HOUSTON (LifeSiteNews) — One of the doctors behind Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH’s) dive into underage gender “reassignment” belongs to a group of pro-LGBT activist physicians and joined a lawsuit attempting to block Texas from protecting children from life-altering surgical and chemical procedures, according to a new report.
Last week, Manhattan Institute journalist and New College of Florida board member Christopher Rufo published a report about TCH nurse Vanessa Sivadge’s firsthand account of the sharp increase in so-called “transgender children” seen by the facility starting in 2021, who were encouraged to “transition” rather than treat the underlying issues they displayed. She also said she found evidence that numerous children seen by Dr. Richard Roberts and Dr. David Paul were prescribed cross-sex hormones while enrolled in the state Medicaid program in apparent violation of state law. Days later, TCH temporarily shut down the pediatric gender program and scrubbed the press contact page from its website.
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On June 21, the Daily Wire’s Spencer Lindquist published a report detailing Roberts’s history of activism for underage “gender transitions,” including attempting to block a state law banning the practice.
Last July, Roberts was among those who signed onto a lawsuit that attempted to block Texas’s ban on “transition” drugs and surgeries, brought by LGBT activist attorney group Lambda Legal, the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its Texas chapter, and the Transgender Law Center. Other backers of the suit included the GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality (an activist group sponsored in part by Big Pharma lobbyists), and PFLAG (the activist group behind gender ideology children’s books such as I Am Jazz). The Texas Supreme Court allowed the ban to take effect last September.
Roberts is actually a member of GLMA, which states its mission as “health equity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) communities and equality for LGBTQ+ health professionals in their work and learning environments”; and maintains so-called “equity maps” of states allegedly perpetrating “extreme and coordinated political attacks on transgender people,” which actually means prohibiting transgender surgeries and drugs for minors.
According to the report, Roberts himself has boasted of his willingness to help hide children’s gender dysphoria from their parents, once telling an audience, “I will often ask patients by themselves if there’s a name that they use privately and that they would like me to use around them, and if they are comfortable with me using that name and their pronouns with parents.”
READ: Texas Children’s Hospital shuts down transgender program after whistleblower revelations: report
The latest on TCH follows Rufo’s 2023 interview with a then-anonymous ex-employee who said Roberts did not hesitate to prescribe cross-sex hormones and mastectomies to gender-confused children whose medical records indicated “serious mental health issues” including autism that better explained their personal strife.
That first whistleblower, now known to be former TCH general surgeon Dr. Eithan Haim, has since been indicted by the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ), ostensibly for sharing confidential patient records in violation of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) – even though the materials he exposed were not patient charts and were redacted to preserve patients’ anonymity. Haim faces up to 10 years in prison.
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children suffering from gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transitioning” procedures, including full “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
READ: New whistleblower reveals Texas hospital illegally billed Medicaid for child transgender hormones
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
Such physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has said it is investigating the charges of Medicaid fraud, and last Friday journalist Maddie Rowley reported that a “group of Texas legislators is assembling in Austin to discuss a potential investigation into Texas Children’s Hospital’s child sex-change program.” On Monday, Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison formally asked the Texas Health & Human Services Commission to investigate the latest accusations against the hospital.