The Biden regime sent two FBI agents to the home of a Texas nurse to intimidate her after she spoke out about an illicit child sex-change program at a Houston-based children’s hospital.
Vanessa Sivadge told conservative journalist and activist Christopher Rufo that the two special agents, Paul Nixon and David McBride, “threatened” her and promised to make life difficult for her if she didn’t cooperate.
“The regime is mobilizing to threaten and imprison anyone who opposes ‘transgender medicine,'” Rufo wrote at City Journal.
A surveillance video shows the two agents at the Sivadge’s front door asking her about “some of the things that have been going on at [her] work lately” and then asking if they could come in. Sivadge told Rufo she was terrified.
The agents told the nurse that she was a “person of interest” in an investigation targeting Dr. Eithan Haim, the whistleblower who had exposed the child sex-change program at Texas Children’s Hospital in the spring of 2023.
“They threatened me,” Sivadge, who worked in the Child Gender Clinic, said. “They promised they would make life difficult for me if I was trying to protect the leaker [Haim]. They said I was ‘not safe’ at work and claimed that someone at my workplace had given my name to the FBI.”
Two months earlier, Sivadge had told Rufo in an interview that after Texas lawmakers had passed a bill outlawing transgender medical procedures for minors, doctors in the clinic were still managing “dozens of pediatric sex-change cases, performing surgeries, blocking puberty, implanting hormone devices, and making specialty referrals.”
“I work very closely with this provider, Dr. Richard Roberts. I’ve been in the room with him when he speaks with these patients,” she told the journalist. “Dr. Roberts is extremely encouraging of their transition and will essentially do whatever he can to make sure that they are happy, at least externally happy. Because I am absolutely certain that they are not internally happy. He is very accommodating. He does whatever they want. Essentially, there is no critical analysis of the process.”
In the spring of 2023, Dr. Haim, a surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital, had contacted Rufo to blow the whistle on the hospital’s duplicity regarding the barbaric practices at the transgender clinic.
A year earlier, after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had pressured the hospital to stop performing transgender medical procedures on children, Texas Children’s Hospital announced that it would shut its Child Gender Clinic down, citing potential legal and criminal liability. But despite what the hospital said publicly, the procedures allegedly continued unabated.
“He contacted me about how the hospital had lied about terminating the transgender medicine program, and that doctors were, in fact, continuing to perform sex-change procedures on children as young as 11,” Rufo explained at City Journal.
The story rocketed across the world. The hospital immediately went on the defensive. Within a week, Texas legislators passed a bill confirming that transgender medical procedures for minors were illegal.
But the story also attracted attention from another powerful source: federal prosecutors. The Department of Justice has not shied from targeting political opponents of the Biden administration: former President Trump; conservative school board protesters; persons praying outside of abortion clinics; and now, doctors who dissent from transgender ideology.
On the morning in June 2023 that Haim was to graduate from Texas Children Hospital’s residency program, federal agents knocked on his door. They had identified him as a potential “leaker,” presumably through forensic examination of the hospital’s computer systems. Shortly thereafter, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tina Ansari began threatening Haim with prosecution.
Earlier this month, Ansari made good on her threats and sent U.S. marshals to Haim’s home, where they summoned him to court for allegedly breaking federal privacy laws.
Haim faces an indictment on four felony counts of violating HIPAA. If convicted, Haim could be sentenced to ten years in federal prison. Now the feds have apparently set its sites on the whistleblower nurse.
According to Rufo, the FBI, the hospital, and federal prosecutors “were all circling the story” as both Biden’s Department of Justice and the hospital leadership “were ideologically committed to ‘transgender medicine.'”
“They had been embarrassed by the investigation that had exposed their actions, and they were looking for revenge,” Rufo wrote at City Journal.
The Biden DOJ “appears to be playing a cat-and-mouse game with those willing to challenge the legitimacy of transgender medicine,” he said.
As public opinion shifts against “gender-affirming care,” Justice Department officials seem to be pursuing harder methods of ideological enforcement—investigating, threatening, and indicting whistleblowers. If you expose the barbarism that is happening in American gender clinics, the message seems to be, you risk imprisonment.
Sivadge, however, will not be deterred. “My faith and my gut, just knowing right from wrong, compels me,” she says. “I was born for this. I have no doubt this is what I am supposed to do.”
For her, it is personal. She witnessed and unwittingly participated in what she now believes to be, quoting a passage from the Bible, “deeds of evil and darkness.” She considers blowing the whistle a form of redemption, recalling a moment early on, in which Roberts asked her to teach a 16-year-old boy how to inject estrogen into his body to affirm a female identity. Later, Sivadge says, she realized what she had done: she had participated in a lie that would harm this boy.
“I was told to do something I knew was wrong,” she says. “It made me sick that the lie called ‘gender-affirming care’ was being sold to parents and children and creating hugely lucrative profits in secret—and I was part of it.”
After being intimidated by the FBI, things reportedly “went quiet” for Sivadge, and she was able to resume her work as a nurse at the hospital, which had continued its “terrible sex-change regimen” on patients who had reached the legal age of 18.
Siladge would soon discover that the hospital was also potentially engaging in Medicaid fraud.
Her duties “included providing medication refills and working with doctors to provide parents with information about treatment plans, scheduling, and diagnostics,” Rudo wrote. “She worked with patients’ charts and saw their complex psychological diagnoses and the treatments administered by the doctors.”
Sivadge said that she began noticing “discrepancies in the paperwork” for these patients, and came to suspect that doctors were breaking the law.
As Sivadge learned, Texas law forbade hospitals from billing Medicaid for transgender procedures. The Texas Medicaid Provider Procedures Manual has long stated that “sex change operations” are “not benefits of Texas Medicaid.” In 2021, Texas Medicaid officials told the Kaiser Family Foundation that this prohibition was not limited to genital surgeries but “explicitly excludes coverage of all gender affirming health services.”
She told Rufo: “The largest children’s hospital in the country is illegally billing Medicaid for transgender procedures,” she said. “It is evident that the hospital continues to believe it is above the law not just by concealing the existence of their transgender medicine program from the public, but by stealing from the federal government.”
After reviewing the evidence, a legal expert “with deep knowledge of Texas Medicaid law,” told Rufo: “Based on the facts we have, the only reasonable conclusion is that Texas Children’s Hospital was using Texas Medicaid funds to pay for ‘gender-affirming care,’ contrary to Texas law.”
Now, AG Paxton is reportedly on the case.
A spokesman for the attorney general said the alleged Medicaid fraud is “currently being investigated by the Texas Attorney General,” Rufo reported on his Substack, Wednesday.