Whistleblower doctor targeted by DOJ after exposing Texas Children’s Hospital's secret transgender surgery program

Dr. Eithan Haim is at the center of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for allegedly leaking redacted medical records of children undergoing so-called gender-affirming services at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH), the nation's largest such hospital.

Once anonymous 

Haim was the then-anonymous source behind a May 2023 exposé on Texas Children’s secretive and aggressive transgender program by City Journal’s Christopher Rufo. The author revealed heavily redacted documents showing that the hospital began a covert campaign to have staff doctors push children into treatments to alter children's outward gender appearance just three days after the hospital publicly disavowed the controversial treatments.

No children named

Rufo linked his article to a presentation, provided by Haim, titled “Medical and Psychological Care of Gender-Diverse Youth.” The medical interventions advocated in the presentation included implantable puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries.

According to this presentation, TCH and Baylor College of Medicine encouraged doctors to begin treatment with puberty blockers and hormones during adolescence, and then consider surgeries, including breast removal and genital reconstruction, in adulthood—though the presenters explained that some surgical procedures could be appropriate for “adolescents on [a] case-by-case basis.” [Emphases added].

While this presentation exposed hospital administrators pushing the highly profitable procedures, no specific children were discussed. Likewise, documents leaked to Rufo, which originally contained patient names, were redacted to remove those names, converting them to what the medical community describes as “de-identified data,” as reported by the Daily Wire: 

Haim and his legal team are insistent that nothing published by Rufo, who made all the materials available on X, would have violated HIPAA [The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ]. The images he published consisted of heavily-redacted screenshots of clinic and operating room schedules that can be accessed by medical providers through Epic, the hospital’s medical record system. To use the industry’s terminology, with the redactions, it was all “de-identified data.” [Emphases added].

Loud knock

Despite redacting patient names, federal officials from the Department of Health and Human Services arrived at Haim's front door with a loud knock on the day he was set to formally complete his surgery residency. Adding to his surprise was the fact that not only did Haim believe his own actions to be legal, but he was under the impression that his employer was the one violating the law: 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already issued an opinion stating that performing sex-change procedures on minors was child abuse. The hospital where he was a surgical resident, Texas Children’s Hospital, stated unequivocally after Paxton’s opinion in March 2022 that it was halting its so-called “gender-affirming services.”

“Texas Children’s Hospital paused hormone-related prescription therapies for gender-affirming services,” read a statement from the hospital" …

Just a few days after the public statement, Haim learned about a surgery in which doctors at the hospital implanted puberty blockers into a prepubescent 11-year-old girl who believed she was transgender.

He continued to hear stories from other residents, and then came across a public “grand rounds” presentation by top doctors at the hospital encouraging the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments. The lecture coached primary care doctors how to funnel patients into the transgender clinic, where they could receive treatment. [Emphases added].

In fact, just two weeks after Ruffo published his exposé of the hospital, the governor of Texas signed into law a ban on gender transitioning and reassignment procedures on children. That move to formally prohibit the procedures reported by Haim was three weeks before the raid on Haim's house.

Whistleblower identified

When the local county attorney covering the city of Houston vowed to find the source of the exposé, Rufo publicly vowed never to reveal the whistleblower's identity.

Federal officials tracked Haim down nonetheless, apparently through a search of the hospital's internal servers.

Deception 

Haim has no regrets about his whistleblowing, though, and has gone public with an interview with Rufo and is quoted by the Daily Wire discussing the deception practiced by his former employer:

“I reached this unavoidable conclusion that Texas Children’s Hospital is providing this outward appearance that they shut down the program, when in actuality, within the hospital, it’s a very high priority,” Haim said. [Emphases added].

Haim does, however, have a fundraising page where more than one thousand individual donors have contributed toward his legal fees.

Weaponized DOJ

Rufo prefaced his interview with Haim with an indictment of the DOJ for allowing itself to be politicized:

Federal agents, presumably having reviewed forensic information from TCH’s internal servers, tracked down the whistleblower and Assistant US Attorney Tina Ansari threatened him with prosecution. 

Although the whistleblower redacted all personal information and remained within the bounds of federal privacy laws, the Biden Administration wanted to make a point: those who challenge trans orthodoxy will be punished by the state. [Emphasis added].

In another indication of which way the wind is blowing in the public health bureaucracy, Breitbart reports, “W.H.O. Picks Trans Activists to Set Global Child-Rearing Rules — Less than Half of Panel Has Medical Background.”