The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday announced a settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) in which the hospital not only committed to never again carry out gender transition procedures on minors, but also agreed to open the nation’s first detransitioner clinic and fully fund it for five years. TCH gained notoriety in 2023 when a whistleblower provided evidence that the hospital continued to secretly administer gender transition hormones to minors, even after the Texas legislature had made it illegal.
“Today’s resolution protects vulnerable children, holds providers accountable, and ensures those harmed receive the care they need,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The Justice Department will use every weapon at its disposal to end the destructive and discredited practice of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ for children.”
The settlement, reached in coordination with the Texas Attorney General’s office, requires TCH to “establish the first-ever multidisciplinary clinic designed to provide medical care to patients who were subjected to ‘gender-transition’ procedures,” the state AG’s office said. “This Detransition Clinic will help patients reverse the damage caused by ideologically-motivated physicians who harmed patients by performing dangerous medical interventions for the purpose of ‘transitioning’ them.”
Under the settlement, TCH will also pay $10 million to cover its fraudulent billing of Texas Medicaid by coding gender transition procedures as completely different procedures — a practice exposed by whistleblower Eithan Haim.
The settlement also requires TCH to fire and irrevocably terminate hospital privileges for five doctors who carried out the illegal procedures on minors, agree to never again provide “gender-transition” services, amend its bylaws so that any doctor who carries out gender transition procedures on minors automatically relinquishes his or her privileges, and implement other compliance and ethical measures, according to the Texas attorney general’s office.
The ramifications of this settlement are massive. While $10 million is a relatively small financial penalty for a hospital giant, it is more significant that the hospital agreed to fire staff, change bylaws, and fully fund a clinic to do the opposite of the procedures it recently profited from.
Clearly, the hospital realized federal and state prosecutors had it over a barrel. So, like any self-interested business, it finally decided to cut its losses and reach the best deal that it could. This entailed significant cooperation with authorities, which the DOJ publicly recognized. Over the course of a five-year investigation, the hospital turned over more than five million documents to investigators.
“I am grateful that Texas Children’s wants to be part of the solution and no longer the problem,” said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate, with the forced politeness of someone who just won a major settlement by agreeing not to say anything negative about someone who richly deserved it.
For its part, TCH claimed it had committed no wrongdoing and presented the settlement as a decision it made to save on legal costs. “All reviews and investigations continue to support the facts — we have been compliant with all laws,” it claimed in a statement. “Today, we made the difficult decision to settle with the Texas Attorney General and the Department of Justice, closing a chapter that has been wrought with falsehoods and distractions. To be clear — we are settling to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation.”
Such excuses did not spare the hospital from leftist wrath. Texas Rep. Jessica González (D) blasted the decision as “shameful” and “the furthering of an agenda to eradicate transgender people from the eyes of society.” González did not explain how recognizing the existence of detransitioners would lower public awareness of people who wish to transition.
Likewise, Equality Texas CEO Brad Pritchett complained that the settlement was “blackmailing a hospital system into creating a resource that no one is asking for.” Yet a 2021 study surveyed some 237 detransitioners, and the number has only grown since. Pritchett added that it was “embarrassing that a hospital once revered for its care has lost its integrity and put politics over patients.” So much for blunting the Left’s displeasure.
The most electric remarks came from Andrea Segovia of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, who called the decision “terrifying” because of “what other states will take from this” and claimed that people who identify as transgender only detransition “because of social pressures.”
Segovia has clearly never listened to the stories of detransitioners. For instance, Fox Varian, who won the first trial malpractice verdict for gender transition procedures, said she had felt social pressure to transition, and that she had regretted her underage double mastectomy from the moment the bandages were removed.
Trans activists oppose detransitioners just like abortion activists oppose pro-life pregnancy centers. These opposite counterparts do nothing to interfere with their own behavior. But their very existence pricks the conscience and exposes the fundamental lie at the root of these unnatural ideologies. The existence of detransitioners proves that immutable biology trumps subjective and transitory feelings.
But the hatred leftists feel for them does not change the fact that detransitioners exist, comprise a growing category, and currently have no clinics committed to helping them recover the God-given design of their bodies.
Whether the newly agreed-upon TCH clinic will fulfill this role remains to be seen. In its public statement, TCH did not provide any specifics on the character of the new detransitioner clinic. By publishing time, it did not respond to a TWS request for comment.
“From a legal liability standpoint, this is great news,” FRC Senior Director of Government Affairs Quena González (no relation to Jessica) responded to the news. “‘You break it, you buy it’ was good retail policy at the Pottery Barn when I was a kid. But from a practical standpoint, I can’t imagine that anyone who has had their body permanently altered as a child — whether hormonally, chemically, and/or surgically, up to and including permanent sterilization — would entrust their healing to the same gender-experimenting institution after they were so carelessly broken under the thrall of the late, great mass gender-hysteria.”
However, González expressed the need that many detransitioners have for healing and hope that goes beyond the physical. “When I speak with people who are ‘detransitioning,’ that is, seeking to realign their identity with their sex after experimenting with so-called ‘gender transition,’ many express profound sorrow at the marring of their bodies. Christians or not, it’s as if we can’t not know, in some sense, that we, as created beings, bear the eternal image of God,” he told TWS. “The good news of the gospel is that, though our bodies are all to some degree marked by the effects of human sin and the fall of mankind in the garden from the very beginning, our souls can be completely healed and set free to live in the fullness of joy, reflecting our Creator’s love.”
“Followers of Christ worship a Savior who, though a ‘man of sorrows’ who was beaten almost beyond recognition, nevertheless healed us by the very stripes of his beating, and who can become for us, in his resurrection, the power and hope of restoration to a wholeness of personhood we’ve never before known,” González continued. “This promise of transformation and restoration to fullness of life in God is available for everyone who believes in Jesus, and it must be especially precious to those who’ve also been marked in their bodies by deep suffering, just as Jesus was.”
As Jesus brought about salvation and final victory through his apparent defeat at Calvary, so the final vindication against TCH came after much suffering and trials.
In 2023, Texas surgeon Eithan Haim, who had admitting privileges at TCH, blew the whistle on the hospital’s policy of mis-coding gender transition procedures for minors to conceal them from outside scrutiny — even after the hospital had publicly claimed to stop all such procedures to comply with a new Texas law. That provoked a relentless campaign of persecution of the Biden administration DOJ, which used aggressive intimidation tactics and tried to bankrupt Haim through more than a year of legal proceedings — without any good reason to charge him.
Partway through the ordeal, a second whistleblower, TCH nurse Vanessa Sivadge, came forward to corroborate Haim’s claims. She was ultimately fired from TCH after the hospital denied her a religious exemption from participating in dispensing gender transition hormones to minors.
This information prompted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) to launch the first investigation into TCH in 2023. After the Trump administration succeeded that of President Biden, the DOJ quickly reversed its position, saving Haim from prison time and joining the investigation into TCH. What began as big bad government colluding with a hospital to persecute whistleblowers has now concluded in a resounding victory for biology and for justice.
“It is not possible to communicate what it is like to be terrorized by your own government,” Haim reflected in a comment to TWS. “The most powerful federal leviathan in the history of man was weaponized to destroy my life — not because I committed a crime but because I upheld one of our most sacred virtues.”
“I’ve seen true evil up close and spent every second of every minute of every day for years living with that terror,” Haim continued. “But I’ve also witnessed extraordinary courage, honor, and dignity from those who sacrificed alongside me.”
“I never doubted that sacrifice because I always believed it would one day be worth it,” Haim said. “Today is that day.”
