WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The former chief pediatrician of the embattled Texas Children’s Hospital may have resigned in April 2022 amid exposure of the facility’s involvement in subjecting children to harmful surgical and chemical gender “transition” procedures, but Catherine Gordon has since found a far more influential role as part of the Biden administration.
In 2022, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ordered an investigation of underage transitions and directed state officials to treat underage transitions as child abuse, prompting Texas Children’s to cease performing them. Gordon resigned in April of that year, just seven months after being hired for the position, after coverage of an article she had written blessing puberty blockers as “invaluable” to gender-confused minors. At the time, the hospital claimed it “fully support(ed)” her article and “remain(ed) deeply committed to our transgender and gender-diverse patients.”
In September 2023, she joined President Joe Biden’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and currently fills the role of clinical director for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the Daily Signal reported.
Emails provided to the Signal by America First Legal indicate that, months after leaving Texas Children’s Hospital, Gordon began communicating with Biden’s assistant HHS Secretary Richard “Rachel” Levine, a man who “identifies” as a woman and a radical advocate for transitioning minors. Gordon was appointed to her current role after roughly a month of chatting with Levine.
Notably, Gordon’s official NIH biography does not mention her time at Texas Children’s, saying instead that she simply has “training in both adolescent medicine and pediatric endocrinology with research experience in adolescent bone health.”
“While the rest of the world is pulling back on the inhumane practice of child experimentation, the Biden administration is plowing full steam ahead, and the Department of ‘Health and Human Services’ is leading the way,” America First Legal senior adviser Ian Prior told the Signal. “Whether it’s putting transgender-activist doctors in high-ranking positions in the National Institute of Health or prosecuting doctors who blow the whistle on these barbaric medical treatments, the Biden administration is weaponizing the federal government to destroy any dissent or challenge to child mutilation and sterilization.”
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 experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with a 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.”
The Biden administration’s own Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a since-deleted report last year acknowledging that “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more likely than straight adults to use substances, experience mental health conditions including major depressive episodes, and experience serious thoughts of suicide.”
Yet Biden’s White House refuses to retreat an inch from any major aspect of the LGBT agenda: reopening the military to recruits afflicted with gender dysphoria, promoting gender ideology within the military (including “diversity” and drag events on military bases), holding events to “affirm transgender kids,” condemning state laws against underage transitions as “close to sinful,” promoting underage transitions (potentially at taxpayer expense) as a “best practice,” and trying to force federally funded schools to let males into female athletic competitions and restrooms.
As for Texas Children’s Hospital, one year after its initial suspension of underage transitions, anti-woke activist Christopher Rufo obtained documents indicating that the hospital secretly resumed the procedures within days of its original announcement and had been performing them ever since. That prompted Texas Republicans to enact a law banning the practice, which elicited another pledge by Texas Children’s to stop. Multiple whistleblowers have spoken with Rufo in the years since, detailing hospital officials’ bias toward transitioning patients instead of finding the actual causes of their symptoms, their disregard of evidence of serious mental health issues, and potential Medicaid fraud.
That first of those whistleblowers, now known to be former Texas Children’s Hospital general surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim, has since been indicted by the Biden Department of Justice, 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.