Vanessa Sivadge has worked at a Texas Children’s Hospital clinic where kids are given gender-affirming care since 2021. She said that doctors there are more driven by “ideology” than what was best for the youths, many of whom had additional underlying problems.
“Parents were manipulated by doctors with an ideological agenda to go down this path of medical transition for their child,” Sivadge told The Post in an exclusive interview.
Sivadge, 31, also alleged that doctors falsely diagnosed services to qualify for gender-affirming care – a tactic she suspected was being used as a workaround to a Texas Medicaid ban on covering hormone treatments for transgender medicine.
The former nurse told police that she does not know whether the treatments were ever billed to the taxpayer-funded health insurance program.
Sivadge said she is now being tracked by the FBI for talking. The agents went to her home after she spoke with conservative journalist Chris Rufo and implied they were part of an investigation into possible violations of the patient privacy law known as HIPAA.
Sivadge, who continued to work at Texas Children’s Hospital, is said to have watched doctors strong arm parents into signing for procedures without telling them that a condition of the treatment would render their child sterile. The doctor would then proceed as the patient wished, not what was clinically preferred for their health. “There was just no discussion of what are the risks, what are the long term effects,” she shares.
Sivadge also saw that many patients had underlying issues, such as past suicide attempts, autism, depression, or anxiety. She believed these matters were being swept under the carpet, in order to administer hormones and the like for a trans identity.
“Many of them had previous ER visits for attempted suicide, many of them are autistic, many of them are depressed and anxious, and that’s really devastating because it’s really clear there’s something else going on in addition to having confusion about their sexual identity,” she said.
Sivadge said she saw clinic docs falsely diagnosing patients with hormone deficiency in order to obtain Medicaid coverage. “Providers… were misdiagnosing patients intentionally for the purpose of justifying puberty blockers and hormones,” she said.
She said doctors made “insane” claims that healthy girls were testosterone deficient, or that healthy boys were estrogen deficient. That included gender-affirming care for children (usually diagnosed as gender dysphoria, but doctors had been using alternative diagnoses in an attempt to secure health insurance treatment coverage through Medicaid.
After Governor Greg Abbott and State Attorney General Ken Paxton decided that this classified as “child abuse” under state law and Texas Children’s Hospital announced in March 2022 that it would no longer offer gender-affirming hormone treatments to children. The state legislature passed a law in June 2023 that would bar trans treatments for children and restrict tax dollars from being used on gender-affirming care. This law is now on appeal in the Texas Supreme Court.
The first time Sivadge publicly spoke out against trans medicine for kids was back in 2022, when she wrote for the conservative Family Research Council about her view that gender treatment causes lasting damage to its young patients.
In May 2023, she went public with allegations against Texas Children’s Hospital —after another whistleblower, Dr. Eithan Haim, leaked documents to Rufo in 2023 that alleged the institution was clandestinely performing gender-affirming surgeries on children in violation of state law.
Several weeks after her interview, the FBI came to Sivadge’s home, where she claims their intentions were to silence her. Sivadge and her husband were entertaining friends for dinner that night. But when the two men at the door identified themselves, Sivadge knew exactly why they were there.
For 15 minutes, the agents lingered inside Sivadge’s home. “They said ‘we’re here because we’re aware of your views on transgender medicine,’” Sivadge shared.
The accusations of both Sivadge and Haim are now under investigation by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. State representative Brian Harrison (R-TX) has also called on the Texas state legislature to hold hearings in order to investigate this and what he’s slamming as the Biden administration’s “unconstitutional tyranny.”
