A 21-year-old who underwent gender reassignment surgery at the age of 17 is suing the medical team who performed the procedures for medical negligence, stating that the doctors who encouraged her to complete the procedure were acting as ideologues, not unbiased medical professionals.
The lawsuit, which was filed in recent days with the Tarrant County District Court of Texas, says that Soren Aldaco was a teen with a “slew of mental health issues” complicating the already difficult challenges of adolescence and body image. But, despite doctors knowing of her “mental health comorbidities and other psychological and social disorders,” they “deliberately and recklessly propelled [Aldaco] down a path of permanent physical disfiguring and worsening psychological distress.”
Aldaco’s complaint lists names Del Scott Perry, Sreenath Nekkalapu, Barbara Rose Wood, Richard Santucci, Ashley DeLeon, Crane Clinic LLC, Texas Health Physicians Group, Three Oaks Counseling Group LLC, and Mesa Springs LLC as defendants.
According to the legal filing, the girl has struggled with mental health issues from an early age, because of a troubled family life, the sudden loss of a beloved grandmother, peer ridicule, and unspecified other stressors and issues.
Complicating matters, she experienced early puberty, which resulted in her breasts developing earlier than the girls around her, which brought even more ridicule. After the harassment from her peers and being influenced by female body images she saw on social media, Aldaco began to hate her own physical appearance.
Because of this dislike of her former body, along with the fact she tended to enjoy activities normally enjoyed by boys, as well as prodding from transgender online friends, she began to believe she might be transgender too.
Through eighth and ninth grade, she began entertaining the idea of identifying as a boy with a small group of friends and a couple of trusted teachers, the complaint states.
By tenth grade, her depression, anxiety, and social disorders became so severe she was hospitalized at Mesa Springs Psychiatric Hospital in Ft. Worth, Texas.
Despite her explicit wishes not to discuss gender identity, Dr. Nekkalapu pressed her so hard on the issue that she simply aquiesced and finally agreed with him. The emotionally shattered teenager was coerced into identifying as transgender, the filing states.
“Notably, Dr. Nekkalapu did not do any meaningful or comprehensive psychobehavioral examination, did not explore Soren’s existing mental and psychological issues, and did not discuss or attempt to address her glaring comorbidities,” the lawsuit reads. “Instead, he appeared to simply jump to — and indeed encourage — the conclusion that the sole explanation for Soren’s psychotic break was her needing to embrace a transgender identity, after only knowing her for mere minutes.”
Soon, Aldaco began using cross-sex hormones. Doctors failed to discuss the risks posed by cross-sex hormones “and the irreversible consequences that use of the cross-sex hormones would cause,” the lawsuit states. Doctors also did not discuss alternatives to cross-sex hormones and never sought or received written parental consent, the suit alleges.
In February 2021, the girl, still unhappy with her body, began exploring the possibility of a double mastectomy (gender transition proponents often use the term “top surgery,” which has the impact of downplaying the severity of the procedure).
The initial consultation appointment was a brief phone call that lasted only a few minutes, which was followed by surgeons scheduling the girl’s double mastectomy.
The surgery left her with severe complications that resulted in disfigurement that still persists. “Despite Soren sending graphic pictures of the pools of blood forming subcutaneously within her torso, her nipples literally peeling off of her chest, and explaining the immense pain she was experiencing, Dr. Santucci seemed as though he could not be bothered to see her and did not even advise her to seek emergency care,” the lawsuit says.
After some time, Aldaco came to understand that, as the filing states, “her body was not the problem at all; the problem was with her perception and expectation of her body that society and social media had all but forced upon her.” Doctors rushed to begin transitioning procedures while ignoring her “sordid psychological history to justify the approach they had pre-determined to be right,” lawyers explain in the lawsuit. “The repercussions of these interventions have led to Soren’s permanent disfigurement and profound psychological scarring,” the suit says. “The Defendants’ breaches of their fiduciary duties are only underscored by the fact that each Defendant met Soren and facilitated these ‘therapies’ at a pivotal juncture in Soren’s life — when she was grappling not only with the universal challenges of adolescence and body image but also with a complex amalgamation of diagnosed mental health comorbidities and other psychological and social disorders.” The lawsuit says, “Ultimately, what [Aldaco] realized is that over the rocky course of her adolescence, what she needed was an unbiased doctor, not an idealogue. And upon these realizations, she immediately felt and understood the wrongs she had suffered at the hands of the Defendants. With this lawsuit, Soren now seeks redress for those wrongs.” Over the past few years, there has been a large (and growing) movement of detransitioners speaking out as a warning to others about the seriousness and danger of gender transition medical procedures. A study published in 2022 found that 70 percent of those who detransitioned back to the gender matching their biological sex at birth did so because they realized their gender dysphoria was related to other issues. Fifty percent say that becoming transgender did not help with their dysphoria. The study also found that the average age of social transition was 18, while the average age for medically transitioning is 20 years old.