When Policy Becomes Politics
By Soren Aldaco
Fact-checkers fixated on my surgery at 19. The pipeline that led there started years earlier
United States
In Oct 2026, I told my story of adolescent gender transition to millions of American voters. As a result, I was doxxed, harassed, and made out to be a liar by our Left-wing media for my vulnerability in speaking on a political ad.
It all started with a quote taken out of context: “At 11, I was groomed by strangers online. At 15, a doctor told my family I was transgender. Hormone injections, then surgery—without my parents’ consent. I was a kid.”
I’ve told my story countless times—in op-eds for The Wall Street Journal and Dallas Morning News, to Laura Ingraham and Charlie Hurt at Fox—and to people across the spectrum of beliefs. All along, I’ve been crystal clear that I experienced sex rejection as a pipeline. It was the sum of events that hurt me, beginning when I was sexually groomed on my Nintendo DS at 10 and ending shortly after surgeons cut off my breasts and de-sexed my chest at 19.
When I shared my story once again for the Ohio U.S. Senate race, I had one goal: to reach moderate voters in language anyone could understand. I had to condense nine complex years into roughly 30 seconds and 60 words. I collaborated with political strategists to understand my audience while remaining authentic in my speech.
I knew people would try to spin what I said no matter what. I stand by my choices.
As expected, a reporter with an ABC affiliate, Morgan Trau of WEWS, quickly stepped in to cut my telling of that pipeline mid-sentence. She then ran her fact-check on the manufactured product: “‘Surgery without my parents’ consent,’ [Aldaco] said. ‘I was a kid.’” In doing so, she withheld the fact that the vast majority of my transition happened while I was a minor—and all of it happened while I was a teen.
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale included some of that context in his follow-up article, but not without narrowing his lede to just my surgery. He took incredible care to respond to a direct statement I gave him on the horror of my experience by nitpicking how, in that statement, I referred to teenager-me as a “kid.”
LGBTQ Nation, Them, and the Advocate ran copies of these stories; Ohio-area Facebook groups made PSAs emphasizing that I was a “legal adult” when I had surgery, that pediatric gender procedures were already illegal in Ohio, and that I wasn’t even from Ohio, so my story didn’t matter.
But “adult” means a lot of things, especially to a specialist in human development like me. People aren’t adults with regard to drinking, smoking, or buying a handgun until they’re 21. We require parent information on the FAFSA, except under rare circumstances, until 24. The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to allow above-18 children on their parents’ plans until age 26. I was 19 when I had my surgery.
I’m a U.S. citizen speaking to U.S. citizens about a U.S. Senate race. Senators from Ohio are elected to make decisions for all Americans. The legality of transgender procedures in Ohio doesn’t matter when they’re still legal federally, and we know children are traveling to evade bans in their home states.
Sherrod Brown—Ohio’s 18-year quasi-incumbent who lost his U.S. Senate seat last election and is running for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat this year—signed a letter in 2023 asking then-President Joe Biden to protect families’ so-called right to state-hop. Neither WEWS nor CNN nor PolitiFact reported on this fact in their recent fact-checks.
And interestingly, Trau quotes a Columbus-area Democrat and OB-GYN who claimed that “under 18, there is not a single surgery that’s been done here in the state.” If so, it’s strange that Ohio parents have reported otherwise, praising in-state surgeons willing to perform them. Earlier this year, Cleveland Clinic agreed to pay over $2 million to settle with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding allegations that the Ohio hospital system used fraudulent billing codes to provide pediatric gender procedures.
The truth is, I’m not a politician. I’m a victim of medical malpractice who tells and retells some of the most embarrassing, traumatic experiences of my life to protect countless other young people, including my minor sister, from facing similar harm.
Trau’s and Dale’s reporting was callous, and WEWS and CNN were irresponsible for publishing it. The establishment Left’s focus on disparate details of my story, including my surgery, reflects their fundamental illiteracy on this issue—and on the systemic nature of sex, generally. Their insistence on getting it wrong has inspired tens of thousands of the internet’s worst to harass me, including blaming me for my own experience of medical abuse, all because I was 19 (still a pediatric patient) at the very end of it.
It does not matter what age I had my mastectomy.
My parents, the mom and dad who raised me, were in the dark for my entire “journey.” They didn’t know my Nintendo had a web browser; they didn’t know that Duke University’s talent program would socially transition me behind their backs. It was unimaginable to them that a school friend’s mom might buy me a breast binder. They had no say when a child psychiatrist told them I was trans, then declared that all my problems were because they didn’t affirm me.
Above all, my mom and step-dad never consented to my step-mom taking me to get testosterone at 17 from a nurse she and I met at a support group when I was 16. At that point, any arbitrary age threshold was moot. It was a surgery my step-mom talked to me about as young as 15, then helped me book and took me to get as soon as COVID lockdown ended. The pipeline had done its job.
Sherrod Brown’s idea that these decisions should be left between “[pediatric patients], their parents, their families, their doctors, not politicians” works for vaccine schedules and ear tubes—not medical shortcuts for adolescent identity crises. I’ve experienced the hypothetical he presents firsthand. Family situations are complex, and doctors’ authority creates an inherent power imbalance.
So, when doctors make an oath to do no harm, they ought to be held to it.
And when our medical institutions systematically break that oath by refusing to protect their most vulnerable patients, unfortunately, politicians have to get involved.
Soren Aldaco is an Independent Women ambassador and human development consultant whose story of transition and detransition was first featured in IW Features’ “Identity Crisis” Series.
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