A Texas nurse who previously blew the whistle on illegal transgender procedures for minors now says her hospital may be illegally using taxpayer-funded Medicaid dollars to pay for drugs and sex-change operations for transgender-identifying individuals – and the Biden administration is doing everything it can to keep the scheme quiet.
As first reported by investigative journalist Christopher Rufo for City Journal, Vanessa Sivadge, a nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest children’s hospital in the country, has noticed “discrepancies” in the paperwork of patients who identify as transgender that may indicate the hospital is billing Medicaid for their “treatments.” As Texas Children’s itself admitted in 2021, “sex change operations” are “not benefits of Texas Medicaid” and Texas law “explicitly excludes coverage of all gender affirming health services.”
Specifically, Sivadge said she noticed that two patients, both aged 16, were prescribed cross-sex hormones while being enrolled in Texas Children’s Health Plan STAR, a “no-cost Medicaid managed care plan.” According to experts interviewed by Rufo, “Based on the facts we have, the only reasonable conclusion is that Texas Children’s Hospital was using Texas Medicaid funds to pay for ‘gender-affirming care,’ contrary to Texas law.”
To justify the drug regimens, Sivadge says, “Providers… were misdiagnosing patients intentionally for the purpose of justifying puberty blockers and hormones.” One strategy was making “ludicrous” claims that healthy girls had a testosterone deficiency, or healthy boys had an estrogen deficiency.
Texas law also prohibits doctors from prescribing cross-sex hormones or surgeries for minors. In a legal opinion published last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton stated that providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or gender surgeries to transgender-identifying minors would meet the standard for child abuse. Just hours after Rufo published Sivadge’s allegations, a spokesperson for Paxton confirmed that his office had launched an investigation into the matter.
Notably, this isn’t the first time Sivadge, who has worked at Texas Children’s since 2021, has made headlines for exposing illegal transgender medical procedures at the hospital.
Back in 2022, under pressure from Paxton, the hospital initially said it was shutting down its gender transition clinic, which allegedly prescribed puberty blockers to kids as young as 11, and routinely saw patients between the ages of 12 and 17. But as Rufo also reported at the time, the clinic secretly reopened “just days later.”
In 2023, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 14. That bill “prohibits procedures and prescription treatments for gender transitioning, gender reassignment, and gender dysphoria” for minors. Before the law went into effect on September 1 of that year, the Texas Children’s Hospital again announced it would no longer provide sex change operations or drugs to patients under 18.
But Eithan Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s, revealed that the hospital “secretly continued to perform transgender medical interventions, including the use of implantable puberty blockers, on minor children.” Haim’s testimony inspired Sivadge to come forward and corroborate his allegations.
Sivadge has also told the New York Post that she has “observed doctors manipulating the parents of young patients into agreeing to the treatment without informing them of the long term side effects like infertility.” While many of the transgender-identifying children who came through the Texas Children’s gender transition clinic had other serious issues like suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety, or autism, Sivadge says doctors pressured both patients and parents to sign off on cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and other life-altering drug regimens. She believes that some families had legitimate reason to fear the hospital would call Child Protective Services if they refused.
The Biden Department of Justice has now targeted both Haim and Sivadge for coming forward and exposing Texas Children’s illegal transgender medical interventions. Earlier this month, Haim was charged with four counts of violating HIPAA patient privacy protections – even though he revealed no personal information about any patient. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
Following her initial whistleblower testimony, Sivadge also received a knock on her door from two FBI agents who she alleges explicitly threatened her. The agents reportedly told her that she was a “person of interest” and, according to Sivadge, said she was “not safe at work” and “promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker” – presumably referring to Haim.
As Rufo concludes, “Both the Department of Justice and the hospital leadership were ideologically committed to ‘transgender medicine.’ They had been embarrassed by the investigation that had exposed their actions, and they were looking for revenge.”
Despite the clear intimidation effort, however, Sivadge appears undaunted, telling Rufo that she feels compelled to expose illegal transgender procedures to stop “deeds of evil and darkness.” For the children and families threatened by the transgender medical complex, the country can only hope for more such bravery and courage within the medical community.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
