After He Blew Whistle on Gender Treatments for Minors, Federal Government Came After Him

By Virginia Allen, The Daily Signal 

Dr. Eithan Haim was completing his surgical training at Texas Children’s Hospital in the spring of 2023. On a Friday morning in June, just before graduation, a knock came on Haim’s door. 

“I open it, [and] standing outside there are two federal agents with [the Department of] Health and Human Services,” Haim recalls.

The surgeon says he was told he was under investigation in a case involving medical records. Just one month earlier, Haim had worked with journalist Christopher Rufo to blow the whistle on Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston and its gender treatments for minors. 

In 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, took steps to ensure that hospitals in Texas weren’t performing such procedures. As a result, the Texas Children’s Hospital announced that it had stopped doing the gender procedures on kids; inside the hospital, Haim says, he was seeing a different story. 

The hospital “took away all the public-facing indications that the program was still active,” Haim says, adding that “the hospital is telling the public this program no longer exists, but within the hospital, they’re prioritizing it to the highest level.”

“So the directors of the program that supposedly did not exist were speaking at the hospital’s most prestigious lecture series seven months after that statement [in which] they said they were shutting it down,” the surgeon says.

After the federal government launched its investigation of Haim, he decided to come forward and identify himself as the whistleblower at Texas Children’s Hospital. 

Asked where the investigation against him stands now, Haim says he doesn’t know, and adds that the federal government has “nothing.”

“But what’s going to happen now is we’re going to do everything we can, [with] every fiber of my being, to hold them accountable,” Haim says. “We’re never going to stop until we succeed. So they thought they were going to intimidate me. They thought I was going to bend the knee to their evil ideology, like most doctors would have done. But as they were coming to find out, they had knocked on the wrong door.”

Haim joins this episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why he is so passionate about defending minors from these dangerous medical procedures and standing against what he sees as the federal government’s intimidation tactics.