HOUSTON, Texas — A nurse at the nation’s largest children’s hospital says doctors pressured parents to give their kids hormone therapy and other transgender medicine interventions — warning that their children might kill themselves if they held off on treatments.
Vanessa Sivadge has worked at a Texas Children’s Hospital clinic where kids are given gender-affirming care since 2021. She said that doctors there are more driven by “ideology” than what was best for the youths, many of whom had additional underlying problems.
“Parents were manipulated by doctors with an ideological agenda to go down this path of medical transition for their child,” Sivadge told The Post in an exclusive interview.
“And I do think that doctors would use manipulative language to suggest that if they didn’t do this their child would commit suicide or they would harm themselves.”
Sivadge, 31, also alleged that doctors would mis-categorize the treatments to justify gender-affirming care. She believes that the doctors are using the strategy to get around a ban by Texas Medicaid on covering hormone treatments for transgender medicine.
However, Sivadge said she does not directly know whether the treatments are being charged to the publicly-funded health insurance scheme.
The Houston healthcare worker said she is now being hounded by the FBI for speaking out. Agents visited her home after she spoke to the conservative journalist Chris Rufo, and suggested she was part of an investigation into violations of HIPAA patient privacy laws.
Sivadge, who still works for Texas Children’s Hospital, said 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.
“The doctor would do things based on what the patient wanted, and not what was medically best for them,” she said.
“There was just no discussion of what are the risks, what are the longterm effects.”
Sivadge also saw that many patients had underlying issues, including past suicide attempts, autism diagnoses, depression and anxiety. She felt these issues were being dismissed in the name of prescribing hormones and other forms of transgender care.
“Many of them had previous ER visits for attempted suicide, many of them are autistic, many of them are depressed and anxious, and that’s really devastating because it’s really clear there’s something else going on in addition to having confusion about their sexual identity,” she said.
“That just really devastated me.”
She said she observed doctors in the clinic misdiagnosing patients with hormone deficiencies in order to get Medicaid coverage.
“Providers… were misdiagnosing patients intentionally for the purpose of justifying puberty blockers and hormones,” she said.
Among the strategies was making “ludicrous” claims that healthy girls had a testosterone deficiency, or healthy boys had an estrogen deficiency, she alleged.
The normal diagnosis would be gender dysphoria for kids who were deemed to need gender-affirming care, she explained. However, doctors were instead using the alternate diagnosis.
She believes this is part of an effort to allow them to get treatments covered through the taxpayer-funded health insurance program, she claimed.
Texas Children’s Hospital said in March 2022 that it would stop gender-affirming hormone treatments for kids after Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton declared such treatments “child abuse” under state law.
In June 2023, the state legislature passed a law banning trans treatments for kids, and barring taxpayer funds from going to pay for gender-affirming care. That legislation is now the subject of a lawsuit before the Texas Supreme Court.
Sivadge said the clinic would also note which parents expressed reticence about giving gender-affirming care to their children.
“There were the parents that were very affirming of their child’s new sexual identity and there were the parents that were a little more cautious and a little more careful and they had some questions and it was always noted in the chart which parents were cautious and weren’t completely affirming and which ones were,” she claimed.
Sivadge first spoke out publicly against transgender medicine for children in 2022, when she wrote for the conservative Family Research Council that she believes the treatment inflicts long term harm on young patients.
But, she came forward in May 2023 to make specific allegations against Texas Children’s Hospital after another whistleblower, Dr. Eithan Haim — a surgeon who completed his residency at the hospital, leaked documents to Rufo in 2023 that purported to show the institution was conducting gender-affirming surgeries on kids in secret and against the law.
Haim has since been arrested charged by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas with four counts of violating HIPAA privacy laws.
“Dr. Haim did not break the law, and he looks forward to his day in court,” Ryan Patrick, an attorney for Haim, told the Dallas Morning News.
After that interview, in July 24, 2023, the FBI showed up at Sivadge’s door. She said the visit was meant to intimidate her into silence.
Sivadge and her husband were entertaining friends for dinner that night. But when the two men at the door identified themselves, Sivadge knew exactly why they were there.
For 15 minutes, the agents lingered inside Sivadge’s home. She said they threatened her in the hopes she’d help them track down Haim, she said.
“They said ‘we’re here because we’re aware of your views on transgender medicine,’” Sivadge said of her interaction with the FBI.
“They continued to talk and say ‘you’re a person of interest in an investigation of someone who has released patient confidential information violating HIPAA’”
The agents said Sivadge wouldn’t be safe at work if she didn’t help them, she said.
“They said we would like your help in finding him and we would like you to help us expose him and if you don’t do that, we will make your life very difficult,’
When Sivadge referred to Haim as a whistleblower, the FBI agents corrected her, saying he was “not a whistleblower, he’s a leaker,” she said.
“They used very veiled language, like kind of threats, to suggest that if I did not help them they could not protect me,”
“We just listened and they left and we knew from that moment on that our lives would never be the same and that we would not be silent.”
The FBI said it does not comment on interactions it has with individuals.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into both whistleblowers’ claims. Additonally, Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison has called for the state legislature to hold hearings to investigate the issue and the Biden administration’s “unconstitutional tyranny.”
“The Biden administration, their goal here is to stifle dissent. They want to silence opposition,” Harrison recently told The Post.
A spokesperson for Texas Children’s Hospital didn’t respond to The Post when reached for comment.
Sivadge said that her goal in speaking out is to advocate for the kids who are being given life-altering treatments by providers who are putting political correctness ahead of medicine.
“These doctors are driven by a political agenda, like an ideological agenda,” she said, “and I truly believe that they think that they’re doing the right thing.”
