Whistleblowing Surgeon Targeted by DOJ, HHS for Exposing Trans Procedures in Texas Children’s Hospital

Last spring, a little-known surgeon exposed that Texas Children’s Hospital, despite announcing the end of its sex-change procedures, secretly continued performing transgender surgeries and treatments on minors. Now, he faces persecution by the federal government for telling the truth.

After trying to keep his head down by anonymously leaking evidence of the procedures to a journalist, Dr. Eithan Haim, 33, decided to go public in January in an effort to protect himself from retaliation by Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services officials.

“After understanding how far this corruption went, I had no other option but to take the story public and fight back,” Haim told National Review. “If I don’t do this now, I’m going to pass on this conflict to my children. That’s something I will not tolerate.”

On June 23, the day of his graduation from surgical residency last year, two HHS agents showed up to Haim’s home and said they were investigating a case regarding medical records. Haim recalled his mind went blank at that moment.

“There was this deep visceral part of me that knew exactly what was happening — that they were there because we had challenged the political ideology, and they were there to make an example out of me,” Haim said.

He proceeded to invite the federal agents inside. They requested an interview with Haim, but his wife advised him not to speak without a lawyer present.

On their way out the door, the agents handed Haim a target letter from the DOJ. The letter, signed by Tina Ansari, assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, notified the surgeon that he was a potential target in a criminal investigation. The letter did not provide specifics as to what those violations were.

Believing it to be a corrupt investigation, he decided to fight the case. Haim said he’s seen how the DOJ has weaponized itself against American citizens in recent years; however, he didn’t anticipate the level of corruption that would later be uncovered.

After meeting with the DOJ prosecutor multiple times, Haim’s attorneys at Burke Law Group decided to blow the whistle to Congress about instances of blatant misconduct in the case.

For example, Ansari allegedly never reviewed the purported evidence against Haim before initiating the investigation and, instead, relied solely on what federal agents told her. Under DOJ policy, as Haim’s attorneys explain, sufficient evidence and a sufficient likelihood of conviction are needed to consider a suspect a “target,” which is a “putative defendant.”

Haim still has not been charged with a crime, although the legal process so far has cost him over $250,000.

Ansari argued Haim had no right to share the medical records of minor patients with the public. However, she neglected to mention that the documents disclosed were not patient charts, were redacted to protect sensitive patient information, and complied with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. (HIPAA permits anonymized information to be disclosed generally, and even protected information can be publicized if it’s used to stop egregious medical misconduct.)

Moreover, the prosecutor claimed Haim’s wife interfered in the investigation by advising her husband to postpone the initial interview with the two HHS agents in June 2023 — and, according to Haim, threatened her career over it. Mrs. Haim, who was and is still undergoing a background check to become an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, faces the threat of her security clearance being revoked if she “becomes difficult,” Haim’s attorneys alleged in a whistleblower letter to lawmakers.

In the letter dated January 24, Haim’s lawyers asked Representatives Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Chip Roy (R., Texas) to lead a probe into “the Department of Justice and the weaponization of the federal government” as it concerns their committees’ work. Jordan serves as chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and Roy is chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government.

With the congressional request, the whistleblower hopes the DOJ and HHS will be held accountable.

A spokesperson for Ansari’s office declined to comment on Haim’s allegations.

Haim’s professional career had also been targeted in a way he didn’t expect: Harshly negative, even defamatory, reviews were being posted on his WebMD page. He called these reviews “vicious” in nature; some of them accused him of sexual assault. Haim then discovered these reviews originated from one IP address in downtown Houston.

Haim believes the DOJ or Texas Children’s Hospital leaked his name to “left-wing activists who have viciously defamed me online and threatened my reputation as a physician,” he wrote on his GiveSendGo page, which so far has raised over $220,000 to pay his legal fees. His efforts to identify the individual posting the reviews are ongoing.

Despite his career being threatened, Haim now works as a general surgeon at a medical center in Greenville, Texas.

The DOJ investigation began weeks after conservative journalist Christopher Rufo published an article on May 16, 2023, based on the damning documents about the transgender-medical practices that had taken root at Texas Children’s Hospital — the largest in the world. Its leadership said it would stop performing sex-change procedures, using cross-sex hormones, and giving puberty blockers a year earlier in response to Governor Greg Abbott’s directive that equated such medical interventions with child abuse. But the institution never did.

Although it tried concealing its transgender program from the public, the hospital openly promoted “gender-affirming care” to its physicians. In January 2023, Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine together hosted a Zoom presentation titled “Medical and Psychological Care of Gender-Diverse Youth.” Throughout the hour-long video, doctors supported the use of puberty blockers and hormones during adolescence and recommended that surgeries be considered for “adolescents on [a] case-by-case basis.”

Haim, who was on the lookout for evidence of the transgender ideology at his place of work, knew he had a moral responsibility to do something, so he started reaching out to journalists. Facing rejection after rejection over the course of five months, Haim eventually got the story picked up by Rufo.

The article was published 24 hours before the Texas legislature was set to vote on a bill that would prohibit child sex-change procedures across the state. S.B. 14 ultimately passed with the support of some Democratic lawmakers, including Texas state representative Shawn Thierry, who gave an impassioned speech on the Texas house floor about voting in favor of the legislation.

Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the second investigation into Texas Children’s Hospital on May 19, causing President and CEO Mark Wallace to formally announce plans to officially discontinue its child-sex medical procedures a few days later. In a statement, Wallace called the decision “heart-wrenching” and expressed his support for referring children to other doctors who can perform these procedures outside of the state.

S.B. 14, which Abbott signed into law the following month, went into effect on September 1. The case challenging its legality remains pending.

On June 21, Rufo published an anonymous interview he had with Haim, who likened the “false ideology of transgenderism” to “child sacrifice” and alleged his colleagues were partaking in it. Two days later, the surgeon received a knock on his door from the federal agents.