They’re building transgender speakeasies.
As red states ban sex-rejecting procedures for minors, and the Department of Justice shuts down pediatric transgender facilities at hospitals, the business is going underground. Two reports published this week reveal the degree to which the industry that performs sex-rejecting procedures on children relies on subterfuge and sneaking. One covers billing fraud in past practices, and one is specifically about the way the people who are “transing” children keep right on going as their work becomes more and more legally dubious.
First, at City Journal, the investigative reporter Christina Buttons has published a long story about her undercover efforts to get transgender procedures for her make-believe child, calling providers and pretending to be a parent in states where those procedures are illegal. Don’t worry, counselors tell her, we have ways to get around all that stuff.
Buttons focuses on “the Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE), a North Carolina-based LGBT advocacy nonprofit,” which runs a “Trans Youth Emergency Project.” That organization provides medical referrals and travel grants to parents who want puberty blockers and trans surgeries for their children, flying families out of red states to places where those procedures are still being performed.
But Buttons also “found that many of CSE’s recommended medical providers — with the organization’s knowledge — described ways to circumvent state restrictions and allow minors to continue receiving medical interventions in their home states.”
Read that extraordinary story for details, as Buttons pretends to be a mom in Tennessee who wants to transition her child. Sample telephone exchange with a caseworker:
During our conversation, I explained that I lived in Tennessee, where “gender-affirming care” is prohibited for minors. Jaye told me the clinic had an in-house pharmacy that stocked puberty blockers and worked with specialty pharmacies that could mail estradiol and testosterone vials directly to my home or send prescriptions to my local pharmacy.
When I asked whether pharmacies would know why the medications were being prescribed, Jaye said they would not, because the clinic used a general “endocrine disorder” diagnosis code for labs and medications. He said the gender dysphoria code was only used when seeking approval for puberty blockers.
Second, the surgeon Eithan Haim, whose advocacy played a significant role in ending sex-rejecting procedures at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, has posted a long report on X in which he describes the use of fake medical diagnoses to get health insurance companies to pay for the performance of trans interventions on children. Haim uses medical records and other evidence from a successful detransitioner lawsuit to show exactly how doctors lied about their work. As one example among many in a richly reported discussion, he posts this screenshot from a deposition with a psychologist who was working to “trans” a child:
The real diagnosis “never makes it to the record.” In short, Haim writes, the evidence provides clear examples of “false diagnoses used as proxies for a gender-related diagnosis in order to secure insurance payment.”
Asking the obvious and extremely important question about a long record of apparent insurance fraud, Haim wonders why the DOJ is only pursuing civil settlements with hospitals: “Why has the federal government not pursued criminal charges?”
The civil settlements “were meaningful victories,” he concludes, but “this punishment does not match the crime.”
Spend some time with both of these important reports. Again, here’s the link to the piece from Christina Buttons at City Journal, and here’s the link to Eithan Haim’s long and detailed report on X.
These reports establish important facts about the industry that profits from harming children, and they come as no surprise to the people who have been closely watching this business for many years. Erin Friday, the president of the parental advocacy group Our Duty, told The Federalist that “when a medical provider has to falsify codes, it is a tacit admission that he knows what he is doing is wrong.”
The investigations from Buttons and Haim, Friday told The Federalist, “confirm what we have known for years, that sex-rejecting medicine is fraud from the diagnosis to the coding to the treatment. The whole of this medicine is a lie, and those profiting from it financially or ideologically will continue to find ways to harm children with the backing of well-funded nonprofits and liberal politicians.”
