Texas Children’s Hospital agreed to admit to fraudulent practices and other concessions in a second legal settlement related to its past sex-change “care,” a whistleblower’s attorneys announced Wednesday.
Former Texas Children’s Hospital nurse Vanessa Sivadge reached the agreement with the facility after she was fired in 2024 for speaking out about false diagnoses, according to Burke Law Group, which represented her. Sivadge’s case is another blow to the hospital in a long legal saga that began in 2023, when former employee Eithan Haim leaked documents showing the facility was performing sex-change procedures after saying it would stop. Texas abolished child gender interventions in 2023 after Haim’s leak, and the state Supreme Court later upheld the ban.
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Sivadge followed Haim’s lead after the procedures became illegal, blowing the whistle on how physicians wrote down false diagnoses to prescribe transgender drugs and cover them with Medicaid. The new settlement requires Texas Children’s Hospital to “publicly admit” the fraud in a written statement, fire five doctors involved, pay $10 million, and implement reforms to correct the behavior, including training on “the dangers and illegality of sex-rejecting ‘gender transition’ treatments,” Burke Law Group said.
Texas Children’s Hospital did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment. The hospital already agreed to open the country’s first “Detransitioner Clinic” in a settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the Justice Department, officials announced in May. Sivadge brought her case on behalf of the DOJ and Texas.
Sivadge portrayed the new agreement as a personal victory because the Biden administration’s DOJ investigated both her and Haim over their whistleblower disclosures. Haim’s case led to federal charges under medical privacy law that the Trump administration dropped, while the FBI tried to question Sivadge at her home in July 2023.
“If I could go back in time and speak to the terrified, insecure girl who walked out of Texas Children’s Hospital with a box of her belongings, I would say this: Your whistleblower case will one day result in America’s First Detransitioner Clinic,” she said in a Wednesday statement. “That sentence still doesn’t seem real. But now-2 years later, I can finally share EVERYTHING I couldn’t speak about till now.”
PLANNED PARENTHOOD ACCUSED OF POSSIBLE FRAUD OVER SEX-CHANGE ‘CARE’
“It’s over. I won,” Sivadge said. “To God be the Glory.”
Experts critical of the sex-change industry believe it may be fraudulently using diagnosis codes such as “endocrine disorder” on a much wider scale, the Washington Examiner previously reported.
