WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Despite handing over the reins in two months to a successor with very different positions and priorities, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Biden administration is using what time it has remaining to continue its case against a doctor who blew the whistle on the dangerous child gender “transition” practices of Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH).
Last year, Manhattan Institute journalist and New College of Florida board member Christopher Rufo interviewed a then-anonymous former TCH employee who said the hospital’s activist Dr. Richard Roberts did not hesitate to prescribe cross-sex hormones and mastectomies to gender-confused children whose medical records indicated “serious mental health issues” including autism.
That whistleblower, now known to be former TCH general surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim, was later indicted by the Biden DOJ, ostensibly for sharing confidential patient records in violation of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – even though the materials he exposed were not patient charts and were redacted to preserve patients’ anonymity. Haim faces up to 10 years in prison.
On Tuesday, DOJ filed a reply brief supporting its motion for a gag order against Haim and his defense “making inflammatory and unfairly prejudicial statements” in public, including his ability to share certain supportive comments from public figures on social media, including Rufo, Jordan Peterson, Rep. Dan Crenshaw, and more.
“They dispute our charges of government misconduct, saying that we mischaracterize the facts,” responded Burke Law Group, which is representing Haim. “Yet much like previous censorship efforts by this administration, it is the federal government that is purveying misinformation, and it is all on the judicial record.”
The statement addressed the government’s claim that Haim was advancing a “false narrative of government corruption” by noting that prosecutors “admit that they don’t actually know what happened until after Dr. Haim was indicted because the lead prosecutor who handled everything has been removed from the case. They cannot even respond to clear instances of misconduct that defense counsel – including multiple former DOJ career prosecutors – witnessed firsthand.”
“The prosecution also denies that it was at least negligent in sponsoring false information to the first grand jury for the first indictment, which painted Dr. Haim as an interloper who sought to harm TCH patients when he had nothing to do with TCH,” the statement adds. “Yet records proving that this was false were in the government’s own files. They simply ignored that information and went with the first witness that told them what they wanted to hear. Is that not negligent?”
The prosecution hit a snag in September, when it came out that lead prosecutor Tina Ansari had been suspended by the Texas Bar from September 1 to September 18 for failure to pay her dues, and while the matter was resolved a day later, she continued to work on the case during her suspension, including signing and filing a September 9 brief and lending her signature to several other filings and communications, all without appearing to notify the court or her superiors.
Ansari withdrew from the case last month, but the Washington Stand reports that her involvement may have tainted it even deeper: “Ansari’s family runs coffee and tea company Fresh Brew Group, whose customers include multiple hospitals in the Texas Medical Center, which houses Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine.” Further, her “close family members have substantial financial and political ties” to TCH, Haim lawyer Ryan Patrick notified Houston executive assistant U.S. attorney John Pearson.
DOJ’s decision to continue defending the gag order is also notable in light of the fact that Republican Donald Trump will be replacing Democrat Joe Biden as president in January, in a shift that is assumed will also end the case against Haim. Trump has been critical of the transgender agenda and promised to end the weaponization of federal law enforcement against conservatives.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that “transition” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
So-called “gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”