Detransitioning - Discomfort Before Something Greater | Soren Aldaco
On Detrans Awareness Day, Beyond Gender speaks with researcher and podcast producer Soren Aldaco about her personal journey through detransition. Aldaco examines how algorithms, overvalued ideas and social contagion can drive young people toward medicalisation, and how small "pebble moments" of doubt eventually shift a person's course. For continental European listeners — in countries still reckoning with the consequences of a decade of gender-affirming protocols — her account illuminates what healthcare systems now owe the adults they treated as minors, and what clinicians and support networks can do differently.
Recorded to mark Detrans Awareness Day on 12 March, this episode brings Soren Aldaco into a candid conversation about the experience of those who have stepped back from medical transition and are rebuilding their lives. Aldaco is no outside observer. She has produced the Beyond Gender podcast, works as a researcher, and serves as an ambassador for Independent Women. Her perspective is both deeply personal and analytically grounded, which makes for a rare kind of testimony. The conversation moves through territory that is immediately relevant to clinicians and policymakers across continental Europe. Aldaco examines the role of algorithms and what she calls overvalued ideas — the way online environments can amplify and entrench a single explanatory framework for complex psychological discomfort. She traces how something that begins as imaginative or social roleplay can gradually lead a young person toward irreversible medical intervention. The concept of social contagion, already central to debates in Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, is addressed directly and without euphemism. One of the most valuable ideas in this conversation is what Aldaco describes as "pebble moments" — small, accumulating instances of doubt or dissonance that do not announce themselves dramatically but that, in retrospect, signalled a turning point. For European mental health professionals working with young adults in the aftermath of medical transition, this framing offers something concrete: a way of understanding how change happens slowly and privately, often without external validation. It also speaks to the importance of leaving therapeutic space genuinely open rather than foreclosed. The episode addresses the challenge of finding community after detransition, a subject with particular resonance in countries where public discourse on this topic remains constrained. In France and Germany, where professional cultures have been more reluctant to platform detransitioned voices, the isolation Aldaco describes will be familiar to many. The growing European detrans community is real but still operates largely in informal, semi-private networks. Hearing a first-person account framed with both intellectual rigour and emotional honesty offers those listeners something rare. The closing portion of the episode deals with practical matters: advice for those reconsidering their transition, how to maintain personal boundaries, and how to recognise and avoid thought traps that can keep a person stuck. These are useful orientations for anyone supporting someone through this process — as a friend, a family member, or a clinician. Broadcast on Detrans Awareness Day, the episode is a reminder that the numbers of people detransitioning are no longer negligible, and that European healthcare systems that medicalised young people over the past decade now carry a clinical and ethical responsibility to those same individuals as adults seeking to understand what happened to them.
