HOUSTON (LifeSiteNews) — Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) appears to be in damage control mode following the latest revelations about its underage “gender reassignment” practices, as word emerges that state lawmakers may be preparing to step in.
On Tuesday, Manhattan Institute journalist and New College of Florida board member Christopher Rufo published a report based on an interview with TCH nurse Vanessa Sivadge, who detailed the sharp increase in so-called “transgender children” seen by the facility starting in 2021, who were encouraged to “transition” rather than treat the underlying issues they displayed. She also says she found evidence that numerous children seen by Dr. Richard Roberts and Dr. David Paul were prescribed cross-sex hormones while enrolled in Texas Children’s Health Plan STAR, a “no-cost Medicaid managed care plan,” despite the fact that Texas law forbids the state Medicaid program from covering any kind of “sex change operations.”
READ: Biden DOJ indicts doctor who exposed transgender child mutilation at Texas hospital
On Thursday, Rufo highlighted several signs of TCH’s response to the development, including a temporary closure of its pediatric gender facility, the removal of its press contact page (general contact information still appears at the bottom of TCH’s main website), and video of a doctor having police expel journalist Jonathan Choe from the hospital grounds:
BREAKING: Texas Children’s Hospital has temporarily closed its pediatric sex-change clinic, per a source on the ground. The pressure is mounting on the hospital’s transgender program, which is now under investigation by the state attorney general for alleged Medicaid fraud.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 20, 2024
They’ve now scrubbed their entire press page. It was up yesterday. They are in a full-blown panic. https://t.co/BNUpDCcC9q
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 20, 2024
This is insane. Texas Children’s Hospital just trespassed a reporter for asking questions about its pediatric sex-change program. https://t.co/WUBUHaWe9f
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 20, 2024
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has said it is investigating the charges of Medicaid fraud, and on Friday, journalist Maddie Rowley reported that a “group of Texas legislators is assembling in Austin to discuss a potential investigation into Texas Children’s Hospital’s child sex-change program.”
READ: New whistleblower reveals Texas hospital illegally billed Medicaid for child transgender hormones
Sivadge’s latest revelations followed Rufo’s 2023 interview with a then-anonymous ex-employee of TCH, where he said Dr. 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 better explained their personal strife.
That first whistleblower, now known to be former TCH general surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim, has since been indicted by the Biden Department of Justice (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.
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% of children suffering from gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” interventions, including full “reassignment” surgery, fail 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.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, 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 support of “transitioning.”
Such 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.”