American Thought Leaders - How I Almost Ended Up in Jail for Exposing a Secret Gender Transition Program: Eithan Haim

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

Find showtimes for Shen Yun at https://www.shenyun.com/ticketsUse the code JAN25 to get ticketing fees waived. Dr. Eithan Haim said he was working as a resident surgeon at the Texas Children’s Hospital when he discovered that doctors were secretly continuing and expanding their program of transgender medical procedures for minors—after publicly shutting it down.He blew the whistle, and ended up under federal investigation. After three indictments and 148 legal files, his case has now been dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

These doctors knew their research was bogus, but that didn't stop them from saying publicly that this was legitimate research. And as a doctor, that's a big deal, because that means it was done so knowingly. Dr. Atenheim was working as a resident surgeon at the Texas Children's Hospital when he discovered that doctors were secretly continuing and even expanding their program of gender-affirming care for minors after publicly shutting it down. Dr. Hain blew the whistle and ended up under federal investigation. You had an entire team of prosecutors, FBI agents, HHS agents. They had spent hundreds of hours, I mean, I can't even imagine how

many millions of dollars of taxpayer money to prosecute me for something that was fundamentally not a crime. After three failed indictments and over 148 legal files, his case has now been dismissed. They never thought that this was going to go very far, but they just knocked on the wrong door and they chose me as a target. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. You may have noticed it's Shen Yun season again, but I wanted to tell you a little bit personally about why I love this show and go see it every year. Aside from being beautiful, it's actually a

homegrown American dream success story. All things from traditional China were under attack during the Cultural Revolution and have kind of really remained that way since. Traditional Chinese dance was almost destroyed, but parts of it actually survived. So what the Shen Yun people did is in upstate New York, they brought together the people that actually remembered what it was all about, and kind of rekindled it, put it back together, re-birthed it in upstate New York. They started with one company in 2006. Today, there's eight of them touring the world. A million people see it every year. I mean. Just think about that. In under 20 years, pulling your boots up, no government funding, and they brought back

traditional Chinese dance to the world. The tagline is China before communism. Something speaks very deeply to me personally. The Chinese Communist Party has been trying to destroy this group, prevent them from performing all these years. And over the last year, the New York Times has even been going after Shen Yun, using a lot of the same talking points that the Chinese Communist Party has been using. And with these increased attacks, I particularly feel motivated personally to invite you to see Shen Yun and actually see for yourself what it's all about, how amazing it is, how inspiring it is. So to find out where Shen Yun is performing near you, check out Showtimes at

ShenYun.com. They're still performing at Lincoln Center in New York City as we speak until April 12th. You can use the code JAN25 to get theater ticketing fees waived. Again, that's JAN25. I can't stress how highly I appreciate this show and how much I think you will love it. Dr. Aten Haim, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a privilege. Well, so let's go back to January 24th of this year, not that long ago. You were expecting to be going to jail, but that's not what happened. Give me a sense of what happened.

Yeah, I mean, it was the culmination of an entire story that, I mean, it's truly unbelievable because January 24th is when my case was dismissed. But that day and then the night before especially, I was getting ready to go to jail. I was giving my wife all of my media contacts. You know, we were thinking about, like, if they show up to my work because I was operating the next day. And we were fully getting ready to prepare for the worst. And all of this came about because I spoke out, right? And we were fully getting ready to prepare for the worst. And all of this came about because I spoke out, right?

I expressed my opinion about what was going on in this case. And the judge was threatening to send me to jail for violating a de facto gag order, something he had not even signed. And on the same day that I was possibly going to jail, he ended up signing the dismissal of the case. And it was dismissed with prejudice, which means it could never be brought again. Let's backtrack a bit. Okay, I mean, this goes way back to 2023, when you blew the whistle on some very unfortunate activities. So give me a picture of what happened. Yeah, so I was a surgery resident in general surgery

at Baylor College of Medicine, which is one of the academic institutions in the Texas Medical Center. And part of the program during your training is you go to different hospitals. One of those hospitals is Texas Children's Hospital, one of the most prestigious. And we spent a lot of time training there. is you go to different hospitals. One of those hospitals is Texas Children's Hospital, one of the most prestigious.

And we spent a lot of time training there. And it actually goes back one year before because in 2022, this is when the transgender issue was really coming to the mainstream. You know, it was after COVID that it went into the schools, went into the hospitals everywhere. And in March of 2022, the hospital had released a very public statement saying that they were shutting down their transgender program because of the potential criminal ramifications.

And the reason they said that was because a few weeks earlier, the attorney general of Texas said that it could be investigated as child abuse. Right? So it makes sense why they would release that statement. And over the next couple of months, what I found out is that the hospital did not shut down the program. They not only continued it, but expanded it, all of it behind closed doors. The reason I knew this was because I worked there. And the people who were doing these surgeries told me they were doing it. So at some point I knew I had to blow the whistle.

It was part of my job as a doctor. So in May of 2023, May 16, 2023, I blew the whistle anonymously with Christopher Ruffo to expose the fact that the largest children's hospital in the world was lying about a program that was manipulating, mutilating, and sterilizing healthy young children. You said that this was part of your job, speaking out. Explain to me what your thought is behind that. Yeah. Well, when you take your oath as a doctor, you say to do no harm, right? But that not only involves the patients who are on your operating room table, the people I see in clinic, but also the profession.

Because my dad's a doctor, he's a pulmonologist. And when I was growing up, he always told me, you have to take care of your patients. That's the most important thing. But you also have to take care of your profession. So part of that is holding other doctors accountable. to take care of your patients, that's the most important thing, but you also have to take care of your profession. So part of that is holding other doctors accountable if they're lying or they're harming patients because you have a responsibility to those people. If you see something going wrong, you have to say something about it.

You have to do something, even if that means you may have to sacrifice, because the job of being a doctor is so important. There's no other option. I think this is a rare view from what I've seen over the last several years. I think a lot of that view came from what I saw during COVID. Because everything I saw going on in the hospital, people dying alone, right, these kids who were being abused because they were locked down at home. And all that came from doctors not

falling through with their oaths to their profession, right. So many were willing to stay silent in the face of lies. And because of that, the people who we were supposed to take care of were the ones who were suffering the most. And seeing all this, right, it was horrific. I mean, warehouse is full of dead bodies that were not able to see the people they loved the most before they passed away. And even though I did my best to try to fight against it, at some point I'm complicit, right? I'm guilty of it. And I just couldn't live with my life, right?

I couldn't look in the mirror if this other thing is happening and I didn't do anything about it because I knew I could. So I blew the whistle May 16th, 2023, and I was anonymous, so no one knew who I was. I was just planning on moving on with my life because I was about to finish my surgical residency and start my new job. But on the day of my graduation, a month later, June 23rd, 2023, a few hours before the ceremony,

a few hours before I'm about to meet up with my parents and my entire program, I get an aggressive knock on my door and I open it and there's two armed agents with Health and Human Services and they tell me that they're investigating a case regarding medical records. And that's when I knew that the federal Leviathan showed up to my door and that this was going to be a fight. You know, luckily, my wife is an attorney. She's actually a federal prosecutor. She works at DOJ.

And she had advised me not to speak with them without an attorney, but they gave me a target letter that named me as the target of a investigation. And what followed after that was so corrupt, so treacherous, a case that was so wrong that it's hard to even put it into words. There's so many layers of corruption that we were always surprised by the depth they were willing to go. What were you charged with? Yes. So, in general, what they were charging me with was accessing records without authorization.

And then initially they charged me with disclosure. Those were the two big things, the two operational components of HIPAA. Access and then disclosure. The thing with this case, which makes it unprecedented in American history, is that their own evidence, the evidence they gave us, showed that I had access to the hospital because I was working there. And then their first indictment was built on a fabricated story. So that one fell apart. So they had to drop the disclosure because I had never released patient names, right? Everything was de-identified.

The same type of information that hospitals give to public health agency or news organizations to report about public health diseases. So they had reinterpreted the law in the most radical way possible, essentially to charge me with a non-crime. They had never even defined the nature of the charges after all these months of fighting. I still don't know what they were charging me with because they never told us. You mentioned a first indictment, so there was a second. Yeah. So there were three total. And just imagine how much legal cost that took to get through three. The first indictment fell apart because their story was not real. They said after January 2021, I had no reason to be at Texas Children's Hospital. So they were making it seem like I was some type of, you know, like grifter, some type of

liar who was lying about needing to access records at TCH in order to get into the medical system. That was not true. I was working there. I was rotating at the hospital in April and May of 2023. So once that became known, then they had to go back to a grand jury and get a second indictment. The second indictment fell apart because the language they used and the charges were not part of the statute. It was just like a big deal.

So they were charged with something that wasn't a crime. But then also, they included a typo in their indictment. And not just like a their, their type thing. Instead of subchapter XI, they wrote subchapter XL. The problem with that is that doesn't exist. That's a major legal problem if you charge someone with a crime that's not on the books. So we had this long hearing, the judge ripped into the prosecutor, and they ended up having to get a third indictment. So this was after

months and months of fighting in court. I just want to mention, I saw that there's 148 filings in this case, which is really kind of, let's just say it's a lot, right? And all of these things, as you mentioned, are expensive. And so, you know, there's incredible resources were used here. Yeah, and it's really remarkable. Because when you go to the legal docket you can go online and when you scroll through all of them, it actually takes some

time to scroll through them. My legal team had to fight so hard to define even the basic components of this case. So when you think about when people say the process is the punishment, well, this is how this plays out in real life. They write an indictment that's based on a fabricated story, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars to prove that in court, right? Then they charge you with crimes that aren't in the statute, right? We have to file motions for that. My lawyers have to put in hundreds of hours, right, which all translates to an immense

amount of financial billing. So and this is just week after week after week of bitter legal fighting. I mean, it was unbelievable to think that my attorneys had to argue for certain points that were completely obvious, but the DOJ was fighting so hard in order to bleed us dry of all of our resources. You believe this was the strategy. It was like this, people call it the process is the punishment. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, I know this for a fact because the DOJ had never intended for this to go as far as it did. They thought I was going to plead to some misdemeanor make this all go away so that they get their victory. They criminalize whistleblowing in hospitals and they get elevated within the Democratic Party superstructure because that's who these people are. They never thought that I was going to fight back because the day of my first arraignment, an arraignment is when I plead not guilty, I have to go into court. And before know, before and after me, there, you know, these are serious crimes, right? You know, people who are rapists, murderers, drug traffickers, everyone's in orange jumpsuits except for me. I go up and I plead not guilty. But before that, my attorneys

went to the lead DOJ prosecutor. And the first thing she says to my attorneys is, are we really trying this? Are we really going to bring this case further than it needs to go? So just from that alone, it reveals that they never thought that this was going to go very far, but they just knocked on the wrong door when they chose me as a target. For the benefit of the few audience members who may not be aware at this point, most cases in the U.S. are settled, basically. There are very few that actually go to trial. The vast majority of federal criminal cases will plead to a lesser charge. And the very small proportion that goes to trial, you will lose. So even for us, we were in this extreme minority of cases.

And not only that we were willing to go to trial, but especially the fact that before then the case was finally dismissed with prejudice, which is an even smaller number of cases. Because once it's dismissed with prejudice, that means an even smaller number of cases. Because once it's dismissed with prejudice, that means that the case had no legitimacy to begin with, because they can never bring it again in the future. What was the reaction to the people that you worked with, some of the fellow residents? There's these implications around starting a new job amidst all of this. So just tell me about that picture.

I knew I wanted to work in a small town. And I had found this amazing place to work outside of Dallas, maybe like 40, 50 miles outside. And when I told them about what was happening, the hospital, everyone was very supportive, especially because more people were aware what was happening to these kids. And so many people were just fed up with doctors not standing up for themselves and not doing the right thing. And you know, like when the case was dismissed, I can say like, you know, my knuckles were sore just from

all the fist bumps I was giving, you know, around the hospital. It was amazing. But the one thing I was disappointed in was the people in my program, the surgeons I worked with, at Baylor and TCH, there was only one of them who was willing to put himself on the line and defend me publicly. Only one. I have hundreds of people, sorry two. There are only two who are willing to defend me publicly.

This is an entire generation of surgeons. We're supposed to take care of people. We're gonna be the ones who are taking care of your brother or your father or your mother when they get sick. You hope those people will have a spine, but I think many people are coming to the realization that most of them don't. Well, so how do we grapple with that as a society? Yeah. Let's say this idea that there wasn't a lot of courage in the medical profession during

the COVID years in this gender-affirming care realm as well. That's a common theme that has kept coming up. I believe it's a trend that had been going on for decades, but it had culminated with COVID because the censorship and the ideology that was infused into the medical profession during COVID was so strong that people hadn't kind of primed themselves to not speak up. They knew everything that was happening with lockdowns, with masks, social distancing, the vaccine, everything was not proper medicine or science. That all of it was essentially witchcraft. But they had to stay silent because the

professional repercussions were so severe. You know, how you, you know, people who are vomiting, they would put masks on them. When someone got shot, right, and they would come into the trauma bay, the first thing they would do is put a mask on them. And like, you don't have to be a doctor to understand how totally insane that is, right, to put a mask on someone who is going to have a hard time breathing because they just got shot with a gun, right? That's like common sense. For me, just taking off the mask and doing what's right for these patients, I almost

got fired. So the change has to happen within the major academic centers. Doctors have to be able to speak out and not face existential professional repercussions because that's what the situation is now. And when you think about doctors are unique because you work your entire life, college, medical school, training, and the training is brutal. And you do all of that to get to this point and to sacrifice everything, to speak out is a lot.

And there has to be a change at the top, but also for the average doctor. They have to grow a spine. They have to start doing it, even when it's a hard thing to do. That's one of these things. If a lot of people get inspired to speak up more, then it's easier for that change to happen. I guess a lot easier. That's what happened though, because for me, what I saw during COVID, because I was completely atomized and isolated during COVID, I mean, by far the most difficult time of my life, where I'm not an angry person by disposition. And I was very, very angry during that time because I was complicit with this

crime that was so awful that it went against every principle of the medical profession. But I saw the doctors who were speaking up, like Robert Malone, like Simone Gold, Peter McCullough. And I looked at these guys and I was like, man, these guys are doctors. They're putting everything on the line to do the right thing when they're being destroyed, like Jay Bhattacharya. I mean, these guys are heroes. So when I saw them speaking out, that had served as an inspiration for me. And even in my case, when I spoke out,

anonymously during the first go-round, May 2023, there was another whistleblower a couple of days later who anonymously spoke out and told her story about working in the transgender clinic and all of the horrors that happened behind closed doors. So tell me a little bit more about what this whistleblower alleged. She was a nurse working in the clinic. And we actually got in contact with each other because the FBI came to her home. There's a video of it on accidents. It's shocking. The FBI agent in that video was the FBI agent in my case, which goes to show the corruption was coming from the same people.

So that's how we got in contact with each other. So our stories kind of unfolded in tandem. But when I was indicted in June of 2024, and I went to my arraignment, I pled not guilty. That day, she had took her identity public to come out with an even more shocking story, because she was still working in the clinic after she blew the whistle the first time. And what she was alleging in this new story in 2024 was that the transgender clinic at TCH, right, she was alleging that they were billing Medicaid in Texas

for these interventions. And to do that is illegal because Texas law explicitly bans Medicaid from being used for these purposes. And, you know, when you look at some of the records, it's pretty interesting because the transgender doctors at TCH were the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit who were challenging the law in Texas banning these interventions for children.

But even in their lawsuit, they expressed how they were using Medicaid for these interventions. So it's almost like this blatant admission of this misconduct. And of course, there's still allegations the case has to play out, but it was pretty shocking, and especially to see how the Attorney General of Texas over the next couple of months, had filed lawsuits against three other doctors who, for schemes in a similar sense, where they were mislabeling the patient's sex, so like male to female,

and then they were using fraudulent billing codes to get insurance companies to pay for things they wouldn't otherwise pay for. I think that's going to establish the template for how these other hospitals in blue states are going to bypass accountability from the Department of Justice and HHS. And just to be clear, they would use a particular billing code that doesn't reveal that there's actually some sort of gender affirming care type medical approaches being used. What you would do is say it's a 16 year old girl comes into your clinic, and you change

the sex of that patient in the medical chart from female to male and you want insurance companies to reimburse you for you know testosterone but you don't want to reveal that you're billing for gender dysphoria. So what you do is you just write you know in the chart instead of gender dysphoria it's testosterone deficiency. So the diagnosis and then the treatment, which are the two things that go to the insurance company, when they see that no red flags are raised,

for them looks perfectly normal. You have a male with testosterone deficiency, we will reimburse those testosterone injections for that patient. But they don't know that they're getting scammed. And the public doesn't know that these interventions are still happening. So yeah, I mean, that is classic, you know, bread and butter medical fraud. Like that's a serious, serious issue. And if that is being done, which I suspect it is,

those people can go to prison. This is something that's a major crime because you're fraudulently stealing money from insurance companies and even government insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid at the extent of maybe millions, tens of millions of dollars. Do they believe that they're doing the right thing, that they're being prevented from doing these incredibly important surgeries and other interventions for these young people? I think it's hard to say exactly what they think because it's tough to crawl into their mind because it's tough to crawl into their mind and understand their motivations. But what I will say is that, you know, the ideology is so radical, this idea that you're going to take these children and transition their sex from one to the other, which is

obviously impossible. But what they're doing to achieve that is to give them chemotherapy drugs, which is puberty blockers, hormones, and then the most radical surgeries ever conceived in the field of medicine. And they're putting these children down this road to turn them into chronic medical patients. And at some point in the future— And maybe just qualify that for someone that might not be fully aware. Why did they become forever a medical patient? Yeah, because all of the complications from the surgeries and the medications—I mean,

I was taking care of a patient not that long ago who had a pulmonary embolism from all of the estrogen they were taking because it was being prescribed as part of their gender affirming care regimen. So that's something that's going to affect the rest of that person's life. So imagine being the doctors who were telling these kids that this is going to save your life, that if you don't do this, if you don't turn yourself into a chronic medical patient, you're going to kill yourself. How evil is that?

For these people to then turn around to self-reflect and realize that they were the monsters, that they were accusing everyone else of being, is the worst possible thing that is conceivable for these people. I don't think they could take it. Like self-reflection for them would be self-immolation. Right, their souls, I don't think could survive that reality, that truth, so they lie to themselves. Realizing that what they did is extremely harmful to their patients.

Exactly, yeah. Because what they were is extremely harmful to their patients. Exactly, yeah. Because what they were doing is preventing these kids from the interventions that they really needed, right? Like they needed people to listen to them, to talk to them. They didn't need drugs and surgeries. And while they were preventing what they really needed, they were giving them these poisons and these meaningless,

destructive, vicious, gruesome surgeries. So you're here for D-Trans Awareness Day. So what's been happening in Congress? It's a pretty remarkable time because you had the election of Donald Trump. You had the executive orders. And now what's happening is you have legislation going through, hopefully both Senate and House, where things can start happening to where the damage that has been done to these people can start to be reversed and that they can get what they need to take care of themselves because all the complications from the hormones and the surgeries, you know, those require very extensive medical interventions to, you know, ameliorate the effects of that. And like for them, none of that's being covered so they have to live with it. If there's

bills that can be passed to make sure insurance covers the detransitioning because there's not even a billing code for that. Like, you know, what would you bill for something like this? You know, making sure that that gets passed into a bill is very important for them. But also, you know, lengthening the statute of limitations for lawsuits. Because many of these people have been harmed by their

doctors. Most of the statutes of limitations in these states goes by state, so everyone's different. I believe in Texas it's one year. Very short. Most of these people only feel the effects of it, right? Only start detransitioning years after. Very short, most of these people only feel the effects of it, right, only start detransitioning years after and it's only then that they would pursue a

lawsuit against their former doctors but the statute of limitations is already gone. So you know it's just two of the really important things that are working their way through both the federal legislation, but also in a lot of the states as well. And so you're here to advocate for that. Yeah, yeah. But also I'd pay my respects because I mean, the champions, the true heroes of this whole movement,

the fact that these detransitioners were willing to tell their stories. Because when you talk about the research studies or the medicine behind it, people aren't really animated by that. Yeah, they can see how absurd it is, but when you hear their stories about what they went through and what these doctors did to them, you can't help but be horrified. I mean, these are the most grotesque stories I've ever heard. And my job as a doctor doctor to prevent that from happening. So what would accountability in your mind look like here?

So I think accountability for the doctors who are doing this, the people who are leading it, who are the policymakers, who write the guidelines, who are part of the professional organizations, they have to be held legally accountable. And what I mean by that is criminally, for promoting a fraudulent basis of research, having that filtered into insurance companies, then to hospitals, and then all the way to the patients. Because that's essentially what they did,

is they created this fake construct of a medical field and then harmed a bunch of people. There are people who are sitting in prison today for doing similar things, but on a smaller scale. So I believe that's what has to happen on that side. And you're talking about implementing, for example, the WPATH guidelines. Exactly. Yeah. Because these doctors knew their research was bogus, that it was illegitimate.

But that didn't stop them from saying publicly that this was legitimate research. And as a doctor, that's a big deal. Because that means it was done so knowingly. And we know that from all of the whistleblower documents and all of the unsealed evidence from the Alabama lawsuit. So they're talking about how these research studies are fraudulent, like how they don't have the numbers, but they have to provide a certain image publicly

in order to get people to accept it. And very briefly, the Alabama case? Yeah, so they had a case, I believe it's what they were defending their state law that were banning these interventions for children. And a lot of kind of behind the scenes conversations and documents, emails were unsealed from their lawsuit which had given this really interesting perspective into the workings behind this gender industry. Okay. And what was the second area? Yeah, so that's one side of accountability, but just as important is the legal side. You had an entire team of prosecutors, FBI agents,

HHS agents, who had worked together to develop this completely fraudulent case. They had spent hundreds of hours—I can't even imagine how many millions of dollars of taxpayer money to prosecute me for something that was fundamentally not a crime, right? And I believe that there has to be accountability for them too. I believe they have to be fired and investigated. And if it is found that they had conspired to construct false testimony against me, then he'll held criminally liable because that's what led to the destruction of their their first indictment is that it was based on false testimony, right? The witness who they had relied on was

telling them something completely false. And the government should have known this because they had evidence in their possession which proved what he was saying was false. And they had this evidence for 10 months before that. Dr. Heim, any final thoughts as we finish up? The one thing I would hope people take away from this is the power of the average person to have a really meaningful impact if they do the right thing and then stand by it. Because that's what our story is all about. Because I was a no one. I mean, I didn't have a social media presence. I didn't have anything.

We had a small friend group and we had a very small amount of money which was gone after like the first month and which is still gone. But we were able to have this effect on the entire state of Texas. And that's amazing. I mean, that's one of the most remarkable things I've ever done in my life. I mean, it was me and my wife who were going through it. And even though it was so hard, it was so challenging,

you know, I can honestly say that, you know, we're closer now than ever before. So it's not only that you'll face these challenges, but you can get through it, become stronger, and have better relationships on the other side of it. Well, Dr. Eytan Haim, it's such a pleasure to have had you on the show. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Dr. Eytan Haim and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.

We reached out to Texas Children's Hospital. They did not address the specifics of our query, but said, quote, we are unwavering in our dedication to providing every child and woman with the best medical care and emphasize their quote, in compliance with all applicable state and federal regulations and laws.