Vanessa Sivadge had made up her mind long before that Monday night in July 2023—the night a relaxing dinner with longtime friends was interrupted by a knock at the door from two men identifying themselves as FBI agents.
If ever it came down to a choice between her career as a registered nurse at Texas Children’s Hospital and doing the right thing—between obeying man and obeying God—she knew what she would do.
But such faith didn’t shield Vanessa and her husband, Blake, from the heart-pounding intimidation they felt that evening.
When the couple opened the front door, two men promptly explained that they needed to speak with Vanessa about issues at her work—the nation’s largest pediatric hospital.
As Vanessa and Blake sat in their living room across from the FBI agents, their stunned dinner guests—Blake’s best friend and his wife—looked on. The agents were seeking to identify an anonymous “leaker” accused of breaking federal law by releasing personal patient information from Texas Children’s Hospital to a journalist.
A few weeks before, Vanessa had read a bombshell article by journalist Christopher Rufo, quoting an anonymous whistleblower who had documented the hospital’s ongoing work in its pediatric gender clinic, which was facing pressure after a 2022 opinion by the Texas attorney general that said such treatments on minors constitute “child abuse.” Seeing a legal conflict brewing, the hospital claimed to have shut the clinic down. In 2023, only weeks after Rufo’s report emerged, Texas passed an outright ban on gender-altering practices for minors.
In talking to the FBI, Vanessa quickly realized the “leaker” the agents kept mentioning was the anonymous whistleblower who had supplied information for Rufo’s story, and they mistakenly believed she knew the whistleblower, later identified as a general surgeon named Dr. Eithan Haim.
“We are very aware of your views on transgender medicine,” Vanessa recalls the agents telling her. “We know what you believe.”
They told Vanessa she was a person of interest in the case. If she refused to help them, they emphasized, they couldn’t guarantee her safety at the hospital nor protect her career.
Vanessa believes someone tipped the agents off to a bylined article she had written in 2022 for The Washington Stand, the Family Research Council’s online news site. The headline had read, “What Happened to ‘Do No Harm’? A Nurse’s Firsthand Look at the Transgender Craze.”
“I was extremely vocal and direct in that article, calling out the medical profession for the deafening silence as it relates to harming children through transgender medicine. … That’s why I believe the FBI knew who I was.”
Vanessa had managed to avoid direct involvement in the procedures done in the hospital’s gender clinic, but as a nurse she sometimes cared for transgender patients and their parents. The more she saw, the more unsettled she became. What the FBI didn’t know was that Vanessa, after reading Rufo’s story in the spring of 2023, had herself contacted Rufo as an anonymous source to corroborate the information in the article.
That surprise visit from the FBI crystallized Vanessa’s sense that her beliefs were going to be further tested. The months that followed led her to a pivotal decision: In July 2024, she blew the whistle on a related matter. Vanessa went public with documents showing the hospital appearing to illegally bill Medicaid for those pediatric gender procedures. The day after that report was released, Texas Children’s Hospital placed her on administrative leave, then fired her days later.
Now, nearly one year (and one presidential election) after being terminated, Vanessa is finally getting some redress for the hospital’s apparent retaliation. Federal Health and Human Services officials announced in April the agency would begin investigating the pediatric hospital for illegal retaliation under federal whistleblower protection laws. HHS also released new guidance for whistleblower complaints and an online portal regarding the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
The first whistleblower, Dr. Haim, who is now in private practice, got good news in late January when the Justice Department announced it was ending its criminal investigation into his whistleblowing that the Biden administration initiated.
For Vanessa and Blake Sivadge, the journey has been both unsettling and faith-building. After the FBI agents left their home that night in 2023, the Sivadges and the friends they were dining with sat in disbelief. The two couples prayed together. They committed the ordeal to God.
“There is a passage in Ephesians that says to ‘take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness but expose them,’ because everything exposed by the light becomes visible” (Cf. Ephesians 5:11-13), Vanessa says. “It was in the moments following that FBI visit that that became our theme verse, in addition to another verse in Psalm 37, which says ‘Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him, and he will help you. He will make your innocence radiate like the dawn, and the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun,’” (Psalm 37:5-6).
Last fall, Vanessa founded an advocacy organization, Protecting Texas Children, whose mission is to “safeguard the innocence of children by affirming biological truth and advocating for legislation that will champion the health, safety, and well-being of children, so they can fulfill their God-given potential.”
