Blaze News chats with doctor who says Texas kids' hospital continued gender-care program even after promising to 'pause' it

This week, Blaze News spoke with Dr. Eithan Haim, a board-eligible general surgeon working in a small town near Dallas who claims that Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, the largest children's hospital in the country, continued mutilating kids' bodies through so-called "gender-affirming care" even after telling the public that its gender program had been placed on "pause."

From 2018 until last June, Dr. Haim was completing his surgical residency at a number of Houston-area hospitals, including TCH. Beginning in late 2021, Haim began to suspect the hospital had a secret clinical program for children who may or may not suffer from gender dysphoria. Though Haim had heard about transgender clinics for kids in places like California and Washington, he had no notion that one could exist in Texas, let alone at a hospital where he was working.

It seems Haim was right to be suspicious. In March 2022, Texas Children's Hospital announced that it had "paused hormone-related prescription therapies for gender-affirming services" in response to recent statements from Texas AG Ken Paxton and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, both Republicans. A few weeks earlier, Paxton had called transgender treatments on minors a form of child "abuse" that "must be halted."

"This step was taken to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families from potential criminal legal ramifications," said the hospital statement.

"The mission of Texas Children’s Hospital is to create a healthier future for all children, including transgender children, within the bounds of the law."

Despite this assurance, minor patients continued to receive hormone blockers and to undergo gender-related surgery throughout 2022 and even into 2023, Haim told Blaze News, and it appears that hospital staff and administrators did not even try to hide the ongoing program. According to Haim, in January 2023 alone, transgender program directors were given the chance to feature their work during a Grand Rounds lecture to the TCH department of pediatrics, and a panel organized by students at Baylor College of Medicine, which is affiliated with TCH, held a publicly accessible Zoom conference about gender "care" for minors.

"Directors of a program that supposedly did not even exist ... were given the most prestigious opportunities to speak in the hospital," Haim said, "where they were having Zoom conferences with medical students, and they [would] talk about how they were running this really active clinic ... so that all these kids could be seen and how they could be screened for being transgender behind parents' back."

At that point, Haim said he could not longer keep silent.

"This is all for something that has no basis in medical reality," Haim told us. "I knew that I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do something about it."

Haim said he then spent months reaching out to a number of journalists to share his story but got almost nowhere until he connected with notable anti-woke crusader Christopher Rufo. On May 16, 2023 — just one day before the Texas Senate passed SB 14 banning transgender procedures on kids — Rufo helped Haim anonymously reveal his accusations against Texas Children's Hospital with an article published in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

Within days, TCH CEO Mark Wallace issued a statement, promising to close the facility's gender-care program on September 1, 2023, even though the program was supposed to have been put on "pause" in March 2022.

"We will work with patients and their families to manage the discontinuation of hormone therapies or source appropriate care outside of Texas. We will continue to offer psychosocial support and any form of care we can within the bounds of the law," Wallace wrote in a letter dated May 24, 2023. "The transition we will embark on is going to be immensely heart-wrenching, but we will lead through this adversity and navigate these next steps together with grace, love and compassion like we always do."

When asked why Haim took his story to a conservative activist rather than his superiors at the hospital, Haim told Blaze News that he knew going through the chain of command wouldn't have done any good. "The misconduct is being perpetrated by the high level of the hospital," so going to those at that level would have been "a recipe for failure," he explained.

Going public, even anonymously, still had consequences, though. A few weeks after the City Journal story went viral last May, Haim said two federal agents with the Health and Human Services Department showed up at his home — on his residency graduation day, no less — and warned him that he had become "a potential target for a criminal investigation."

These alleged threats from federal agents operating under the purview of the Biden administration motivated Haim to reveal his identity and share his story on his terms. "Defense has no meaning if we don't take offensive measure to hold the people accountable who have abused their authority. So that's exactly what we intend to do."

And Haim has now taken steps to put that plan of accountability into motion. In addition to his conversation with Blaze News, he sat down for another interview with Rufo, this time on video and without the cover of anonymity. He hopes that sharing his story with various outlets will help people realize the severity of the harm such clinical interventions do to children's physical and mental health. Haim even used words like "evil" and "malevolent" to describe them.

"You can't believe that they're taking 11-, 12-, 13-year-old kids and starting them down this path where they're going to have to adopt an identity that's based on hatred of their true self," Haim said. "And for the rest of their life, they're going to have to be on drugs, gonna have to deal with the complications from surgery.

"And it's all based on something that's not true."

He said he also wants to draw attention to the antics used by those in power to intimidate whistleblowers. "All I had done was expose something to be true," he said.

"Within 24 hours of the story's release, what we had exposed was voted to become illegal, and I'm the one being investigated."

As Haim no longer works at TCH, he could not definitively state whether the gender-care program there is still in operation, but he believes it is now finally defunct. TCH CEO Mark Wallace did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment.

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