Texas Children’s Hospital Fires Nurse Who Alleged Medicaid Fraud in Secret Child Sex-Change Program

Texas Children’s Hospital has fired a nurse who accused the facility of engaging in Medicaid fraud to cover gender-transition procedures for minors.

Vanessa Sivadge came forward in June to announce that she had uncovered evidence that the hospital was using Texas Medicaid to finance cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for child patients, in violation of federal law. Given her work refilling prescriptions and coordinating with physicians to answer parents’ questions about treatment plans for gender dysphoria, Sivadge had an intimate understanding of the hospital’s gender-dysphoria treatment practices — but the hospital denied her allegation in a July 22 press release.

Before Sivadge went public with the allegations, she submitted a request for internal transfer out of Texas Children’s endocrinology clinic on religious exemption grounds.

The day after Sivadge went public with the Medicaid story in June, she was put on leave. TCH cited the story and her religious accommodation request in justifying her suspension.

On August 16, TCH fired her effective immediately, Sivadge told National Review.

Around the time that Sivadge voiced her concerns, Dr. Eithan Haim — formerly a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital — was revealed as the anonymous whistleblower behind a 2023 story published by Christopher Rufo exposing Texas Children’s secret sex-change regimen for minors.

Haim revealed that TCH was conducting transition surgeries on and administering cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to children, despite hospital leadership having announced that they stopped these interventions the year before, in accordance with a legal opinion issued by the state attorney general Ken Paxton declaring such procedures abusive. Paxton’s February 2022 non-binding legal opinion equated transgender treatments with child abuse. The opinion prompted Governor Greg Abbott to order the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to conduct an investigation into so-called gender-affirming care in the state.

In June, the Department of Justice indicted Dr. Eithan Haim on four felony counts related to his alleged violation of a medical-records law. Rufo, who reviewed the records himself before publishing the initial article, denies that the documents exposed the personal information of patients.

In addition to being troubled by the alleged Medicaid corruption in the hospital’s covert sex-change program, Sivadge felt her involvement in the gender medicalization program, regardless of the age of the patient, violated her beliefs as a Christian.

“Even having an indirect role, or seeing that providers I was associated with were still seeing adult patients was something I really wasn’t comfortable with,” Sivadge told National Review. “I just wanted to close that chapter and move on to a different department and one that didn’t violate my religious beliefs and thought that was a very reasonable request.”

“I believe that even those adult patients that are being seen, some of them do have Medicaid, so the fraud could still be ongoing with those adult patients,” she said.

On May 31, Sivadge requested to be moved to the cardiology clinic where she received the bulk of her training. Several months ago, Sivadge made a verbal arrangement with a hiring manager in the cardiology department to accept her transfer. Part of her request to HR and to her supervisor asked them to honor that agreement, Sivadge said.

One week after Sivadge submitted her request, the hospital instituted a hiring freeze for financial reasons, Sivadge said. The freeze also applied to transfers within the company, which is the justification the hospital used to explain its denial of Sivadge’s request, she said. However, Sivadge contends that her request was sent in a week before the freeze was announced.

Texas Children’s did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Sivadge expressed to Rufo in a letter that she’s considering challenging her termination in court on the grounds that the hospital illegally retaliated against her.

“It is retaliation for my coming forward with information on TCH’s egregious pattern of deception and Medicaid fraud, and this action also illegally disregarded my request to transfer due to my belief that these procedures bring irreversible harm and lifelong regret to children confused about their sex,” she wrote in the letter.

Despite significant public backlash, the hospital’s commitment to gender ideology has persisted. While the medical procedures have apparently stopped, the TCH human-resources department still requires that its staff complete a training for interacting with gender-confused patients. The training — most recently administered in May, according to a TCH staff member — implies that staff should unquestioningly affirm patients’ dysphoria, regardless of their age or whether their self-diagnosis has been confirmed by a mental-health professional or parent.

The presentation defines gender identity, gender expression, gender dysphoria, and sexual orientation. It urges medical professionals against assuming a patient’s gender just from their appearance. Within the gender spectrum between boy/man and girl/woman, one slide shows, are other identities, including “Bigender,” “Agender,” “Gender Queer,” “Gender Fluid,” and “Non-binary.”

Procedures such as hormone therapy and gender-transition surgery typically follow a period of so-called social transition, which includes accommodating a patient’s preferred identity, pronouns, and name. Rather than interrogating whether there are underlying mental-health conditions or environmental factors that might be contributing to the patient’s dysphoria, as some dissenting mental-health professionals urge, the “affirmation” model employed by TCH can lay the groundwork for escalating medical interventions.

Hormone therapies and gender-transition surgery, particularly when performed on minors, come with unalterable and often medically disastrous consequences, including infertility, loss of sexual function, and decreased bone density.