I am the anonymous whistleblower who, through a story written by Christopher Rufo in May 2023, exposed how Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH), one of the world’s largest and most prestigious children’s hospitals, was lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program.
In February 2022, the Texas attorney general released an opinion that so-called gender-affirming care for children could constitute child abuse under Texas law. On March 4, 2022, TCH issued a statement pledging to stop all hormone and surgical interventions on children who believed they were transgender, essentially shutting down the hospital’s transgender program.
But I worked at the hospital as a surgery resident, and I knew that these interventions didn’t stop. Three days after the announcement, a surgeon implanted a hormone device in a healthy 11-year-old girl for gender dysphoria. Over the next year, the frequency of these procedures increased, and potentially hundreds more children received hormone interventions for gender dysphoria. Meantime, the director of a program that supposedly no longer existed was given the opportunity to speak at the hospital’s most prestigious lecture series in January 2023.
I knew that it was my moral responsibility to expose what was happening to these children. On May 16, 2023, with Rufo’s help, I anonymously blew the whistle on how TCH had been lying to the public. Partly due to the story that Rufo wrote, the Texas legislature, with bipartisan support, passed a law the next day banning transgender medical interventions on minors. Within 24 hours of the story’s release, the conduct we had exposed was made illegal.
We had achieved a victory that I would never have thought possible. But as the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.
A month later, on the day of my graduation from surgical training, two federal agents from the Department of Health and Human Services arrived at my door. They showed me their badges and said that they were investigating a case regarding medical records. It was clear to me that this was a political investigation; I refused to submit to an interview without an attorney. Before leaving, they handed me a letter revealing that I was a “potential target” of an investigation involving alleged violation of federal criminal law related to medical records.
To these agents, the prosecutor, and their political handlers, I was a criminal because I had told the truth. It didn’t matter that we exposed the fact that the largest children’s hospital in the world was lying to the public about the existence of a program in which children were manipulated, mutilated, and even sterilized. It didn’t matter that the practice that they were lying about had now become illegal. It didn’t matter that I had committed no crime.
None of this mattered, I believe, because I had exposed a truth that threatened their ideology. This was the reason for their frightening show of force. The intent was to intimidate me. If I agreed to stay silent, though, I would be legitimizing their lies and sacrificing the truth. Instead, I decided to fight back.
What happened to me did not occur in a vacuum. For the past three years, the Department of Justice has been aggressively pursuing political opponents. While career criminals and gangbangers roam the streets of major American cities, whistleblowers and political dissidents find themselves the targets of a federal leviathan.
The important thing for readers to understand is that, just a few months ago, I was no different than they are now—reading op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, thinking to myself, “Boy, this corruption is really bad, but something like this won’t ever happen to me.” I’m here to tell you that, if you value truth over lies and justice over corruption, your time may be coming.
It does not have to be this way. These abuses of power rely on our silence and our compliance. In my case, however, the perpetrators are learning that they made a mistake. They chose the wrong target on the day they decided to show up at my door. I hope they will have the same realization the day they show up at yours.
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