Soren Aldaco's Medical Malpractice Case Tests Legal Time Limits for Detransitioners

How Aldaco's hearing at the Texas Supreme Court could change the legal landscape by Peter Jenkins

Soren Aldaco today

Soren Aldaco, a 21-year-old detransitioner, appeared before the Texas Supreme Court on 11th February 2026 for oral argument on whether the medical malpractice case against her former therapist was out of time. The court’s decision will influence the widening legal controversy over existing time limits for detransitioner cases. This latest development comes hard on the heels of the first significant detransitioner court victory just weeks ago, in the case brought by Fox Varian in New York state. Varian’s successful case for medical malpractice and failures of informed consent led to her being awarded $2 million in compensation. With more such cases on the legal horizon, Soren Aldaco will be testing whether the current restrictive time limits for bringing such cases will be relaxed in the interests of justice.

Background to Soren Aldaco’s Transition

Soren Aldaco epitomises in many ways the complex personal history and troubled background of many detransitioners, both in terms of her uncertain identity/attachment patterns and in terms of her major vulnerabilities to trans recruitment. Brought up by her single mother for the first four years of her life, Soren was diagnosed with ADHD at 5 years, and was treated for this with medication. A socially isolated child and something of a tomboy, she began identifying as a boy around age 9. Around 11, she became absorbed in online fandom culture as a form of escape. Then at 15, she made dramatic contact with her estranged father, which was quickly followed by her breakdown and then admission for psychiatric inpatient treatment.

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This hospital admission seemed, by her account, to be a major turning point in her life. According to Soren, a psychiatrist persuaded her that she was really transgender, but then ‘outed’ her to her mother and family. “Soren felt pressured to prove to herself and those around her that her identity as a boy was real. She stopped wearing dresses and makeup, gave up on her dream of playing collegiate softball, began binding her chest full-time, insisted that her family call her by her “boy name,” and viewed the possibility of hormones and surgery more like a legitimate possibility.”

Moving Towards Surgical Intervention

Also around this time, Soren received multiple diagnoses for depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and autism. Her mother resisted the professional encouragement of her transgender identity, but her father and stepmother were more accepting of this stance. Soren joined a transgender support group, coming into contact there with a nurse practitioner who also had a trans child. Through the nurse practitioner, she then started on hormone treatment, at the same time as her new partner, who was also just starting treatment. “It’s interesting, both of these major points in my transition—the beginning of my social transition and the beginning of my medical transition—involved me being in a relationship with another trans person,” Soren said. “We were able to transition together.” Hormone treatment was prescribed by a nurse practitioner, i.e., in the form of testosterone and estrogen blockers, allegedly without Soren undergoing any formal psychological evaluation.

Later, heavily impacted by both the break-up of her tumultuous relationship with her then partner and the enforced social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, Soren decided to undergo ‘top surgery’. This is the childlike euphemism widely used by gender affirming clinicians for a double mastectomy, i.e., the surgical removal of both breasts. Under the U.S. system, Soren required a letter of confirmation from a therapist to obtain this surgery. In her view, she provided just the right kind of material needed for the therapist’s letter. But, in reality, she hadn’t actually been presenting socially as a male for 12 months, as claimed in the letter, largely because of COVID restrictions. Once again, the connective web of trans relationships seemed influential here – the therapist herself apparently had a trans-identified ex-partner.

Impact of Gender Identity Surgery

Two weeks after the double mastectomy at age 19, Soren experienced exceptionally heavy bleeding, requiring a nightmarish trip to undergo emergency medical care. In addition, she experienced some of the wider side effects of medical transition, including vaginal atrophy, hormone fluctuations, joint pain, and gastrointestinal issues. She says she began to regret the surgery, and later stopped taking cross-sex hormones, and started to detransition soon after this.

Part of this journey involved a brutally frank re-examination of her own experiences. Through this process, Soren has learned to be more compassionate toward herself and to practice mindfulness to manage her ongoing distress. In her video, she comes across as a vibrant young woman, keen to get on with her life. This positive outlook, in turn, has contributed to her decision to pursue legal action against the professionals involved in her care, partly for redress and partly to raise wider issues about the systemic failings in medical transition. Thus, Soren explains: “I originally sued the psychiatrist. I sued the nurse practitioner who prescribed me hormones at age 17 without my mother’s consent. I sued the therapist who wrote the letter for my double mastectomy and then dropped me a month before I actually had the mastectomy.”

Taking the Legal Route

There is, however, many a slip between making a legal claim for malpractice and actually winning a case in court. Soren has had to launch separate legal actions against the various parties providing her care, rather like testing the separate links in a chain. Hence, there have been separate actions against the psychiatrist, the nurse practitioner, the therapist, and the surgeon. So far, all these cases have been dismissed, except the case against the therapist who provided the original letter recommending surgery. This case also failed in a lower court on the grounds that it was time-barred. Texas has a two-year statute of limitations, set by the state’s 2003 Medical Malpractice and Tort Reform Act. Soren and her supporters are challenging this bar in the Texas Supreme Court. They claim that this time limit disadvantages detransitioners, who may only realise the harms of medical transition several years later. Crucially, any delay in detransitioning will likely render their cases outside the narrow two-year window for bringing a civil action for damages.

This presents very real problems for detransitioners. Dr Lisa Littman, one of the leading researchers on detransition, has found that the mean (average) age for participants in her study to start identifying as transgender was 17 years. Again, on average, this transgender identification lasted slightly more than 5 years, leading to detransition at around age 22 years. So, given the fluidity and back-and-forth nature of this rollercoaster process, most detransitioners would not meet a two-year rule for bringing their case, should they be so minded.

Barriers to Detransitioner Legal Action

This narrow window of time for qualifying is only one of many barriers facing detransitioners in suing clinicians and their employers. Other problems include the substantial costs involved, the significant hurdles to challenging the peer defence system in medical malpractice cases, and the emotional toll borne by detransitioners, who often just want to move on with their lives. Detransitioners who are seen as leading activists in opposing gender-affirming medicine may also run foul of some courts’ suspicion of politically motivated litigation, however worthy their cause might appear to be.

It is hard to estimate the potential scope of future legal action by detransitioners with any degree of certainty. Leor Sapir, for example, suggests that the number of ‘gender affirming’ double mastectomies for girls under 18 in the US between 2017 and 2023 was between 5,288 and 6,294. This figure includes 50 to 179 girls who were 12.5 or younger at the time of their procedure. Not all individuals in this sample will necessarily detransition, as detransition rates are little researched and therefore largely unknown, but some may decide to do so in the future.

Shifting our perspective away from the medical angle and toward the legal end of the telescope, Ben Ryan has constructed a provisional database of known U.S. detransitioner legal cases, now running in the mid-twenties. Using the recorded outcomes to construct a table, the following diagram indicates the outcomes for which data are known.

Outcome of US Detransitioner Legal Cases

Table: Outcome of US detransitioner legal cases at February 2026. (Data source: Ryan, 2026)

The information is currently patchy, but these data suggest that detransitioner lawsuits are already building up in numbers. ‘Timing out’ of legal claims via existing legislation may lead to increased pressure for such bans to be revisited in the future, if it is perceived that such time limits unfairly penalise detransitioners, where the realisation of the nature of their perceived harm allegedly caused by ‘gender affirming care’ simply arrives too late for them to bring their case to court

One of Many

One of the cases marked as ‘Pending’ in the Table above is the one currently being brought by Soren Aldaco. Her case before the Texas Supreme Court is now to present arguments for revisiting the two-year statute of limitations in cases like hers. In a nutshell, her case is a compelling moral argument for legal reform. “Children deserve better than plastic surgery and hormones,” she told the state lawmakers. “The gender-affirming care I experienced in adolescence was an elaborate placebo.”

Peter Jenkins is a counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017).

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