For Eithan Haim, operating on patients provides a welcome break from the federal criminal indictment hanging over him. Haim, who is 34 years old, works as a general surgeon at a regional hospital in Texas, dealing with ruptured appendixes, gunshot wounds, and whatever else comes through the ER. “Whenever I go into an operating room, any stress is gone,” he says. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
Haim’s alleged crime? That he violated HIPAA, a patient privacy law, when he revealed that Texas Children’s Hospital was providing gender transition treatments to minors after it announced that such services had been “paused.” The U.S. Department of Justice has charged him with four felonies, which could land Haim in prison for the next decade.
I met Haim recently at his house east of Dallas, where he lives with his wife and their newborn daughter. That afternoon he had just returned from removing someone’s gallbladder and was still dressed in his green scrubs. Haim is quick to launch into a story, whether it’s explaining how you massage a patient’s heart after it’s stopped beating, or describing his days as an aspiring musician before he decided to become a doctor.
The story of how he was indicted begins in 2022, when Haim was a surgical resident. He discovered then that Texas Children’s, the largest children’s hospital in the country, was inserting puberty blocker implants in young patients with gender dysphoria—that is, distress at one’s biological sex. After studying the medical literature on the subject, Haim came to the conclusion that delaying puberty in gender-questioning children was not only unwise, but unethical.
“Kids come into the hospital because they’re sick, and you make them better because they want to live a normal life,” he told me. “But then here’s this other situation where, in the same operating rooms, they’re taking healthy children and they’re making them sick for the rest of their life.”
He wasn’t the only one at Texas Children’s who was concerned. A small group of fellow resident doctors had whispered conversations in what Haim calls “the dark corners of the hospital.” One resident told Haim about feeling uncomfortable when asked to assist in the insertion of a puberty-blocking device in a patient’s arm, but felt that—as a mere resident—he couldn’t object. “We rely on the hospital’s good graces in order to graduate,” Haim says. “You know if you challenge that, they will destroy you.”
Many Western countries, such as Denmark, England, Finland, and Sweden, have in recent years investigated youth gender transition, found a lack of evidence for the benefits of these interventions, and severely restricted such procedures. More than half the states in the U.S. also have restrictions. The Cass Review, commissioned by England’s National Health Service and released in April, concluded that there is “no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”
In contrast, the Biden administration has remained firmly supportive of what’s known as gender-affirming care, declaring the medical transition of patients “lifesaving.” Currently there is litigation challenging the ban on gender-affirming care in Texas as well as in 16 other states, with the suit in Tennessee going all the way to the Supreme Court. On December 4, the Biden administration will argue before the highest court in the land that it is unconstitutional for states to restrict such care.
Haim decided to tell the media what was happening at his hospital. He knew taking a public stance on such a divisive issue could undermine his medical career before it really started, so he was determined to remain anonymous. He told me he didn’t present his findings to hospital administrators because it was obvious to him that what was happening had the approval of higher-ups.
Eventually, Haim contacted Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist and journalist. Rufo published a story in May 2023, not naming Haim, but calling him a “whistleblower” at Texas Children’s. It was illustrated with heavily redacted versions of the patients’ records. (Shortly after, the Texas legislature voted to pass its law banning transition treatments for minors.)
Haim felt he’d done his part to alert the public and Texas officials about what was going on while protecting himself and his family from the consequences of speaking out.
The records Haim disclosed include the ages of patients, some as young as 11 and 12. They also include their diagnoses and brief treatment summaries—most were getting puberty blockers inserted. To conceal the patients’ identities, Haim stripped out their names, birth dates, and other identifying information before sending the records to Rufo. (Haim points out the irony that in the indictment against him, the initials of several patients are listed, which means the government published more identifying information than he did.)
Rufo’s article did include the names of doctors performing the procedures. One was a surgeon Haim had worked with and considers brilliant. Why not black out their names, too? “If you can’t defend what you’re doing to children behind closed doors, then you have no business doing it,” Haim says. “There’s nothing that a doctor does in a hospital that they should not be willing to defend publicly.” Plus, it’s unclear how listing the names of doctors would be a violation of privacy laws. As Robert Field, a professor of law, health management, and policy at Drexel University, told me: “HIPAA is meant to protect patients, not providers.”
Rufo’s article came to the attention of the federal government. And on June 23 of last year, early on the morning of the day he graduated from his residency, two agents from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services showed up at Haim’s Houston apartment. He knew right away why they were there. “You’re so freaked out in the moment that you just start crumbling,” he told me.
Haim initially agreed to speak to them. It was his wife, Andrea, who intervened and told him that he needed to stop talking and hire a lawyer. She would know: Andrea is employed as a federal prosecutor in Texas’s northern district. Haim is being prosecuted in the state’s southern district. “Being the assistant United States attorney who everyone knows that my husband’s on felony indictment in another district—that’s an awkward position to be in, for sure,” she told me. “I find the prosecution against my husband, in a lot of ways, to be outrageous and disappointing, as someone who works at the Justice Department.”
Before the agents left, they handed Haim a letter letting him know that he was a potential target of a federal investigation.
He hired a lawyer. He struggled to sleep. He even started smoking. As the investigation dragged on, Haim expected that the DOJ planned to indict him despite his certainty that he hadn’t violated any laws. So he decided to beat the feds to the punch and out himself in a video interview with Rufo. “I’m going to tell this story to make sure everyone knows what’s going on,” he told me, “and knows that I’m not going to be scared.”
Then in June of this year, three armed U.S. marshals knocked on Haim’s door and served him with the felony indictment. In the months that followed, Haim and his wife said they burned through all their savings. They were, he recalls, “completely alone and hemorrhaging cash.” Haim needed publicity in order to get donations for his defense. So he made the rounds: Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Dr. Phil.
He eventually raised more than $1 million, although his legal bills are fast approaching $2 million. He’s felt buoyed by the hundreds of notes of support he received, many from other doctors thanking him for speaking out. “It was the energy we needed to get through the daily grind of it,” he says. “To know they’re rooting for me.”
In late September, Haim made his first appearance in front of David Hittner, the U.S. district judge who will decide his fate. Flanked by three lawyers and wearing a trim blue suit, Haim did his best not to panic. He had to wait his turn as another defendant, who was caught with more than 100 pounds of cocaine, was sentenced to seven years. It wasn’t lost on Haim that he might spend more time in prison than the drug trafficker.
But in the last several weeks, the government’s case against Haim has begun to seem increasingly shaky. For starters, Justice filed a motion to withdraw the lead prosecutor, Tina Ansari, from the case. Haim’s lawyers have pointed out that Ansari’s family members “have substantial financial and political ties” to Texas Children’s, which, they argue, raises “serious ethical questions.”
The DOJ has also twice refiled its indictment against Haim, deleting what his lawyers call “significant errors.” For example, the initial charges allege that Haim accessed patient information after he was no longer working at Texas Children’s. That was false, his lawyers say—at the time he accessed the information, he was still performing surgeries at the hospital. That allegation is not in the revised indictment. In the original indictment, the department argued that Haim obtained the records “to promote his own personal agenda.” That explanation doesn’t appear in the revised indictment either. The original indictment also alleges that Haim contacted Rufo in an effort to “grossly mischaracterize” the hospital’s procedures. That phrase has been deleted as well.
In a recent public status conference in a Houston courtroom, Judge Hittner appeared annoyed by the government’s backtracking. He seized on the fact that prosecutors originally used the phrase “wrongfully disclose,” only to later strike that language. Hittner also admonished the Justice lawyers for overlooking an erroneous citation of the law. “Who’s proofreading? All of you?” Judge Hittner said, referring to the three government lawyers present. “It’s in a major case, ready to go to trial, and it’s still incorrect.”
Haim’s lawyers see the department’s errors and shifting story as proof that this case was politically motivated, and that he was targeted for drawing negative attention to the controversial field of pediatric gender medicine. “At its most charitable, it’s an incredibly sloppy investigation,” says Ryan Patrick, one of Haim’s lawyers. “And at its most egregious, it’s that they’re doing this on purpose and they have ignored their own evidence.” (A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment.)
At a hearing on December 3, Judge Hittner moved the pretrial conference to February. That means that Haim’s case will then be overseen by a Trump Justice Department. “We feel very confident that Dr. Haim will be vindicated,” says Marcella Burke, another attorney for Haim.
Haim believes he wasn’t indicted for violating patient privacy, which he says he would never do. Instead, he thinks the Justice Department intended to silence him and, in so doing, send a message to other would-be whistleblowers. As Haim’s situation demonstrates, being under federal indictment is ruinous. But Haim says he has never considered a deal in which he would have to plead guilty. “I think they wanted to make an example out of me,” he says. “Hopefully, they now realize they knocked on the wrong door.”
Tom Bartlett is a writer in Austin, Texas.
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