A Texas nurse says she rang the alarm about the nation’s largest children’s hospital allegedly pushing gender transitions because she believes doctors are being driven by their politics.
Vanessa Sivadge, 31, has claimed she was threatened by the FBI after she revealed that progressive doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital are violating state law by using Medicaid benefits to provide sex change treatments to minors.
In an interview with the New York Post, Sivadge said the doctors at the clinic often told parents their kids could kill themselves if they did not go down the path of medical gender transition.
‘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.’
Sivadge added: ‘Parents were manipulated by doctors with an ideological agenda to go down this path of medical transition for their child…
‘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 believes doctors at the hospital miscategorize gender-affirming treatments in order to get around Texas’ ban on Medicaid covering hormone treatments.
She said she saw doctors misdiagnosing patients with hormone deficiencies in order to get Medicaid coverage for puberty blockers and hormones.
Sivadge claims she has seen doctors ‘manipulating’ parents into agreeing to gender transitions for their children before informing them of long term side effects such as infertility.
She also said many patients had underlying issues such as autism and depression that were dismissed by doctors.
‘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 long term effects…
‘Many of [the patients] 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.’
Sivadge came forward in May of 2023 with her claims against the Texas Children’s Hospital – following Dr Eithan Haim, a surgeon who leaked documents showing the hospital was continuing gender-affirming care against the law.
Texas Children’s Hospital said it would stop gender-affirming care procedures after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled in February 2022 that stated gender-affirming care for kids could be a form of child abuse under state law.
The nurse claims the FBI showed up at her door months after she spoke up in an interview with Christopher Rufo. She shared doorbell camera footage that showed two plain-clothes agents knocking on the door and asking for her.
As she approached the men, one of the agents began asking her about her work.
‘I’m sure you’re aware of some of the things that have been going on at your work lately,’ he says in the video, which Rufo shared to X.
When she replies that she is, the agent then asks if he could come inside to ‘let me do my song and dance.’
From there, Sivadge claims the agents began to threaten her.
‘They threatened me,’ she told Rufo. ‘They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker. They said I was not safe at work and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.’
Sivadge is now the second employee at Texas Children’s Hospital to make such claims.
Haim has since been indicted on four criminal charges as he’s accused by the Department of Justice with three HIPAA violations. HIPAA rules protect a person’s protected health information.
Haim responded to the charges, saying: ‘They wanted to intimidate me into silence using every technique the federal leviathan had at their disposal. But they failed.
‘The only way to lose is to submit to corruption. It’s time to fight back harder than ever!’
Haim in May 2023 released medical files showing that Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) staff had provided puberty blockers and other sex-change treatments to kids, even after hospital officials said they had stopped doing so in March 2022.
He has repeatedly said the leaked documents did not include any patient’s personal information.
Donations have since poured into Haim’s legal defense fund, with supporters praising him for ‘holding the line’ and ‘standing up for children’ in the face of ‘corruption’ at the hospital.
Meanwhile, Texas State Attorney General Ken Paxton said he is investigating the claims, and State Rep. Brian Harrison called for an emergency hearing over the allegations that the US Justice Department intimidated the whistleblowers.
DailyMail.com has reached out to Texas’ Children’s Hospital for comment on this story.