Soren Aldaco
Detransitioner, researcher and podcast producer
Soren Aldaco is a researcher and podcast producer who lived the detransition experience she now studies. Her analysis of algorithms, social contagion and overvalued ideas speaks directly to Europe, where regulators, clinicians and families are still charting a course through one of the most contested areas of contemporary medicine.
Soren Aldaco came out publicly as a detransitioner after years of living as a trans man, and has since channelled that experience into research and podcast production. She brings both personal testimony and analytical rigour to questions European health systems are only beginning to confront: how social environments shape identity, and how medical pathways, once entered, can be genuinely difficult to leave.
In the Beyond Gender episode Detransitioning — Discomfort Before Something Greater (12 March 2026), recorded on Detrans Awareness Day, Aldaco spoke with hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman about the internal logic of her transition and what eventually unravelled it. She introduced the concept of "pebble moments" — small, accumulating doubts that rarely announce themselves as turning points but collectively redirect a life — and examined how recommendation algorithms create immersive online ecosystems that reinforce gender-distressed identities, and how overvalued ideas, once internalised, can make dissent feel unthinkable.
For continental European listeners, Aldaco's testimony arrives at a critical juncture. Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands have each pulled back from routine youth gender medicine, citing insufficient evidence; France, Germany and EU institutions are still shaping policy. Her argument — that social contagion and algorithmic exposure are structural forces, not individual failures — gives clinicians and policymakers a language for evidence-based reform that need not read as culturally reactive.
As a researcher who also produces podcasts dedicated to detransitioner voices, Aldaco understands from the inside the content ecosystems that draw young people toward medicalisation. That dual perspective makes her one of the more analytically grounded contributors to a conversation that Europe urgently needs to have on its own terms.
