While the LGBTQ community celebrate “Pride Month”, legal, cultural, medical, and ideological battles are being fought over gender interventions for children.
As “Pride Month” comes to a close, the Biden administration continues to advocate for controversial treatments for transgender people, including by targeting a doctor who has been indicted after alleging that Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) doctors were secretly providing so-called “gender affirming care” to children.
Dr. Eithan Haim was indicted by the Department of Justice and arraigned in Houston on June 17 to face four counts of wrongfully obtaining individually identifiable health information. Haim, a 34-year old surgeon who has reportedly worked at Texas Children’s Hospital in the past, is accused of improperly accessing hospital records in 2023.
The indictment alleges that Haim used his account on the TCH network to access to information on pediatric patients, and hand the information over to the media. The patients were not under Haim’s care. If convicted he could face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
“Our client is a mandatory reporter of child abuse who reported as a whistleblower to the State of Texas what he had seen in his hospital,” said Marcella Burke, Haim’s attorney. “It is our opinion that this is the government going out of its way to prosecute a whistleblower.”
The leaked internal documents allegedly show that Texas Children’s Hospital continued to provide access to hormones and other “gender-affirming services” to minors, even after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion in 2022 stating gender-affirming care was a form of child abuse. Although attorney general opinion is not law, but rather an interpretation of existing law, the Texas AG’s views laid a foundation for Texas Governor Greg Abbot to later direct the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents pursuing gender-affirming care for their children.
In March 2022, a few weeks after Abbot’s announcement, Texas Children’s Hospital announced they would pause “hormone-related prescription therapies for gender-affirming services” for minors. Hospital leadership said the pause was “taken to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families” from any potential legal repercussions.
However, Haim alleges that the hospital continued providing treatment to children in secret throughout 2022 and into 2023. While transgender care for minors was still legal in Texas, the notion that the hospital falsely claimed to have ended the treatments has not been well received by critics of the treatments.
“Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria,” Haim wrote in January 2024 when he publicly admitted to having shared the documents with Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
Shortly after Rufo published the documents in May 2023, Texas AG Paxton launched an investigation into the hospital for “actively engaging in illegal behavior” by providing gender-affirming care to minors.
The Biden DOJ is accusing Haim of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, commonly known as HIPAA, by sharing patient data. However, Rufo has maintained that the documents provided by Haim contained no identifying information. “All the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted,” Rufos wrote on June 6.
Haim’s attorneys also sent a letter to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in January condemning the “conduct of this investigation against a whistleblower”.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Haim claimed the charges were “politically motivated” and accused the Biden administration of being captured by “gender ideology”.
Although Texas Children’s Hospital claimed it was stopping hormone treatments in March 2022, local news in Houston reported in May 2023 that TCH was still offering such services and would need to modify their treatment following the passing of a Texas law banning such care for minors. Texas Children’s CEO Mark Wallace said the hospital would comply with the law when it went into effect on September 1st, 2023.
“We will work with patients and their families to manage the discontinuation of hormone therapies or source appropriate care outside of Texas,” Wallace said in acknowledgement that the hospital was continuing to offer these services.
The Texas law is currently being challenged in court. Texas is one of 25 states that have adopted laws restricting or banning gender treatments for minors in recent years.
In fact, The Daily Wire reported that Dr. Richard Ogden Roberts III, a pediatric endocrinologist at TCH who has been prescribing puberty blocking and cross-sex hormone medications to minors, is also one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Texas ban. The Wire notes that Roberts is deeply involved with activist organizations which advocate for the LGBTQ community. The Daily Wire writes:
“In one presentation on behalf of the Texas Children’s Hospital, Roberts repeated the line that child sex change procedures are “life saving and medically necessary” care, and even explained that he uses the preferred names and pronouns of “gender diverse” children behind the backs of parents.
“I will often ask patients by themselves if there’s a name that they use privately and that they would like me to use around them, and if they are comfortable with me using that name and their pronouns with parents,” the pediatric doctor told the audience.”
One of the organizations fighting the lawsuit along Roberts is PFLAG, a group which promotes gender ideology to children and publishes a “transgender reading list for children.”
Recent reporting by The National Review also appears to show the TCH human-resources department still requires its staff complete a training for interacting with gender-confused patients. The report claims that a “TCH staff member” said the training happened as recently as last month. Screenshots of the training show suggestions to staff not to assume an individuals gender based on their physical appearance. One slide shows gender identities that include “Bigender,” “Agender,” “Gender Queer,” “Gender Fluid,” and “Non-binary.”
The DOJ investigation into Haim comes shortly after a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the Biden administration’s expansion of Title IX protections, including rules meant to protect LGBTQ students. Title IX was passed in 1972 to ban discrimination based on sex in education. Biden’s expansion also forbade discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. LGBTQ students who face discrimination will be entitled to a response from their school under Title IX, and those failed by their schools can seek recourse from the federal government.
In the preliminary injunction to the rules, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty called the new rule an “abuse of power” and a “threat to democracy.”
Earlier in June, a group of doctors calling itself “Doctors Protecting Children” held a press conference calling for an end of gender treatments for children. The group demanded “prominent American medical institutions” halt current “harmful protocols promoted for children and adolescents”. Dr. Jill Simons, pediatrician and Executive Director of American College of Pediatricians, stated:
“It is time that these American medical institutions follow the science and the lead of our European professional colleagues and cease to promote protocols that harm children, including the promotion of social affirmation, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for children and adolescents who experience distress over their biological sex.
The declaration was co-signed by medical and health organizations across the U.S. including the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC), American College of Family Medicine (ACFM), Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), Catholic Health Care Leadership Alliance (CHCLA), Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA), Coalition of Jewish Values, and several others.
