(LifeSiteNews) — A young woman who once identified as a “transgender” man is speaking out about the unsound ways in which her mutilating surgery and cross-sex hormones were approved and administered in hopes of saving youth from the kind of harm she suffered.
Soren Adalco, 21, and her attorney, Ron Miller, explained Sunday evening on The Ingraham Angle why she is suing the health practitioners who green-lighted and provided her “transgender” interventions, including a botched double mastectomy.
While introducing Adalco, Ingraham pointed out that she suffered a slew of mental health issues, including “crippling anxiety” and depression, when she was a young teen, and first began to question her gender identity.
Adalco has previously shared that she began identifying as “transgender” at age 11, when she was a tomboy and “felt very different from other girls.”
“So when I heard that feelings of wrongness associated with being a girl had a name, it was very attractive to me. And I felt very understood for the first time in my life,” explained Adalco, adding, “I finally had something to build my identity around.”
Over the next few years, Adalco explored LGBTQ forums online, which “pushed” her “further into having to fight for how I identified.”
At age 15, one month after meeting her biological father, she suffered a mental health breakdown that drove her to the hospital, where a psychiatrist discovered she was exploring a “trans” identity and told her mother against her wishes. Adalco said she thereafter felt pressured to “prove” her male identity was “real.”
She began to bind her chest full time, stopped wearing dresses and makeup, and requested that her family call her by her “boy” name.
While her mother resisted affirming her “male” identity, considering her mental health issues, her newly discovered biological father and stepmother wanted to encourage a gender “transition.” According to Adalco, they were exposed to and responding to the mindset that sees such transition as a remedy for suicide.
Adalco attended a “trans” support group with her father and stepmother, where she met a nurse practitioner whose child identified as “trans.”
Ingraham noted that “after only a 30-minute meeting” with him at age 17, she received her first prescription for cross-sex hormones, “including an outrageously large off-label dosage of testosterone.”
As Kelsey Bolar has noted in a report for The Daily Wire, the nurse never conducted psychological evaluations before prescribing the hormones.
At age 19, after just over a year of cross-sex hormones, while socially secluded due to COVID-19 and not long after a breakup, Adalco decided to have a double mastectomy after a “brief phone call and a visit to a clinic,” Ingraham shared.
As Bolar reported, Adalco received a recommendation letter for the surgery from a therapist she had been seeing not for “gender-related issues,” but for other problems, such as with her relationships.
Adalco said that she admitted to her therapist that she “had some reservations about fully embracing a male identity and had also begun exploring the possibility of taking on a ‘non-binary’ gender identity.”
The therapist nevertheless wrote a letter recommending that Adalco receive the double mastectomy, writing, “I am fully versed on this process and endorse Mr. [Soren] Aldaco’s decision for top surgery.”
Soon after surgery, Adalco noticed “major complications,” including severe bruising and swelling, but was repeatedly dismissed by her surgeons after reaching out to them. Adalco was forced to visit an emergency room, where during a “horrific” eight-hour visit, her incisions were reopened and drains were sewn into her chest, and they worked to eradicate the blood clots she was suffering.
Adalco told Ingraham that she reached out again to the clinic responsible for the botched top surgery, and after she “very insistently” let them know she “wanted some form of recourse,” she was offered reimbursement for her ER visit on the condition that she signed a non-disparagement agreement.
“Of course, I did not,” Adalco recounted. She asked them what they were doing to ensure such a botched operation didn’t happen again, such as extra training.
“At that point, they ghosted me,” Adalco said.
Adalco’s attorney decried the ordeal as “gross malpractice,” noting that the mastectomy has left her “permanently disfigured,” and that her hormone prescription was the result of incompetent, biased advice from her therapist.
Adalco had earlier shared with Bolar that she stopped her hormones because their adverse effects, including joint pain, vaginal atrophy, and gastro issues, eventually became intolerable. At the time, her therapist claimed they weren’t associated with the hormones, instead referring her to specialists to alleviate her symptoms.
The 21-year-old eventually stopped identifying as a man not because of the harm that resulted from her “trans” interventions — she continued to present as male even after she discontinued testosterone — but because she began to rethink how her sense of identity was formed.
This led her to imagine how she would have responded to her younger sister, who she met while connecting to her father, if she had attempted a similar gender transition.
“I thought, what if she came up to me and said the things that I say to myself? What if she told me that she felt her body was wrong when I know for a fact that she is perfect, that there is not a single thing about her that she needs to change?”
She now believes children and teens suffering from gender dysphoria need therapy programs.
“Children deserve better than plastic surgery and hormones,” she told the Texas state legislature, The Daily Wire reported. “The gender-affirming care I experienced in adolescence was an elaborate placebo.”
When Ingraham asked Adalco what advice she has for youth who relate to her earlier struggles, she replied, “Ask the important questions. You’re not compromising your integrity or betraying yourself by thinking critically about what’s happened to you, by unpacking why you feel the way you feel instead of just accepting it at face value.”