medicalisation. The concept she and the hosts discuss — of overvalued ideas amplified by algorithms — has direct relevance to the clinical picture now emerging across Europe. The Cass Review, commissioned in the UK and widely cited in Irish policy discussions, raised questions about whether the presentations seen in gender clinics reflect stable, pre-existing conditions or whether social and digital environments are a significant driver. Aldaco's account sits squarely inside that debate. She introduces the notion of "pebble moments" — small, often hard-to-articulate realisations that accumulated over time and eventually shifted her understanding of herself. This is a useful concept for anyone trying to understand how people exit strongly held identity frameworks. The moments are rarely dramatic; they tend to be quiet, private, and initially easy to dismiss. Aldaco's account suggests that clinical environments are not always well designed to notice or encourage them. The episode also addresses what comes after: finding community, navigating loss, and building a sense of self that is not organised around a medicalized identity. These are psychological and social processes, and the conversation reflects the hosts' consistent argument that psychotherapy and open dialogue are more appropriate responses to gender distress than rapid medical pathways. In Ireland, the HSE's adult Gender Service and the paediatric referral structure provide formal routes toward gender-related medical treatment. There is, however, no published HSE guidance on discontinuing hormone therapy, managing the sequelae of gender surgeries, or accessing psychological support specifically oriented toward people who have detransitioned. No national data on the number of people in Ireland who have sought to reverse or stop gender-related medical treatment has been published. Aldaco's testimony — and the growing international body of detransitioner accounts — points to a category of patient whose needs have not yet been formally acknowledged in Irish healthcare policy. The episode closes with practical reflections: advice for people in early stages of questioning, the importance of maintaining boundaries, and what Aldaco calls thought traps — cognitive patterns that can keep someone anchored in frameworks that no longer fit. For Irish clinicians, commissioners and families, this conversation is a substantive contribution to an area where formal institutional engagement remains overdue.
