Graphic Warning â The story contains a graphic image.Â
After undergoing life-altering surgeries she now regrets, Soren Aldaco is taking her fight to the Texas Supreme Court. The 23-year-old claims online grooming led her to pursue medical intervention as a minor; now, justices must decide if her malpractice suit against her former doctors can proceed past the state’s legal deadline.
Aldaco spoke to Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview about her journey, which began when she started using social media at age 11 and joined “these little art communities online where we would create characters and give them different names and appearances.”Â
“I discovered the darkest corners of the internet. In these chatrooms, I was sexually groomed by adult strangers who used my love for art against me,” Aldaco wrote in a . “I made friends with other little girls on art forums around the same time, many of whom had similar experiences. One such girl began identifying as transgender. She told me she felt like “a boy trapped in a girls body.”
This is when she learned about people identifying as transgender.
“I think transgender identity is very similar to cosplay in a lot of ways. You take on a new name, you take on a new appearance, almost like you’re creating one of those characters online,” Aldaco told Fox News Digital.Â
But it soon became more than just pretending online, saying she started to “feel like a boy” due to a combination of newfound male attention and her tendency to “engage in this fantasy of cosplaying.”
“I was role-playing in these art forums, just like boyfriend, girlfriend role plays, cutesy, like innocent kid things. I mean, the most that we got into that was mature was kissing, right? But online, in those adult chat rooms, obviously I wasn’t aware that there was more mature content that adults would end up leading me into,” she said. “I ended up having this and my family took me to a hospital where the psychiatrist that was responsible for my care pressured me to essentially come out to him as trans.”
Aldaco claimed she didn’t have intentions of doing so.Â
“This was something I never intended to do. I saw it as the role-play identity, and he insisted that it was safe to tell him, even though it was something I wasn’t going to deal with ’til I was an adult,” she said.Â
She shared how, over the next year and a half, she was involved in a support group and met a nurse practitioner that .Â
WARNING: GRAPHIC FOOTAGE
Aldaco alleges that her transition was facilitated by medical professionals who ignored her underlying trauma and coached her to navigate insurance hurdles. According to Aldaco, her therapist showed no interest in exploring her history of being groomed, despite Aldacos explicit requests to discuss it. Instead, she claims the therapist fast-tracked her medical transition by drafting a surgical recommendation letter that contained a significant falsehood: It stated Aldaco had been living as a male for at least 12 months â a standard clinical milestone Aldaco says she had not actually reached.
The alleged misconduct extended to the surgical center, where Aldaco claims the staff prioritized “coaching” over care. She describes being told exactly what to say to secure insurance approval, including instructions to claim she wanted a phalloplasty (a complex genital reconstruction that uses tissue to create a penis) even though she did not. Aldaco alleges this was a tactical move by the center to maximize insurance payouts. When her provider initially denied coverage as “out-of-network,” she says the center pressured her into a self-pay agreement, promising they had the expertise to force the insurance company to reimburse her at in-network rates.
Aldaco said she experienced complications af
