The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC closely tied to Senate Republican leadership, has been running an anti-trans ad in Ohio that blames former Sen. Sherrod Brown for a surgery performed in Texas on a 19-year-old. The ad went up on September 24, and in it, a detransitioner named Soren Aldaco tells viewers that she went through “hormone shots, a botched double mastectomy, and years of trauma,” that “I was a kid,” and that Brown “supports sex change surgery for minors, and admitted he would never oppose it.”
Ohio already bans that surgery for anyone under 18, Aldaco had hers in Austin when she was 19, and the video clip SLF offers as proof of Brown’s “admission” shows him saying that a child’s health care decisions belong to families and doctors, “not politicians.”
SLF “is spending nearly $10 million while the ad runs,” according to the Washington Examiner, which got the ad first, and SLF’s upload on YouTube showed nearly 6 million views by Monday. In the press release, SLF’s communications director, Chris Gustafson, accused Brown directly: “Children should never have to endure the trauma that Far-Left politicians like Sherrod Brown have inflicted.” On Monday, SLF released a second ad with Aldaco, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee posted it with the message that Brown “supports irreversible sex change surgeries on kids — like what happened to Soren.”
I’m not going to argue with Aldaco about her own life. By the Texas Supreme Court’s account, she had complications after her surgery that “required emergency medical care,” and she has every right to talk about what happened to her. But SLF has attached her story to a candidate who had nothing to do with it, in a state whose law would still allow her surgery today, to make a claim that PolitiFact rated Mostly False when SLF made it about Brown in 2024.
The Surgery Happened in Texas, When She Was 19
Neither ad says where or when Aldaco had her surgery. The Texas Supreme Court’s opinion in her lawsuit does. According to the court, “Aldaco contacted the Crane Clinic to schedule a double mastectomy” after struggling with her gender identity as a teenager, and she got the letter the clinic required from a therapist “with whom she’d been having telehealth sessions to talk about relationship issues.” The surgery took place on June 11, 2021. KERA, the public radio station in North Texas, reported that it happened at the Crane Clinic in Austin, when she was 19.
Her lawsuit says that she started testosterone at 17, prescribed by a nurse practitioner in Texas, so the ad’s “hormone shots” line does describe treatment that began while she was a minor. SLF’s attack on Brown, though, is about surgery, and she had her surgery at 19.
The second ad puts it this way, in Aldaco’s own words: “Hormone injections, then surgery, without my parents’ consent.” At 19, she was an adult, and she didn’t need her parents’ consent. When a different anti-trans campaign in Ohio made the same kind of claim in 2023, I wrote that “in no state is it legal for a child to have gender-affirming surgical procedures without the consent of their parents; such procedures for minors are also extremely rare.”
Aldaco sued several of the Texas providers involved in her care in 2023, in Tarrant County. In June, the Texas Supreme Court ruled unanimously that she had filed her claim against the therapist in time and sent it back to the trial court. The court decided when she sued, not whether the therapist did anything wrong.
Ohio Already Bans It
Ohio law has banned gender surgery for minors since April 24, 2024, when House Bill 68 took effect. The law bars doctors from performing “gender reassignment surgery on a minor individual,” and the lawsuit against HB 68 doesn’t challenge that part of it. When an Ohio appeals court ruled on HB 68 in 2025, it noted that “none of the appellants have raised a challenge to the law’s surgery provision.” The ban is limited to patients under 18, so the surgery at the center of SLF’s ad would be legal in Ohio today.
Even Gov. Mike DeWine, the Republican who vetoed HB 68 before legislators overrode him, said in his veto announcement that he “adamantly” agreed that “no surgery of this kind should ever be performed on those under the age of 18,” and he directed state agencies to write rules banning it.
The part of HB 68 that has changed life for our kids in Ohio is its ban on puberty blockers and hormones. Two trans girls and their families sued over it in 2024, when the girls were 12, and the Ohio Supreme Court has kept the ban in effect while it considers their case; the justices heard arguments in March and haven’t ruled. Those are the Ohio kids this law actually reaches, and SLF’s ads never mention them.
SLF’s Own Clip Shows What Brown Said
Both ads put the same citation on screen, “WSYX, 7/19/23.” In the first ad, it sits under the captions “Sherrod Brown supports sex change surgery for minors” and “Sherrod Brown admitted he would never ban child sex changes.” SLF’s press release links its “would never oppose” claim to a video file named “Sherrod-Brown-supports-sex-reassignment-surgeries-for-minors.mp4.” The file is a 22-second clip from a WSYX report in July 2023. In it, Brown, asked about a proposal from then-Sen. JD Vance, says a child’s health care decisions “are between them, their parents, their families, their doctors, not politicians,” and adds, “I will never agree with anybody that wants to bring politics into the family situation with health care, period.”
Vance’s bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, “sought to make it a felony for doctors to provide surgery or prescribe puberty blockers to anyone younger than 18,” according to PolitiFact. Brown told a reporter that politicians shouldn’t make those decisions for families. He doesn’t say the word “surgery” anywhere in SLF’s clip, and he doesn’t admit to anything. The phrase “sex change surgery,” which I described in 2023 as “an archaic label that Fox News and other outlets have increasingly substituted for gender-affirming care,” comes from SLF’s ad, not from Brown.
SLF made the same claim about Brown two years ago, when he ran for reelection, and PolitiFact rated it Mostly False, noting that “gender-affirming surgery is very rare among minors in the United States.” The same week, PolitiFact rated False an SLF ad claiming that Brown voted to let “transgender biological men” compete in girls’ sports. Brown lost that race to Bernie Moreno, and he’s now running against Sen. Jon Husted in a special election on November 3.
Six Days After Brown Said It’s Illegal, SLF Ran This Ad
Brown’s campaign had already answered the surgery attacks. On September 18, it put a spot on TV in which a voter from Richwood says, “In Ohio, it’s against the law to perform transgender surgeries on kids. That’s right, it’s illegal.” Six days later, SLF released an ad that never disputes that point. Instead, its story is about a surgery performed in another state, on an adult, where no Ohio law could have reached.
I understand why Brown’s campaign reached for the law. It’s true, it’s the quickest answer a candidate has, and many of us have made the same argument ourselves. But I don’t think any fact about Ohio law would have kept this ad off the air, because the ad never makes a claim about Ohio law. It tells one woman’s story without a date or a state, and it lets viewers fill in the rest.
If Democrats keep treating “it’s already illegal” as the end of the argument, SLF will keep finding stories from other states and older patients that no Ohio law covers. The answer that holds up is the one Brown gave in 2023, that these decisions belong to families and their doctors, and it’s the one Fred Wellman, a Democrat running for Congress in Missouri, gave on live TV on Sunday.
What Nearly $10 Million Buys
The Husted–Brown race had drawn $298 million in advertising by September 21, more than any other Senate race this cycle, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact, and SLF and five other Republican-aligned super PACs spent $14 million in Ohio in a single week, Reuters reported, in ads that attacked Brown over issues “such as his positions on transgender rights and bank bailouts.” Google’s public political ad data shows SLF’s PAC adding nearly $1.2 million in Ohio ads on Google’s platforms in the week before September 28 alone, bringing its total there to about $3.2 million.
SLF also pays for a Facebook page called Ohio Pulse, which has run ads since September 22 written to look like news headlines, including one that reads, “Sounding the Alarm: A new revelation exposes Sherrod Brown’s extreme record supporting permanent sex change surgeries for Ohio children.” Meta’s ad library puts that single ad at 600,000 to 700,000 impressions.
It links to ohiopulse.org, a website that calls itself “Ohio’s #1 News Source,” says it’s “committed to accurate, timely, and impactful reporting,” and states at the bottom of its pages that it’s “Paid for by SLF PAC.” (Its September 16 story on Brown paraphrases his answer to Vance’s bill as saying families should decide “even for sex change surgery,” words he never says in SLF’s own clip.)
Ohio voters have heard this pitch before. In 2023, a multimillion-dollar campaign for Issue 1, an August ballot measure that would have made the state constitution harder to amend, warned that without it, “out-of-state special interest groups” would “abolish parental rights so someone can take your child to get an abortion or sex change operation without your consent,” and Ohio voters rejected it anyway. This year, even the right’s own strategists have doubts. The American Principles Project warned Republican candidates in a memo, as Erin in the Morning reported on September 18, that “pressing the advantage on these issues alone, while important, may not be sufficient.”
SLF’s allies are running the same attack in Texas. On September 24, the same day the Aldaco ad launched, PolitiFact rated False an ad from Texas PAC, a super PAC linked to SLF, claiming that James Talarico, the Democratic Senate nominee in Texas, “supported using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” PolitiFact took about two weeks to get to that one.
When fact-checkers and Ohio reporters get to this ad, I’d ask them to start with the two facts it leaves out, where Aldaco had her surgery and how old she was, and then to read the sentence the Washington Examiner printed in its own exclusive story on the ad: “Ohio bans transgender surgeries and related medical treatments for minors.”
