Lawsuit Settlement: Texas Children’s Hospital Will Create Nation’s First ‘Detransition Clinic’

This was a big one. The settlement terms have been finalized, and I can only wish it had come so much sooner. How many little ruined lives would have been saved if it had?

Texas Children’s Hospital has three months to create the nation’s first clinic designed to reverse gender transition care, and must provide that care for free, according to the newly released terms of a settlement with Attorney General Ken Paxton.

The terms, which were released Wednesday, detail several measures the hospital system will have to take after being investigated for three years by both the state and the U.S. Department of Justice over allegations that they illegally provided transgender care to children. 

“This historic settlement is a resounding defeat for the radical gender ideology that has preyed on Texas children under the guise of ‘care,’” Paxton said in a statement. “Texas Children’s has agreed to pay millions back to Texas. The detransition clinic, which is the first of its kind, must open within months. Activist doctors who harmed children have been fired.” 

The settlement requires the hospital to advertise the “detransition clinic” on its website, and for the first five years, provide free care to any patient who has previously received transgender care, regardless of age, including hormone therapy and surgery.  

This is all thanks to the courage and determination of a whistleblowing doctor at the facility, Dr. Ethan Haim, and one woman who started the ball rolling on the horrific scandal – a Texas Children’s Hospital pediatric nurse named Vanessa Sivadge.

She was working at the hospital and began noticing things staff doctors were doing that didn’t add up. At the same time, she had just finished reading Dr. Haim’s anonymous whistleblower testimony that Texas Children’s was secretly providing gender transitional care to minors under the age of 18, in defiance of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s threat of investigation.

When she realized the injections she was being asked to teach little boys to give themselves were estrogen, she said she had to act.

…But I knew I had to do something about it, and that day came specifically for me, when I was asked to do something by the doctor, the transgender doctor, I was asked to teach a boy, a teenage boy, how to administer an injection to himself. And what I didn’t realize at the time was that this boy was going to utilize what I had taught him to administer estrogen to himself via injection on a weekly basis to affirm the false identity that he had adopted for himself. And after that happened, I realized that what I was witnessing and what I was asked to do was directly contradictory to my values, to my beliefs as a Christian. And so what happened next was I was at work, and I read an article from an anonymous whistleblower, as you mentioned, who had come forward very courageously and very bravely to expose that Texas Children’s Hospital was providing gender affirming care to children under the age of 18 in secret, and they did this because they knew that our Attorney General, Ken Paxton, due to his previously stated opinion that he would investigate hospitals for child abuse if they provided cross sex hormones to children. They had scrubbed their transgender medicine program from their website. There was zero evidence that anything of this nature was happening to the outside world. And I knew that that was a lie, because I was a nurse working in this clinic where this was taking place. And so, you know, there’s a saying that courage begets courage, that courage is contagious. And this anonymous whistleblower, who I had no idea who this person was at the time, had found the courage to come forward and reveal this shocking truth that children were being treated for gender dysphoria inside the hospital. And so, I decided to come forward as well. I came forward anonymously. I spoke with this reporter, and I provided my testimony as a nurse working in this clinic.

In May of 2023, thanks to their anonymous testimony and with public opinion turning decisively against gender affirming care for minors, the Texas legislature outlawed and criminalized the procedures and therapies.

But that wasn’t the end of the vindictive Biden administration’s campaign against those who would deny these mutilating ghouls their lucrative experiments on children.

Two months later, even though her testimony had been anonymous, the FBI showed up at her door to begin a campaign of threats and intimidation.

… And little did I know what would happen two months later. I was anonymous. No one knew my identity. But two months later, on a Monday evening in July of 2023, I was having dinner here at home with my husband and some friends, and there was a knock at our front door, and my husband and I go to open the door and discover that there are two federal agents who asked to speak with me about issues at my work, and they flashed their badges. They said they’re from the FBI, and they informed me that I am a person of interest in an investigation targeting a whistleblower. And in their words, this anonymous whistleblower had violated HIPAA patient confidentiality by releasing confidential patient information to the public, and they wanted to recruit my help to expose this whistleblower’s identity to the world. And, you know, it was a terrifying moment for my husband and I. Never did I think in my, in my life, that the federal government would weaponize the Department of Justice to come after a nurse whose only crime was to speak the truth about what I had seen. And instead of going after the hospital who had concealed their crimes against children, they were coming after the person who had exposed the crime in the first place. And so, they issued a series of threats. They said that I wasn’t safe at my work. They said that they could make life very difficult for me if I didn’t cooperate with them, and their goal was to coerce and intimidate me into aiding their investigation of this other anonymous person whom, at the time, I had no idea who this person was. Now, of course, we know that this is Dr. Eithan Haim, who was the first whistleblower who had come forward before me, but at the time, I had no idea who he was. And so, we had a decision to make….

Instead of remaining silent and helping the feds in their effort to hang Dr. Haim, Sivadge and her husband began to speak out.

In 2024, she was fired from the hospital, but not before she had dropped another bombshell on the scurrilous goings on in the hospital. By 2025, the new Trump administration was making moves to right the heinous Biden-era wrongs.

…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.

In her statement today, Sivadge makes it crystal clear that she believes that had Kamala Harris won, she and Ethan Haim would now be in prison for exposing the hospital’s misdeeds.

Instead, she has a tremendous, comprehensive victory for herself and those children.

Burke Law Group, PLLC announced today that it secured a historic and unprecedented settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital (“Texas Children’s”) that sets the bar for enforcement actions against hospitals that provide sex-rejecting “gender transition” procedures to minors. The settlement resolves alleged violations of the federal False Claims Act, the Texas Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act, the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and federal fraud and conspiracy laws on behalf of nurse-whistleblower Vanessa Sivadge. Under the terms of the agreement, Texas Children’s will:

• Pay $10 million in penalties;
• Build and operate a free Detransition Clinic that will deliver full-service care to patients who underwent sex-rejecting “gender-transition” procedures at any hospital or clinic nationwide;
• Publicly admit in a written statement that it made false statements to the public about its practices and acknowledge its legal obligations going forward;
• Permanently terminate and revoke the privileges of five physicians who carried out the prohibited procedures with an agreement never to re-hire or credential them;
• Implement sweeping operational reforms including training healthcare professionals on the dangers and illegality of sex-rejecting “gender transition” treatments or procedures, including training employees on how to blow the whistle if they witness same;
• Rewrite its institutional bylaws so that any physician who engages in prohibited sex-rejecting, “gender-transition” procedures on minors automatically forfeits clinical privileges; and
• Commit to a permanent prohibition on sex-rejecting, “gender-transition” services at any of its facilities.

The case, Sivadge v. Texas Children’s Hospital, et al., Case No. 4:24-cv-2018 (S.D. Tex.), alleged that Texas Children’s Hospital, Texas Children’s Health Plan, Inc., and named defendant TCH physicians knowingly submitted false claims to Medicaid by prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and other gender-transition treatments to minors in violation of Texas Medicaid policies, and billing those prohibited services to federal and state healthcare programs using fraudulent diagnosis codes. The covered conduct period extends from as early as January 1, 2010 (January 1, 2016, as to the federal claims), through the effective date of the settlement. Under the settlement, three current physicians will have their privileges permanently and irrevocably terminated, and two former physicians are permanently barred from holding credentials or privileges at any Texas Children’s facility.

This settlement is the first of its kind in the nation and establishes a legal framework for pending DOJ settlements in other states. It goes beyond financial penalties, mandating that Texas Children’s must implement sweeping operational reforms.

If I could go back in time and speak to the terrified, insecure girl who walked out of Texas Children’s Hospital with a box of her belongings, I would say this:

Your whistleblower case will one day result in America’s First Detransitioner Clinic.

That sentence still doesn’t… https://t.co/EmxJKoVwDn

— Vanessa Sivadge (@V_Sivadge) August 5, 2026

…That sentence still doesn’t seem real. 

But now-2 years later, I can finally share EVERYTHING I couldn’t speak about till now. 

It’s over.

I won. 

To God be the Glory.

This is a tremendous victory over a pernicious, evil ideology and took tremendous courage.

The win is one more reason to thank voters for 5 November 2024.

Literally, it was for the children.

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