Detransitioner Soren Aldaco Describes Managing Her Unending “Distress”
Gender dysphoria is a lifelong struggle against distress according to a woman who is suing her doctors for having provided her with gender-affirming care.
by Evan Urquhart
Stock image only! Aldaco not shown.
Is it normal for a woman to experience endless mental distress over her gender? Soren Aldaco, a young detransitioned woman who is suing the medical professionals who once provided her with gender-affirming care, says yes. Aldaco, who authored an opinion column for the Dallas Morning News this morning, once believed that she was a trans boy. Now, however, she now believes that societal expectations for women were the cause of her distress. Notably, however, she does not say her distress has eased, or that she anticipates any end to it.
Aldaco’s story has been circulating in the right-wing press over the past two weeks or so after she filed a lawsuit suing the doctors who treated her gender dysphoria before her detransition. Many of the stories focused on claims of gruesome medical complications from a chest masculinization surgery Aldaco underwent when she was 19. The stories all set out a similar timeline: Aldaco began thinking of herself as trans as a young teen, during a mental health crisis at 15 she felt pressured by a doctor to talk about her gender identity and betrayed when the doctor shared the fact that she identified as male with her parents, she began cross-sex hormones at 17, had surgery to remove her breasts at 19. In the wake of complications from that surgery Aldaco came to believe that her transition had been a mistake.
Now 21, Aldaco writes that she believes the pressures to conform as a woman naturally result in women wanting to escape. She describes the euphoria she felt at each step she took to masculinize her appearance and presentation, and her belief that this euphoria was because she wasn’t forcing herself to conform to a woman’s gender role.
screenshot from the Dallas Morning News
By highlighting the similarities between her experiences and that of trans boys, Aldaco seeks to underscore the point that she wasn’t misdiagnosed with gender dysphoria, but rather that people who experience gender dysphoria aren’t really trans. Does this mean that all women would feel “ecstatic” to wear a chest binder or a suit? Aldaco clearly believes that gender dysphoria is caused by patriarchy, but she never explains why so many cis women are able to express dissatisfaction with patriarchal gender norms and even rebel against them without reporting anything similar to this. There’s clearly something different about Aldaco and other female-assigned people who experience euphoria when they present themselves as boys or men (a tiny percentage of all the people who are AFAB), but she isn’t forthcoming about what that difference might be.
Aldaco also chooses not to offer any hope to people experiencing gender dysphoria that their discomfort might ease. Instead, she describes her chosen path as one of managing distress:
screenshot from the Dallas Morning News
Here, Aldaco is conceding something that was first made public by ex-detransitioners, people who attempted to live as detransitioned women and gave up because it was too painful to fight a lifelong battle with themselves over their gender for ideological reasons. While alternative treatments for gender dysphoria are part of what the anti-trans movement promises, the reality is that people who choose to detransition often report an ongoing struggle with gender dysphoria. This is very different from the promise of gender-affirming care. Medical transition doesn’t have the ability to transform patients into another person or solve all their problems, but it does claim to drastically reduce or eliminate gender dysphoria from patients’ lives. Far from a lifelong struggle with gender distress, most trans people report major reductions in the specific symptom, gender dysphoria, that transition is intended to treat. (Dissatisfaction with transition is much more common among the minority of trans people who don’t experience that benefit.) Although it’s never touted as a cure for every problem, for many trans people the reduction in gender dysphoria brings with it a reduction in other negative mental healt symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. (Here’s one of several studies that found this.)
“Listen to detransitioners” is a common refrain from activists opposed to medical transition, but when you do listen you often find that people who detransition do not claim to have been misdiagnosed, or even that their gender dysphoria has lessened through the alternative approaches they promote. Aldaco does not promise relief for sufferers from gender dysphoria, and has not experienced such relief herself. In place of relief she calls for widespread cultural change to make gender norms less onerous on women, but she does not claim that letting go of those norms for herself eased her distress.
There is no evidence that feminist cultural change will eliminate gender dysphoria, but even if it could it’s not clear why trans people experiencing gender dysphoria now shouldn’t transition in the meantime, while we wait for the cultural change that will do away with the need. It is Aldaco’s choice if she prefers to live as a woman who experiences constant distress over her gender, and no one should take that choice away from her. However, she does not make a compelling case for why any trans person should follow her lead.
