The edge of accountability: Part I

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LES SILLARS, HOST: From WORLD Radio, this is Doubletake. I’m Les Sillars.

NIXON: Hello? Hi. I’m looking for Vanessa Sivadge.

BLAKE SIVADGE: OK. Who are you?

NIXON: Paul Nixon. I’m an FBI agent.

NIXON: Are we interrupting dinner?

VANESSA: That’s all right. What’s going on? …

Vanessa Sivadge is a Christian and a nurse.

SIVADGE: I've always wanted to be a nurse.

In July of 2023 she was working at Texas Children’s Hospital. A very prestigious children’s hospital. She’s not the kind of person who normally attracts the attention of the FBI. She started the job in 2021 and soon discovered that she was helping provide transgender transition treatments. For minors.

For about two years she didn’t say anything. Just did her job. Transgenderism had exploded in law and culture over the previous decade. People encountered boys in girls’ bathrooms and on girls’ sports teams. Trans characters all over Netflix and Prime. Trans public officials. Pro-trans legislation. In 2022 President Joe Biden declared a “Transgender Day of Visibility.”

BIDEN: We’re committed to advancing transgender equality in the classroom, on the playing field, at work, in our military, in our housing and healthcare systems–everywhere. Simply everywhere.

And it was simply everywhere. Including Vanessa’s hospital.

SIVADGE: It's like they're … playing God, in the sense that they think that that you can change your birth, biological sex.

There had been conservative pushback by this point. Maybe a dozen red states had passed bills limiting so-called transgender “rights.” But Vanessa was sure that opposing medical transgender interventions would bring reprisals.

SIVADGE: It's a huge weight on my conscience. But how do you, how do you fight back? It's literally in my job description, I have to do it. I can’t pawn it off to someone else.

But eventually she’d had enough. We’ll get into the details later, but in May of 2023 she helped blow the whistle on a gender transition clinic at Texas Children’s Hospital. A few weeks later, the FBI was knocking at her door.

Vanessa tried not to show it, but she was pretty rattled.

They told her …

SIVADGE: … you know, if you don't collaborate with us, if you don't help us, then we can't protect you. Your livelihood is at risk, your safety is at risk.

Vanessa found herself–no, that’s not quite right. She put herself in the cross-hairs of the transgender movement. One of the most aggressive ideologies this culture has ever seen. She didn’t exactly mean to, but she did.

This week and next, we’re going to tell Vanessa’s story here on Doubletake. But it’s not just her story. This is about a lot more than just one woman’s fight to keep her integrity, although it is that. Her experience is a window into the battle over transgenderism. It involves one of the most critical spiritual and cultural issues of our age: the nature of human beings. And it’s about how to live according to the truth amid a storm of lies.

To provide some context for Vanessa’s story, though, first we’re going to attend the world’s largest ever gathering of people who thought they could change their biological sex but had a change of heart: De-Trans Awareness Day 2026. Vanessa wasn’t there, but many of the attendees knew Vanessa or knew of her.

This conference happened because of the courage of detransitioners and people like Vanessa. They have this in common: they choose to live not by lies. In fact, the people at this conference and their allies have shoved a dissent-crushing, body-wrecking, soul-bending juggernaut up to the edge of accountability. Now it’s crouched there, heels dug in, and nobody knows what’ll happen next.

One wet, snowy day in March of 2026, I walked into the Regency Hyatt in downtown Washington, D.C. I shook off my umbrella and rode two escalators down to the basement. A security team ran a wand over me, then let me into a small, darkish conference room where I found a modest crowd. Maybe 120 people in total.

KIRA: Hi, so I'm Kira, and I came from a pretty traumatic background, which led to me deciding that I needed to, manifested into me believing that I needed to change my external self to fill my internal void.

A group called GenSpect had gathered more than 70 “detransitioners” from all over the country and a few from Europe to connect and share stories.

RITCHIE HERON: I transitioned at the age of 26 when I had surgery two days before my 31st birthday, and I regretted it immediately.

Detransitioners stop taking cross-sex hormones and try to live according to their biological sex. Never before had so many assembled in one room.

For decades, transgender advocates have insisted that “de-transitioning” is either impossible or incredibly rare…maintaining that those who say they have are either frauds or were pressured into it.

But Jesse Harris told the audience that she transitioned in 1987, but by the nineties …

HARRIS: Anyone who knew me well understood that given the opportunity to take it all back, I would have gladly done so, but by now, I felt trapped …

She didn’t detransition because she was afraid she’d be called a traitor. Seen as a threat to trans ideology.

HARRIS: This is still true today, as we all know, and in my opinion, it seemed to have gotten worse.

It has gotten worse. One slim young man in a black sleeveless top, Jonni Skinner, described growing up with an autism diagnosis and same-sex attractions in a “homophobic family.”

SKINNER: There were frequent episodes with me growing up where people attempt to pray it away or try to change my behavior, the way that I talk, or just my general, I guess, just way that I carry myself.

He started following trans influencers online.

SKINNER: So I was seeing all of these men that, that were like me going through this transition and, and it seemed as if, they spoke as if it made their lives so much better.

When he was 13, his mom took him to a social worker who advised him to undergo “medical transition.”

SKINNER: … and she sort of used my vulnerabilities to make me feel as if this was the only option for me, you know.

This social worker told his mom that Jonni was suicidal. He’d never said that. The social worker said that most kids with gender dysphoria commit suicide if they don’t transition young. That’s a mantra in the trans community. But in fact, a Finnish study last spring showed there’s no causal connection between gender dysphoria and increased risk of suicide at all. Or proof that transitioning reduces the supposed risk of suicide.

The social worker also said his mom

SKINNER: … doesn't have a son. She never had a son, she has a daughter, and she can accept that or have that dead son.

They met with an endocrinologist who presented as a gay man.

SKINNER: So he said that I’m actually gay. Can't be gay. I have a girl brain and a boy body. I was born in the wrong body. Everything about my body is wrong and needs to be essentially reconstructed so that I could be normal.

A gender therapist was there. They agreed that

SKINNER: I would not find, I would not find love or acceptance in the gay community …

Most gay men want “relationships” with manly men, and that wasn’t him.

SKINNER: … and that I needed to do this to, like “disappear into society,” was the wording.

That is, become transgender so he could live like a normal person. Be accepted. He’d find a relationship with a gay man and outwardly he’d be the woman in a straight couple. The phrase some use is, “trans the gay away.”

Jonni said his mom pushed back. She asked, isn’t social transition enough for now? Let him dress how he wants, but no hormones. They told her that if she wasn’t willing to offer a supportive home, they could always step in and find him one.

SKINNER: And I mean, the manipulation of the undue influence was just so profound, it like, makes me almost emotional talking about it. …

In the end, his mom agreed to let her 13-year-old son do a medical transition. He wasn’t any happier.

SKINNER: … I lived that way for eight years, 13 to 21 …

At age 21 he met a new endocrinologist, who said his body needed a break from all the estrogen. Then in March of 2024 he read that the scientific basis for the standards of medical care for transitioners was trash. The standards had been developed by a group called W-PATH. Everyone from the American Medical Association on down has been relying on them.

SKINNER: I literally felt like the sky was caving in. Oh, my God, so, you're, everything I was told by this doctor was not true. They took advantage, shaped and molded my body according to like, whatever plan they had for me.

The De-Trans Day conference attendees listened with rapt attention. Not because this kind of story was new to them, but because most people there had lived some version of it.

The conference also included a panel of doctors who talked about how little research had been done on detransitioners. About why insurance doesn’t cover detransition treatment. A panel of lawyers talked about the roughly two dozen lawsuits filed across the country by detransitioners against their doctors and therapists.

People were especially interested in the Fox Varian verdict.

CBS: In a legal first, a jury in New York awarded a 22-year-old woman two million dollars in damages over her gender transition surgery.

A few weeks before the conference the young New York woman had won a two-million-dollar malpractice lawsuit against her providers. Some organizations at the conference were offering to help detransitioners raise money for more of these kinds of lawsuits.

A Trump cabinet member was there. Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson told the detransitioners that they’ve been ignored far too long. He said the FTC is working “around the clock” to investigate whether those providing “gender affirming care” had broken any laws.

FERGUSON: And if the law has been broken, to identify the law breakers and compel them to pay for what they've done. Today, we are witnesses to a present day of reckoning for those who advocated for medical interventions on vulnerable children in the presence of their vulnerable parents, without evidence that those drugs or surgeries are safe or work as intended.

I left the conference feeling oddly hopeful. In less than two decades in Western countries, transgenderism went from fringe to untouchable. But the momentum has clearly shifted. In that cramped basement conference room filled with some of society’s most overlooked and wounded people, an incredibly powerful and oppressive movement seemed strangely vulnerable. And I thought, maybe one day there will be a day of reckoning.

If there is, people like Vanessa Sivadge will have played a big part.

SIVADGE: You know, I really deeply wanted to help people.

Vanessa grew up in Houston and went to nursing school at the University of Texas Health Science Center. She graduated in 2015. In 2018 landed a job at Texas Children’s Hospital.

SIVADGE: It was a dream come true. I mean, it's incredibly competitive to for any, for nurses anywhere to get a job there.

TEXAS CHILDREN’S PROMO VIDEO: We’re here to celebrate. We are number one among all children’s hospitals nationwide. Give yourselves a round of applause …

She spent her first three years in the cardiology department.

SIVADGE: So I trained with some of … the most world renowned surgeons and doctors.

Then in 2021 she transferred to the hospital’s campus on the outskirts of Houston. She wanted to broaden her skills and shorten her commute. She and her husband Blake had purchased a nice two-story house in a quiet western suburb. It’s near soccer fields and jogging paths. They have a good church.

Her new facility had clinics for gastroenterology, orthopedics, sports medicine, gynecology, endocrinology, and many others. It was a great place to work. A lot of nice people. There were pictures on the walls the kids had drawn. It was a place, Vanessa says, where children would feel welcome and secure. She really felt like she was making a difference. Except …

SIVADGE: I did not realize, when I accepted the job, that there was a fully functional gender clinic happening at, at my workplace.

She didn’t work in the gender clinic. But as a liaison between parents and doctors, she was dealing with transgender patients regularly. A few times per week.

Vanessa soon noticed something weird with the patient charts. Part of her job was obtaining insurance authorizations for prescription medications. And she saw a lot of young teen girls with prescriptions for testosterone. And boys were getting estrogen. That wasn’t surprising in a gender clinic, exactly.

But the only reason she knew which patients were transitioning was because she had worked with them. Their charts listed the patients as male or female not according to their biological sex but according to their preferred “gender.” Some girls were listed as boys and vice versa. She did not expect that.

SIVADGE: And so if you weren't actually in tune with what was happening, you would just see a boy that was requesting testosterone, when in reality it was a girl, a biological girl getting testosterone.

To Vanessa, it looked like someone at the hospital was falsifying medical records to hide the fact that “gender affirming” medical treatments were going on. Later she’d discover why a hospital might want to do that.

SIVADGE: And so that was the first red flag.

I did contact Texas Children’s Hospital regarding the allegations that Vanessa would later bring forward. I also asked for comment on a settlement that Texas Children’s reached with prosecutors as a result of Vanessa’s testimony. We’ll hear more about that case next episode. Here’s their response: “Out of respect for the ongoing settlement process, we will not be making any further statements at this time as the matter proceeds through the proper channels.”

Over time, Vanessa found her job increasingly unsettling.

SIVADGE: I’m a Christian, first and foremost. So … my beliefs as it relates to transgender ideology were always very cemented, and I knew exactly what, that it was wrong.

Most of the transgender patients were girls. They typically had diagnoses like anxiety, depression, or autism. Many had tried to harm themselves. They’d often suffered sexual or physical abuse. Transition treatments were presented as a quick fix.

SIVADGE: And in so many of these cases, these children are have been profoundly abused.

SIVADGE: They had some form of vulnerability that made them susceptible to the lies that transgender ideology brings with it, the lies that you will be accepted, that you will be affirmed, that you will be a part of this incredible community. Those lies sound very appealing to a girl or to a boy who is deeply struggling for some reason or another.

At one point Dr. Richard Roberts asked her to teach a boy how to give himself injections. That wasn’t uncommon.

SIVADGE: And so what I realized, I walk into this room and it's a biological male who's presenting as a female.

An effeminate lad.

SIVADGE: … a boy trying so desperately to be a girl, trying so desperately to erase his God-given identity, long hair, feminine clothes, boy, his voice was starting to become less deep, and it's, it's the worst.

And I walk through all the steps with some minor red flags going off in my brain, but I just did my job.

She showed him how to give the injections and then walked out to record what she’d done on his chart. And that’s when it hit her.

SIVADGE: And so essentially, I have now facilitated his erasure, for lack of a better word, and the weekly injections of estrogen that he was going to be giving himself at home to affirm this false identity, that was heartbreaking for me.

But she didn’t do anything about it right then. She just kept working.

It’s easy to second-guess people like Vanessa in this situation. Who don’t speak up when they know something is wrong. But Colson Center President John Stonestreet recalls that back in 2022, transgender ideology wasn’t merely on the rise.

STONESTREET: And it felt like this was a runaway train, because it had touched every single … cultural sphere.

Education, business, politics, government, medicine, economics, sports, law, news, entertainment. All overrun with demands to be “inclusive” and “caring” and use preferred pronouns. Even many Christian organizations. Sure, there were conservative critics. But if you wanted to keep your job, if you wanted to avoid public shaming, you kept your doubts about transgenderism to yourself.

STONESTREET: This particular issue had to be driven forward by totalitarian impulse.

Stonestreet isn’t saying we’ve been living in a totalitarian state. The “totalitarian impulse” is when a segment of society that has rejected reality tries to shut down dissent in the pursuit of a utopian dream.

How this happened is a long story. We won’t go into too much detail, but here’s the outline widely accepted among conservatives:

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s laid the ideological foundation for homosexual rights and then transgenderism. It enshrined sexual autonomy as a civil right, both culturally and legally. It defined people in terms of their sexual desires. Hetero. Homo. Bi. Whatever. And society must affirm that desire. Treat a person’s sexuality like skin color or religion. The only limit was consent. Biology certainly doesn’t matter.

And if your sexual desires must not be limited by biology, why should your gender identity? If the highest good is serving your sense of self, then of course you should change your body to fit the sex you would like to be.

Crucially, the Sexual Revolution separated sex and gender. It insisted that biology and sexual identity aren’t intrinsically connected. It claimed that gender is what some theorists call “performative.” A social construct. Stonestreet again.

STONESTREET: So there was this evolution where we're going to separate those two, and then we're going to prioritize gender over sex. And then that became to the point that even sex was seen as something that was socially constructed.

Technology now makes plausible the illusion that Man can reject his created limits in rebellion against God, particularly regarding sex. Transgenderism is a crucial front in the war against human nature. It’s the dream of self-creation. To make yourself God. That dream is at the core of transgender ideology.

Activists then sprinkled the dream like toxic pixie dust across the entire culture. From the TV show Entertainment Tonight in 2014.

ANNCR: Check out this new cover of TIME Magazine. That is history being made. Laverne Cox of Orange is the New Black is the first transgender person to make the cover of TIME.

Social media turbocharged the process. It connected people who’d been exposed to the ideology, and those connections helped turn them into believers. Also, a group called W-PATH was central in pushing these ideas globally.

O’MALLEY: WPATH, which is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, they created a political campaign.

Stella O’Malley founded GenSpect, the group that organizes De-Trans Awareness Day. She’s a psychotherapist in Ireland.

O’MALLEY: You could say it went back from the 80s, but really since 2010 to de-psychopathologize gender issues. That meant, this is not a mental illness. This is just an ordinary and healthy, normal identity that needs to be supported in society. This wasn't as a result of scientific inquiry. It was as a result of political lobbying from WPATH that started in 2010 and it's been very, very, very successful.

GenSpect and other opponents are trying to “re-pathologize” gender dysphoria.

O’MALLEY: Because it is a mental illness. It was always a mental illness, and I have an awful lot of compassion for people who do have mental illnesses. But this idea that it's a healthy identity that should be supported, it was never correct.

Twenty years ago few people expected transgenderism would become so powerful so quickly.

STONESTREET: And I think because, observable reality, a lot of people that were kind of common sense people thought there's no way it's going to work. Well, if you find which levers of social power you can pull, you can, you can you can make it work.

The transgender movement found some especially big levers in the medical profession. Dr. Kurt Miceli is the medical director of Do No Harm, an organization that opposes identity politics in medicine.

MICELI: There's no doubt ideology has played a substantial role in this area of medicine.

He says that activists drove the rapid acceptance of transgender ideology by presenting transgenderism as a human rights issue, not by examining the medical evidence.

MICELI: When you have medical associations that are issuing strong position statements, they effectively then become treated as de facto standards of care.

Ordinary doctors feel like they’re not able to contradict professional societies. And the professional environment rewards conformity and punishes dissent. It has produced what he called “ideologically purified” associations. And they intimidate into silence those who disagree.

MICELI: … there's definitely a fear of being fired, having, being blackballed, being canceled.

According to Stella O’Malley, by about 2018 the trans movement had become so successful that transition treatments were supposedly “medically necessary.” To not provide them to people who wanted them was regarded as harmful. And oppressive.

In 2020 President Joe Biden wrote in a social media post: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.”

People in the grip of a totalitarian impulse try to change reality to fit their ideology, rather than the other way ‘round. Political science professor Daniel Mahoney’s latest book is called The Persistence of the Ideological Lie.

MAHONEY: Trans ideology involves an even more frontal and brutal assault on common sense and the very idea of human nature than some of, you know, the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century.

In a dictatorship, a small group of people control society by force. But in a totalitarian state, an ideology takes control through something called “mass formation.”

MATTIAS DESMET: Mass formation is a group of people, usually 20 to 30 percent of the people, who fanatically believe in an ideology, in a narrative …

Mattias Desmet is professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium and the author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. From an interview with Hillsdale College.

DESMET: … and who are willing to self-sacrifice completely for the sake of that ideology.

Desmet describes in his book how these people coalesce around a common threat. A threat to the narrative they tell themselves about what kind of people they are and what kind of a society they live in. And in a science-oriented society, people who have abandoned spiritual realities are particularly susceptible to stories that offer a technological solution.

Desmet didn’t refer in his book to the transgender movement. His book is really about what he saw during the COVID pandemic. But the idea of mass formation explains a lot about the rise of transgenderism.

Professor Mahaoney notes that the explosion of young women claiming to be trans shows how vulnerable that group is. Especially those who are troubled and confused.

MAHONEY: And when they're given a interpretive framework that tells them, you're really a man, it's easy to find comfort in that when it's, in fact, a form of psychological and spiritual torture.

Even worse, those in the grip of mass formation really do believe they’re doing the right thing. They have as professor Desmet writes, “a fanatical ideological belief that justifies deception and manipulation and ultimately transgresses all ethical boundaries.”

So when you oppose those caught up in mass formation, the risks of speaking the truth become enormous.

DESMET: It makes people radically intolerant for dissonant voices, for people who think differently, even if it concerns their own children or their own parents.

Vanessa saw all this developing in the culture around her. And at Texas Children’s Hospital.

SIVADGE: And I knew that I was in a very difficult position, because the hospital was entrenched in this.

The then-CEO of Texas Children’s Hospital, Mark Wallace, would often talk about diversity and equity in his monthly newsletter to the entire staff. In the hospital’s annual training program it included sections on respecting people’s pronouns and gender categories. Gender ideology was in the DNA of the place.

Now imagine Vanessa trying to decide whether to speak up about a gender clinic.

SIVADGE: This was their identity. I mean, this is, this was something that they, you know, paraded around, they were very proud of this program.

So Vanessa stayed at the hospital, even though it became harder and harder. One day she was in the adolescent gynecology clinic.

SIVADGE: Teenage girls with concerns about their period or irregular bleeding, or, you know, stuff like that.

A young Hispanic girl came in with her mother.

SIVADGE: I’ll never forget her.

She was dressed like a boy. Very baggy clothes. She told the gynecologist …

SIVADGE: … that she'd really hated her period and she didn't want to have it anymore, … And the gynecologist looks at her and says, Oh, we can just stop your period altogether if you want. You don't ever have to have a period again.

He offered to prescribe a pill. It’d be easy, he said.

SIVADGE: Thank God I had a mask on …

It was the COVID era.

SIVADGE: … because my face under that mask, I couldn't believe it.

The mother’s English wasn’t great, but she knew what the doctor was suggesting. She asked, is it safe? Are there any side effects?

SIVADGE: And the doctor was like, no, no, no, it's, we don't, we can do whatever your daughter wants. … And the mom just kind of sat back, and she just kind of took it.

And so the girl started hormone treatments. Vanessa says she might actually have liked the results. At first.

SIVADGE: You know, they, at first, they do seem like they're getting better, because it's a new experience that is drastically changing their bodies and their puberty.

The girls stop their periods. Boys’ voices change, become more feminine.

SIVADGE: And at first, it's a very exciting thing. And then, you know, the girls start to develop hair on their legs, and their voice begins to deepen …

Gender doctors rarely emphasize to young patients that the effects of pumping them full of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are often irreversible. They don’t call it chemical castration, but people can end up sterilized. Detransitioners also describe altered bone development. Stunted growth. Hormonal imbalances. If they have genital surgery or breast removal, they certainly can’t get their actual body parts back.

SIVADGE: … And what I observed was that they started to really understand what they had, what they had signed up for, and it wasn't so appealing and shiny and new after a couple of months.

But the kids and their parents can’t stop. They’ve bought into the lie.

SIVADGE: They just kept going, and they learned to deal with the multitude of side effects that came with weekly doses of testosterone or estrogen, wrecking havoc on all of their body.

Vanessa says this is the biggest lie the medical establishment has ever sold to confused children and vulnerable parents.

SIVADGE: I mean, the parents were also very entrenched in this too. They were convinced, they were manipulated by the doctors, that if they did not do this for their kids, that they would harm themselves, they would commit suicide.

Worse, doctors and therapists sometimes threaten to call social services if parents refuse to “affirm” a child’s transgender identity. And the state can come and take away their kids. It’s unclear how often it has happened. But it happens more than most people realize. Meet Alexandra Lyashenko.

LYASHENKO: It happened almost two years ago. She was taken on June 3, 2024.

She attended the De-Trans Awareness Day. She and her husband are Ukrainian immigrants.

LYASHENKO: We are desperate. We lost the dependency court a month ago. Our, our daughter is in the clutches of the corrupt dependency judge of Shasta County, California.

It’s a typical story. A very troubled child who was spending too much private time online decided life would be better as the opposite sex. Her parents refused to affirm the delusion so her therapist reported them to social services. And one day the doorbell rang.

LYASHENKO: So I opened the door. I went on the terrace. There was a woman I never saw before, 30 to 40, … black dress, blonde, immediately starts accusing me of being, you know, emotional abuser based on gender identity, you know, non affirming.

Things escalated from there. The social worker called 9-11. Cops showed up. In the middle of all this Alexandra went into her daughter’s room and found her chat history on her computer. Discovered that the girl had been planning an exit for months.

LYASHENKO: She is disowning us. She is dissociated with this family. You know, that was, she wished me death for these past five plus years.

Their daughter went into foster care. The Lyashenkos have reports from state officials that lead them to believe that she’s been abused. The Lyashenkos’ life became a cycle of court appearances that ended when they lost custody. They recently moved to Florida in part because they were afraid California’s officials would come after their son as well. They want to sue California but can’t find a lawyer who’ll take the case.

Here’s another example from Tuscon, Arizona. In the spring of 2020, Sharmila and Levi Kirwin’s 15-year-old daughter Asha was struggling.

SHARMILA: Yeah, she was wrestling with some eating disorders, self harm, a lot of anxiety.

This story has a number of layers but the outline is typical. At first the parents were willing to make minor accommodations, let her dress in boys’ clothes and so on. But as they started to read about the issue they realized …

SHARMILA: … that this, just, you know, affirmation is not scientifically, medically prudent, and it's also unbiblical. And so, you know, we started to peel back some of the ways that we were affirming her. She was becoming hardened.

Asha got worse. Claimed to have attempted suicide. Then, Levi Kirwin says, in…

LEVI: October … 2020, the state of Arizona's Department of children's services, … began an investigation into the fact that we were not going to lie to our girl and tell her that she was a boy.

They lost custody while Asha was in hospital under psychiatric care.

LEVI: … and the ex parte removal was largely about how we had unrealistic expectations for our child, how we wouldn't affirm, how we were demeaning to the LGBTQ community.

They tried three different times to regain custody over the next few years. They lost every time. The Kirwins say the system was stacked with pro-trans judges and state officials. They spent about $400,000 on these custody attempts, and on hiring experts to testify.

SHARMILA: We sold our dream home in Tucson and most of our possessions, and have been renting ever since and just trusting the Lord for provision.

LEVI: Yep.

SHARMILA: It's had some employment implications as well.

Levi had a high-paying job with a medical device company. But he was concerned that some of the technology involved aborted fetal tissue, so he resigned. It’s been hard to make a living since. When employers and potential clients look him up online, they find this case and decide he has too much baggage.

Finally,

LEVI: We decided that there was nothing further we could do, because our child had been so weaponized against us on five separate psychotropic drugs.

They too are trying to sue the state, but it’s a hard slog.

LEVI: The entire thing, the entire time, was a pretext to make this, to make us the test case, to take away a child on the basis of the transgender identity from parents who would not affirm.

Throughout 2022 Vanessa was finding her job harder and harder.

SIVADGE: I would come home so disturbed, like to the point of tears, telling Blake …

That’s her husband.

SIVADGE:… I got a request for a testosterone for a girl today, and I have to fight with the insurance to get approval for this girl to erase herself. It just infuriating. … It's a huge weight on my conscience. But how do you how do you fight back? It's literally in my job description, I have to do it.

In August she’d finally had enough. She wrote a piece for the Washington Stand, a publication from the Family Research Council. The heading: “What Happened to ‘Do No Harm’? A Nurse’s Firsthand Look at the Transgender Craze.” It attacked transgender ideology and blasted the medical profession as willing to watch teens girls get double mastectomies rather than risk their lucrative jobs.

She put her name on it.

SIVADGE:… and so this was the only way that I could express and voice my convictions and my concerns that at minimum, the First Amendment should protect me at minimum, but if not, I was willing to accept the consequences of the fallout.

It came out, and she waited for the blowback. Nothing happened. She doesn’t know whether her bosses just never saw it, or ignored it, or what.

At first, she thought, she’d done her part. But the reality of her job still confronted her every day.

She also came to understand why the hospital wanted to hide its transgender program. Following an official opinion from Texas’s Attorney General, Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of transgender treatments for kids as criminal abuse. A few weeks later, in March of 2022, Texas Children’s Hospital announced that because of “potential criminal legal ramifications,” it was “pausing” its transgender “hormone related prescription therapies” for children.

Only, it didn’t.

We know this because of Dr. Eithan Haim.

HAIM: I'm a general and trauma surgeon. I was the anonymous whistleblower who exposed Texas Children's Hospital, the largest children's hospital in the world, for lying about the existence of their transgender program, a program that would manipulate, mutilate and sterilize healthy, young children.

This is from his congressional testimony last year.

HAIM: They not only continued the program, they expanded it. All this was happening behind closed doors.

In the fall of 2022, other surgical residents told him they were surgically implanting puberty-blocking hormone devices in young children who believed they were transgender.

Haim was surprised to hear this. He did some research and found that Texas Children’s hospital featured its transgender treatment program in its hospital-wide video conference training series in January of 2023. It was titled, “Medical and Psychological Care of Gender-Diverse Youth.” It described the process of sex-change interventions from puberty blockers to genital surgery. It was put out months after the hospital claimed to have stopped such treatments.

He had a moral and legal obligation to blow the whistle because he’d seen the effects of these procedures.

HAIM: They are destroying the lives of these children. They are putting them down a road where they become a chronic medical patient that they can never come back from, and especially the surgical complications. I see these things all the time.

He described seeing urethras narrowed so that fluid builds up in the bladder. Fistulas where stool leaks into the surgically-constructed vagina.

HAIM: A lot of them don't see these problems in the first couple of months, even the first couple of years, but this is what happens, right?

As a surgeon he took children into the operating room to make them better. Other doctors would take them into the same operating room to make them sick.

HAIM: … So could I call myself a doctor if I didn't speak up against it?

Haim figured it was pointless to confront his bosses at Texas Children’s. In the end, he called a journalist with the Manhattan Institute: Chris Rufo. He’s made a name for himself uncovering all kinds of injustice and abuse in the name of gender ideology. Haim sent Rufo schedules of treatment with patient names redacted. The article came out May 16th, 2023.

That day Vanessa was sitting at her desk in the clinic.

She’d been living under severe strain for several months. She’d screwed her courage to the sticking point to write that piece for the Washington Stand eight months earlier.

SIVADGE: People have asked me before, well, what, why didn't you come out? Like, what did you...what were you thinking this whole time? … And it's just, it's one of these things where you just go to work and you just try to do your best, you try to do your job.

But then a colleague sent her the Rufo piece by email. She clicked on it.

SIVADGE: … and all of a sudden it was like, oh my goodness, someone else in the hospital thinks the same way I think.

At that point, she’d been living inside a lie for about two years.

SIVADGE: Well, if you feel like you're going crazy, you feel like you're the crazy one.

Everyone is reciting the same stuff, the same talking points. And I'm over here like, you're sterilizing children.

Eventually, she hit her breaking point.

SIVADGE: It took me a little bit to get there. Like, because when you're surrounded by people who have pledged their allegiance to a false ideology, you have to kind of build up this inner courage to just break out of that and say, No, I'm not the crazy one. You're, you're insane, you know?

After she read Rufo’s story …

SIVADGE: And I was, it just, it just lit me up. And I was like, I'm I'm ready. Like, send me. Lord, use me. Send me. I'm ready, you know, truly …

It was time.

SIVADGE: … that day, I didn't even tell Blake. That day, I called Christopher Rufo, I emailed him, and I said, I would like to let you know that what everything that you've reported is true, every single word.

The next day she spoke to Rufo for about an hour. Told him everything she could. He published a follow-up piece based on his interview with Vanessa a few days later. She just felt so relieved. At that point both she and Dr. Haim were still anonymous, as far as they knew.

SIVADGE: … and I was very content for it to stay that way.

Shortly after Rufo’s article came out …

KENS5: Now we turn to the Texas state capitol where one of the most controversial bills to make it through the 88th legislature has been signed into law.

From KENS5 San Antonio.

KENS5: Friday, Governor Gregg Abbott signed Senate Bill 14. It bans gender affirming care for Texans under the age of 18.

It outlawed cross hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sex change surgery for minors. The bill had been in process for about two years. The Rufo stories were published just as the final votes were happening in the state legislature. Three Democrats crossed the aisle to support it.

SIVADGE: And I was like, This is great. I can go to work again and not feel like I'm, you know, … violating my conscience.

She doubted Texas Children’s Hospital would continue transgender treatments for minors after it was actually illegal.

SIVADGE: You know, I had played my part. I thought this was supposed to be the end of the story. [laughs]

Actually, no. Not so much.

NIXON: Hello? Hi. I’m looking for Vanessa Sivadge.

BLAKE SIVADGE: OK. Who are you?

NIXON: Paul Nixon. FBI …

SIVADGE: Yeah, so two months later, in July of 2023, the FBI came to my house. They showed up to my front door.

Next time on Doubletake we’ll pick up the story right here.

SIVADGE: Well, we, we were, we were, I mean, the next several weeks, we were in a we were just utterly, just, I mean, just so scared.

I reported and produced this episode of Doubletake. You can find more great news and stories from a biblical perspective on wng.org. Check it out.

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I’m Les Sillars. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.

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