A 21-year-old Texas woman who detransitioned is suing a medical clinic and its doctors for "gross malpractice" after she was put on puberty blockers at 17 and was pressured into a botched double mastectomy that she says left her "permanently disfigured."
Soren Aldaco offered an emotional recollection of her traumatic medical transition in an exclusive interview on "The Ingraham Angle" Monday, revealing details of a $1 million lawsuit she filed last week against the doctors and a nurse practitioner who, according to the suit, pushed her to transition, "irreversibly disfiguring and disabling" her with surgical mutilation while ignoring a host of mental health challenges she was struggling with at the time.
"I want to make sure that this conversation is spoken about and talked about compassionately because I really do think that a bunch of people are hurting and the way we are handling it right now is just not appropriate," Aldaco told Laura Ingraham.
WARNING: GRAPHIC FOOTAGE
Aldaco, who is autistic, said she was battling depression and anxiety as a teenager when she was hospitalized with a manic episode at 15. After a short meeting with a psychiatrist there, Aldaco said she was "coerced" into coming out as transgender. Two years later, Aldaco connected with Del Scott Perry, a nurse practitioner with Texas Health Physicians Group at a transgender support group. After sharing her mental health struggles and identity confusion with Perry, Aldaco said the nurse practitioner encouraged her to begin medically transitioning and wrote her prescriptions for "an outrageously large off-label dosage" of testosterone, the suit alleges.
At the age of 19, Aldaco underwent a double mastectomy at the Crane Clinic in Austin which left her with "horrible post-surgical complications" and found her "nipples literally peeling off of her chest," according to the 29-page complaint. When she reached out to her surgeons over concerns that something was wrong, Aldaco says she was told that her complications were normal "despite sending graphic pictures of the pools of blood forming subcutaneously within her torso."
"I ended up going back to the hospital after reaching out to the clinic initially with my concerns. I chose to go to the hospital in Dallas because they had someone who experienced the type of surgery I underwent and when I showed up to the hospital they took me seriously which was a contrast to the way that my original surgeons treated me," Aldaco recalled in the Fox News interview.
At the hospital, Aldaco's incisions were reopened "with only local anesthesia" while doctors treated blood clots and sewed surgical drains into her body to treat the buildup of blood, she said.
After realizing that her double mastectomy was botched, Aldaco contacted the Crane Clinic demanding "some sort of recourse." She was later contacted by the CEO, who offered her a reimbursement of $421.31 for her out-of-pocket costs or the ER visit on the condition she signed a non-disparagement agreement, she said.
"We did talk afterward by email. After I was persistent very insistently letting them know that I wanted some sort of recourse, the CEO reached out to me and offered to reimburse me for the ER visit with the stipulation that I sign a non-disparagement agreement, which I, of course, did not. I told them, you know, I asked them what have you done to make sure that this doesn’t happen to any other person? Have you spoken to your nurses? Do you plan on doing any sort of trainings? And at that point they ghosted me," Aldaco told Ingraham.
In the suit, Aldaco alleges that her doctors behaved more like "ideologues" than medical professionals by pushing her into a medical gender transition without addressing the mental health challenges she was struggling with at the time.
The complaint names nurse practitioner Del Scott Perry, psychiatrist Sreenath Nekkalapu, counselor Barbara Rose Wood and the surgeons at Crane Clinic Dr. Richard Santucci and Dr. Ashley Deleon. Crane Clinic, LLC, Texas Health Physicians Group, Three Oaks Counseling Group, LLC, and Mesa Springs, LLC. are also listed as defendants.
"This lawsuit details a chronology of wrongful acts committed by a collective of medical providers who... administered a series of ruinous procedures and treatments," the complaint reads. "Despite these telltale signs demanding caution and therapeutic resolution, however, the defendants deliberately and recklessly propelled Soren down a path of permanent physical disfigurement."
Neither Perry nor the Crane Clinic have responded to requests for comment from "The Ingraham Angle" and Fox News Digital.
Aldaco's attorney, Ron Miller, who joined her in the "Ingraham Angle" interview, said the case centers around "gross malpractice" by medical professionals and spotlights a broader issue among doctors who rush to medically transition struggling teenagers without considering alternate options of care.
"This is a situation when Soren experiencing these significant mental health issues, autism, really just looking for a place to fit in amongst her peers goes to the internet and finds some stuff about becoming transgender," he said. "She reaches out to a medical practitioner expecting competent and unbiased advice and instead gets put on a fast track to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and then as you just discussed a botched double mastectomy left her permanently disfigured for the rest of her life."
Aldaco said she hopes her story will encourage young people who may be confused and are facing pressure to undergo this type of procedure or begin puberty blockers to "ask the important questions" for themselves.
"You are not compromising your integrity or betraying yourself by thinking critically about what has happened to you. By unpacking why you feel the way you feel instead of just accepting it at facing it at face value," she said.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
"I want to change the world," Aldaco added. "I like to describe myself as a student of life, friend of the world. I mean that so…I really want…for everybody to kind of kumbaya and not fight so much over something that really should be nonpartisan."
The suit comes after outspoken detransitioner Chloe Cole sued a nationwide medical group and its doctors who she said "decided to perform a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment" on her. In the complaint, Cole said doctors told her parents that her gender dysphoria would not resolve itself and that she was at a high risk for suicide unless she socially and medically transitioned, asking them, "would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son?."
