The Justice Department’s prosecution of a doctor in Texas for simply exposing that a hospital was secretly performing transgender surgeries on minors and giving them hormone treatments after promising to stop shows again that the federal bureaucracy will use all its might to enforce President Joe Biden’s extreme sexual agenda.
Last week, U.S. marshals showed up at the home of surgeon Eithan Haim, 33, and ordered him to appear in court to face four felony charges of violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which bars disclosure of protected health information.
According to Dr. Haim and his lawyers, and journalist Chris Rufo, with whom Haim shared the information in May 2023, no personal information was included in the documents in question.
“For my own part, I can confirm that nothing in the information provided to me identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted,” Rufo wrote in an article published by City Journal on June 6.
At issue are procedures performed by Texas Children’s Hospital, where Haim completed his residency last year and which long represented its support for what the transgender industry euphemistically calls “gender-affirming care,” words constantly used by all members of the Biden administration.
In February 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion stating that “gender-affirming care” for minors was, in fact, a form of child abuse. TCH immediately retreated, and on March 4 of that year issued a public pledge that it would stop all hormone and surgical interventions on minors.
“But I worked at the hospital as a surgery resident, and I knew that these interventions didn’t stop,” Haim wrote on Jan. 12, 2024. “Three days after the announcement, a surgeon implanted a hormone device in a healthy 11-year-old girl for gender dysphoria.”
In fact, as Haim tells it, “Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria.” The program that supposedly had been halted continued on secretly.
It was then that Haim, acting on what he called his “moral responsibility,” went to Rufo, and the latter’s article appeared on May 16, 2023. One day later, the Texas legislature passed a bipartisan bill that banned these interventions when practiced on minors.
That’s when the federal machinery engaged. In order for transgenderism to implant itself in America, it must be unbending, with no right of dissent or refusal.
Two agents from the Health and Human Services Department Office of the Inspector General knocked on the door of Haim’s house on June 23, 2023, the day of his graduation from his medical residency at TCH, notifying him that he had been identified as the potential leaker of the records, according to a Jan. 24, 2024, letter from Haim’s lawyers to House Republicans.
Haim’s wife wisely told him not to submit to an interview without a lawyer, at which point the HHS heavies issued him a target letter signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Texas.
Ansari, who is not new to controversy — she has been kicked out of U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Hughes’s courtroom at least twice — then began issuing prosecutorial threats against Haim and his wife.
Ansari, for example, bizarrely claimed that in counseling her husband to get a lawyer, Mrs. Haim “had interfered with a criminal investigation,” according to the lawyers’ letter. Ansari, moreover, threatened to tamper with a background investigation into Mrs. Haim if she “becomes difficult,” the letter added.
She has also repeatedly referred to the doctors who perform these barbaric surgeries on children —and the hospital that lied about them — as “victims.”
Last week, Ansari made good on her threats to prosecute Haim on four felony counts. The charges, said Haim’s lawyers, are premised on the “easily disproved falsehoods” that the medical documents that Haim leaked to Rufo contained the names of the children in question. “Yet, it is obvious from a quick glance that all patient information is redacted,” the lawyers wrote to Congress.
Through its lawfare, the DOJ is trying to ensure that other whistleblowers do not come forward, which is why this case is so important. It is significant, too, to a transgender industry that makes gobs of money from confused children.
“It’s a remarkable amount of money that’s involved in these procedures because imagine what happens when you take a vulnerable, confused kid when they’re 11 years old and you start them on puberty blockers. They have essentially become sterilized,” Haim told Fox News host Laura Ingraham this week.
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“They go on and get cross-sex hormones, 95%-98% then get surgeries after that. What you created is a chronic medical patient. For the rest of their lives, they’re going to be tethered to the boundaries of a hospital. And it’s a fate that’s unimaginable. And these are otherwise healthy kids,” he added.
Haim is clearly not fighting alone, and he has set up a defense fund. But he is fighting the full force of a federal government that, under this administration, has decided to throw its lot in with the gender “medicine” industry, children be damned.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.
