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Additional support comes from the Equip program by Unbound, giving high school students foundational training through practical skills courses, interest led projects, and a peer coaching environment. Enrollment for the coming school year closes July 31st. More @Beunbound US World from World Radio, this is DoubleTake. I'm Les Sillers.
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Hello. Hi.
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I'm looking for Vanessa Savage.
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Okay, I'll make some. FBI.
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Last week, we introduced you to Vanessa Sivage. Part of her job at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston involved facilitating transgender transition treatments for minors.
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It's a huge weight on my conscience, but how do you. How do you fight back? It's literally in my job description.
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In May of 2023, the Governor of Texas was threatening criminal investigations into gender clinics. In response, the hospital had said that it had paused transition treatments for minors. But Vanessa knew it hadn't. And then she read an article quoting an anonymous surgeon who said the hospital was lying about its gender clinic.
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It just lit me up.
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She called the journalist, told him her story. The article came out with Vanessa and the surgeon as anonymous sources. The next month, Texas outlawed transgender treatments for minors. Vanessa didn't imagine she and the surgeon were solely responsible for that, but she'd done her part. She'd spoken up. She figured she could go back to work and everything would be fine. Two months later, in July of 2023, the FBI knocked on her door. Her husband Blake opened it to a couple of burly guys in jeans. They flashed their badges. This audio is from the door cam. Was the government coming for her? How'd they find her? She thought she was anonymous. Are we interrupting dinner?
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I'm really sorry.
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That's all right.
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What's going on?
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Today on Double Take? The second half of Vanessa's story. It's not just her story. It's about people who decide to stop living by a lie and live according to the truth. And whether this society will hold accountable those who have done terrible things in the name of a profoundly disappointed, destructive view of humanity, supposedly with good intentions.
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We had some friends over for dinner, and we were all in the kitchen, and there's a knock on the door.
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And Vanessa joined Blake at the entryway. They live in a west Houston suburb. They let the FBI agents into the entryway, but no farther. Let me start at the beginning.
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So.
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So I'm sure you're aware of some of the things that have been going
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on at your work lately with regards to. I had this foreboding thought that I knew exactly what they were talking about, but I did not let Them know that I knew what they were talking about.
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Can we sit down for a minute?
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Let me do my song and dance.
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The conversation took about 10 minutes. The agent said they wanted help exposing someone.
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They called him a leaker, not a whistleblower. Who had, in their words, had violated HIPAA confidentiality laws by releasing patient information to the public. And they were wondering if I knew anything about that.
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Of course they were talking about Rufo's articles. The whistleblower was Dr. Ayten Heim. We introduced him to you last week. Although Vanessa didn't know Heim's identity then, she didn't believe he had violated privacy laws. The articles contained nothing that would identify the patients. Vanessa didn't know that FBI agents had already visited Himes house a month earlier. They knew or strongly suspected he was the first whistleblower and wanted to find evidence against him. It looks now like they were trying to confirm the other anonymous source. They were trying to find her.
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And they also said that we're incredibly aware of what you believe. We know of your beliefs against transgender ideology.
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She believes they were talking about the article criticizing gender transition treatments she'd written for the Washington stand the year before, the one with her name on it.
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And, you know, if you don't collaborate with us, if you don't help us, then we can't protect you.
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They told her her livelihood was at risk, even her safety. They didn't say who exactly was threatening her safety. They gave her their cards, invited her to call if she wanted to have an in depth conversation.
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But on top of that, it was an incredibly intimidating conversation and just very manipulative. They, of course, want to appear as your friend, as someone trustworthy, and they, when in reality it's the opposite, they're not your friend at all. It was very, very terrifying.
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For sure, Vanessa was right to be scared, although she couldn't know how right she.
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There's a reason I'm here today. It's because, for exposing this truth, my own government manufactured a case to send me to prison for 10 years.
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At a congressional committee hearing in 2025, Heim outlined how the Department of Justice launched an investigation against him. It sure looks like retaliation for exposing the transgender treatments on minors at Texas Children's Hospital. He described how a couple of armed agents came to his door in June of 2023 to deliver a letter naming him the target of a criminal investigation. It was signed by Assistant U.S. attorney Tina Ansari.
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Over the next few months, though, Ansari confirmed our worst suspicions. This was a political witch hunt.
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They were charging him with violating patient privacy laws. These cases are extremely rare, and to threaten a 10 year sentence in such a case is virtually unheard of, according to Heim's lawyer. At one point, she told my lawyers
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she would take me to a jury trial, even on a technicality and without concern for losing.
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A year later, In June of 2024, Heim woke up to find three heavily armed U.S. marshals at his door with rifles and bulletproof vests. They told him he was indicted on four HIPAA based felonies, facing up to a decade in prison and $250,000 in fines. The gist of the charges is that he lied to access patient records in the hospital system and then disclosed private information he hadn't. The details are too complicated to relate here, but over the next few months, the first indictment collapsed, and then Ansari's office filed two more indictments against him. Heim believes the indictments were both protecting the hospital and intimidating critics of transgenderism, not protecting patient privacy.
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It was too ironic when we discovered that Ansari and her family have quite the special relationship with TCH and Baylor.
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Ansari's brother's coffee company had a contract with Texas Children's Hospital, for example, and her aunt is a prominent Houston Democrat and fundraiser for Texas Children's Hospital. Four days after Trump's 2025 inauguration, new Department of Justice attorneys moved to dismiss all charges against him.
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You know, I think that they went after me so hard in order to send a message to everyone else. Of course they did, because I saw it in my residency. Right.
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You know, the other people who thought
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this was awful, we actually had to meet in dark corners. We, we knew that we couldn't say anything publicly.
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And that's the point. REPRESENTATIVE JIM Jordan Ohio REPUBLICAN to chill anyone else from coming forward. We will make life miserable for you, miserable for Ms. Savage.
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We will do that because we don't
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want anyone else threatening the left's position. And that is the frightening thing. The legal nightmare was over. But by then, Heim had amassed a million dollars in legal debt defending himself. Heim finished his testimony with this.
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They came after me in order to make my life miserable. We're going to make their life miserable, all right?
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That's what we're going to do.
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Well, we, we were, We were. I mean, the next several weeks, we were in a com. We were just utterly just, I mean, just so scared.
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The FBI visits to the Himes and Civic's houses in 2023 were just the beginning of a campaign to intimidate Vanessa and Ayton into silence. Aydin wasn't having it. He continued to post about his situation on social media even as federal prosecutors dragged him into a two year legal ordeal. But for Vanessa, we didn't sleep.
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We didn't sleep for a little while. We didn't. Everything that, you know, it's like, it kind of sends you into this state of paranoia. Sounds silly now to think about, but at the time, you know, you start to question the black suburban that drives down your street, you know, in the middle of the day, or a weird car. At my workplace, I thought that there was a. So it just sends you into this weird state of mind where you're. You're like, very suspicious.
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She and Blake unplugged their Alexa because maybe the government was listening. They knew it sounded paranoid, but still,
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you just start thinking of crazy stuff. Because we were informed politically enough to know that this had happened with other people who were Christian, Catholic, pro life people all over the United States under the Biden Harris regime that had had the FBI or the DOJ show up at their door and haul them away in front of their family. And thankfully, that we won't go into
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the details here, but she was right. The Biden administration had done those things. We've covered them here at World. Vanessa would have been even more scared had she known what Ayton went through. Ironically, Vanessa had no intention of talking to any more reporters. She just wanted life to be normal.
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I went back to work, and it was very hard for me to go back to work because I was thinking, well, what if there was some kind of a collaboration here with my boss or with my workplace? Like, did they tell them?
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Because she had no idea what the FBI might have told her bosses.
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Not knowing who to trust at work, not knowing who to talk to. I didn't tell anyone, obviously, about this, but very on edge, very. Every time my boss would call me into her office for a completely unrelated matter, you just start to, you know, unravel a little bit. You're like, oh, my God, you know.
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This was happening through the fall of 2023 and into spring of 2024, Vanessa asked to be transferred several times, maybe back to cardiology, but nothing ever worked out. She was also still seeing a few adult transgender patients. Finally, she'd had enough. At the end of May 2024, I
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decided to submit a religious accommodation request to transfer from the multispecialty clinic back into cardiology. And I listed the reasons for doing so, that working at this multispecialty clinic violated my beliefs.
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Hospital officials told her they couldn't accommodate her transfer because there was a hiring freeze. Vanessa doesn't believe that she'd put in her request before the freeze went into effect.
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So that's ultimately when I decided to blow the whistle publicly. In June of 2024, she called up Rufo.
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He quoted her and Heim by name in an article describing how two doctors at Texas Children's were providing gender transition services and committing fraud by charging it to Medicaid. We'll get into that in a bit. Vanessa also posted on her social media the doorbell cam of the two FBI agents.
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And this time I did, you know, share my name. My identity was all made public when I worked with Christopher Rufo again.
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A few weeks later, Texas Children's Hospital put her on paid leave. In August of 2024, it fired her. She believes that the hospital fired her in retaliation for her public statements and for being a whistleblower. She's filed an anti discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency. She says that the Office of Civil Rights has opened an investigation into her case. As I mentioned last episode, I contacted Texas Children's to ask for comment on Vanessa's allegations and a state prosecution we'll describe below. The hospital declined out of respect for the ongoing settlement process. As Vanessa was dealing with all this, two other kinds of legal fronts in the battle over transgenderism were unfolding. If there ever is a day of reckoning for the transgender movement, 2026 will be known as the year the dam broke. So we'll spend a little time going over that landscape. The first front in the legal battle involves detransitioner civil lawsuits. People talked a lot about those at the detrans Awareness Day event mentioned in our last episode. Now we move to a landmark medical were a woman who detransitioned after identifying as a male in her teenage years, winning a $2 million malpractice suit. That was in January. From Fox News. Bill, good morning to you. That is one of more than two dozen detransitioner lawsuits moving through our courts nationwide. The case you mentioned, a handful of cases have settled out of court and another four or five could go to trial in the next year or so. In this case, a New York jury ruled that Fox Varian was a victim of medical malpractice. Her doctors performed a double mastectomy at age 16, but her doctors and therapists hadn't examined, diagnosed or treated her gender dysphoria properly. Critically, they had not followed standards of care established by Leading organizations in the transgender movement itself, gender transition providers had never before suffered legal consequences for what they do. The question is how the verdict in the one case will impact the dozens of other cases. Elon Musk reacting on X quote There will be thousands of court cases of children who were mutilated by evil doctors. Modern day Mengele's. The school psychologists, psychiatrists and state officials who facilitated this will pay dearly too. The detransitioner legal strategy is pretty straightforward
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and I want everybody practicing this to look at every single one of their patients and scratch their heads and think is this the one that's going to sue me? Am I going to sit in court in front of this person?
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Lynn Chadwick is the founder of themis, a group that raises funds to help detransitioners sue their providers.
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When people start getting seven figure judgments, we won't have to limit it anymore. It's just going to stop.
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The idea is to make practicing transition treatment so legally dangerous that the cost of malpractice insurance becomes prohibitive.
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It's very sobering and you might get into a different area of medicine.
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Detransitioners charge that malpractice is very common partly because there's a deep ethical contradiction built into transgender ideology. It insists that a trans identity is healthy and unchangeable, certainly not a mental illness. Any problems are the result of non affirming families or communities. Therefore providers must affirm their patients gender identities and help them transition. They often rush patients through assessments and understate the risks in that world. Not providing transition treatment is by definition abusive, oppressive, giving in to narrow minded bigotry. But as Manhattan Institute researcher Joseph Figliolia explained to me, what if gender affirmation treatment conflicts with traditional standards of care? How do you square those? In Fox Varian's case, for example, if you would allow a mastectomy on a
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16 year old that the doctor acknowledges
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has not just multiple psychiatric comorbidities and like a very clear unstable sense of self and like a troubling family history, but also like executive functioning and like IQ deficits. Like in what way is this appropriate for this patient? Detransitioners say Fox variants case is far from unique. How does this make sense? How do you, how do you justify this in any other field this would be like flagrant, unambiguous malpractice.
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Like it's just, it's insane if you
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actually read the details of the cases and the pool of potential plaintiffs is large. Stella o' Malley of Genspect organized the D Trans Awareness Day conference. She says the detransitioner community is. It's huge, but it's very secret. The D Trans Awareness Conference is trying to pull them together in the US and around the world.
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There's a gathering storm of much more people who are all getting to know
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each other because we're all online and
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we're saying, hang on, I'm not the only one.
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But it's not entirely clear how large this storm is in the U.S. one oft cited 2022 survey from UCLA says about 300,000 youth aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender. Another said the number of youths diagnosed annually with gender dysphoria tripled between 2017 and 2023. The number of so called pediatric transgender clinics exploded from 1 to 300 over the last 20 years. How many kids received hormones or surgery? Not clear. How much money did these clinics make? Another good question still unanswered. A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical association found 48,000American youths and adults who had at some point undergone some sort of transition related surgery. But there is no national database tracking the total number of children and adults who received either hormones or surgery. How many people will eventually regret undergoing transition treatment and want to sue is also uncertain. Studies from pro trans researchers say the percentage of people who detransition or regret transitioning is tiny, maybe a few percentage points. But detransitioner supporters say those studies are seriously flawed. They don't account for the many transgender people who just drop out of treatment. The percentage of people who regret transitioning could be very high, some say 30 or 40%. And it typically takes several years for regret to set in. It's far from certain, but it seems likely that thousands of people already regret their medical transitions and if possible, would sue their providers for malpractice. Now, as regret gradually sets in among the thousands and thousands who received medical transition treatments in the last five years, many, many more people may want to file lawsuits. Here's o' Malley once again. And before, they were always ashamed, beaten,
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beaten by the system.
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And now they're hearing from groups like
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Jan Spectre saying, no, no, no, no, no.
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The medics, the clinicians were wrong. They should not have given you medical interventions that were not appropriate. And so our position is that no, it wasn't appropriate to give somebody who had all these other diagnoses and who was in a highly traumatized state.
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It wasn't appropriate to allow them to
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believe that they could become the opposite
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sex when it was never going to
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work out those doctors and therapists and pharmaceutical firms could be on the hook for a lot of money. The second front in the legal battle is the barrage of government investigations into transgender treatment providers. Over the last three years, some red states and the Trump administration have launched several, mostly for fraud of various kinds. In President Trump's first week in office In January of 2025, he issued an executive order titled Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation. Over the next year, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of justice and Health and Human Services all launched investigations. Last episode we mentioned how Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson promised prosecutions for gender affirming care providers who broke federal law and if the law has been broken, to identify the lawbreakers and compel
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them to pay for what they've done.
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Last December, Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. Signed a declaration that cross sex treatments are neither safe nor effective for children with gender dysphoria. So called gender affirming care has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable you young people, he added. Peer reviewed report published by the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health last month confirms that sex rejecting procedures impose medical dangers and lasting harm on children who receive these interventions. HHS is proposing two new rules. First, hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid may not perform these procedures. Second, federal Medicaid money may not be used to pay for such procedures on minors. The Trump administration is working on other prosecutions as well, but the first major legal result came just last May through a state investigation. Today, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced a major settlement with Texas Children's Hospital over gender affirming care for minors. Texas Children's agreed to pay a $10 million fine to fire or never rehire five doctors who provided trans treatment and to start a free clinic to help detransitioners. It's a stunning development. As of this production, details haven't been released, but it's very likely prosecutors were able to force the settlement in part because of what Dr. Ayton Heim and Vanessa Sivage uncovered last episode. Vanessa told us about realizing in 2022 that children's charts were listing their sex by gender preference, not their biological sexual. The charts for males who were transitioning listed them as females and vice versa.
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And so if you weren't actually in tune with what was happening, you would just see a boy that was requesting testosterone at that point. And I started to really, I paid a little bit closer attention than I had in the past.
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Then she noticed that many of the children going through gender transition were on Medicaid.
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Immediately, some red flags go off and I just think, well, it's not just that the hospital has been transitioning kids in secret and hiding what they're doing, but now they're billing it to Texas taxpayers and who have no idea and who many of them, most of them, are avidly against this.
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It's not just taxpayers. Charging Medicaid for transition treatment violates state policy. The most recent Texas Medicaid provider procedures manual specifically excludes from its coverage drugs and surgery for the purpose of transitioning biological sex. Editions of the manual, going back to at least 2015 have similar provisions. Vanessa put it all together and realized
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this is like fraud on a federal and a state level. Like, this is 50 shades of wrong.
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You know, it involved three different kinds of listing the wrong sex on patient charts, misdiagnosing and prescribing treatments according to the false information, and then charging Medicaid for everything. I asked both Vanessa and her lawyer whether she would be eligible to receive a percentage of Texas Children's Hospital's $10 million fine under the state's whistleblower compensation laws. Both declined to comment. And then in June, the Cleveland Clinic settled with Ohio and the doj for these kinds of infractions. The monetary penalty is only $300,000, although it does have to provide a $2 million detransitioner fund. It has also agreed to stop doing trans procedures on minors for 20 years, but those were recently outlawed in Ohio anyway. More hospitals may settle or face prosecutions. According to the Progressive Movement Advancement Project, three states exclude from Medicaid coverage trans related treatments for minors, and 12 more excluded for everybody. If Medicaid fraud is widespread, that could be a ton of money. HHS and the DOJ have invited whistleblowers like Vanessa and Dr. Heim to contact them. A host of other signs say the transgender movement is on the ropes. Here's a quick rundown. A peer reviewed study from Finland last spring concluded that psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment. That is, transgender adolescents already have lots of problems and medical transitioning doesn't help with those. In fact, apparently it made some of them worse. Since the Fox Varian verdict, the American Medical association and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons have backed off their unqualified support of medical transition treatments for minors. Some predict a domino effect on other medical associations in the near future. 27 states have in recent years banned trans treatments for minors. Dozens of hospitals across the country have quit doing the procedures. Much of Europe eased up on medical transition a few years ago. The biggest factor might be the UK's 2024 CAS review that led to the shutdown of England's main gender clinic. It concluded that the evidence supporting gender transition is weak, often misrepresented and overstated, and the effects of puberty suppression remain unknown. American attitudes toward transgenderism have shifted an astonishing amount in just a few years. A 2025 New York Times poll found that 70% of Americans believe no minor should receive transition drugs or treatment, including a majority of Democrats. 80% think males shouldn't be allowed in women's sports. The International Olympic Committee banned transgender athletes last March. And speaking of sports, in July, the Supreme Court ruled that states may reserve girls and women's sports for females. Title IX protections are grounded in biological sex rather than gender identity, it said. Meanwhile, the percentage of Gen Z youth claiming to be transgender plummeted by half between 2023 and 2025 to about 3.5%. That's according to a poll of US undergrads from the foundation for Individual Rights in Education. It's not nearly as cool to be transgender as it was just a few years ago. To sum it up, the studies supporting medicalized transition treatments look increasingly suspect. To put it charitably, public support for the trans cause is melting like a snowbank in a beach. A Republican administration is going hard after trans providers and drug makers. Dozens of hospitals have stopped transition treatments rather than risk an investigation. And there have been major victories in both the civil lawsuit and government investigations, with more wins possible soon. But there are serious challenges with both the civil lawsuits and the government investigations. First, the federal government's investigations, prosecutions, and policy changes will most likely all go away overnight if Democrats win the next presidential election. A coalition of blue states is suing to stop or slow the Trump administration from continuing its investigations. And most of the pushback is aimed at curtailing trans procedures for minors. In many places, adults anybody 18 or older can still readily get transgender procedures. The detransitioner lawsuits face a different set of hurdles. Kevin Keller is a national consultant on gender care litigation. He's helped out on most of the detransitioner cases. He thinks a day of reckoning is coming. Well, I do, and I think it's already coming, but with an asterisk. Actually, it's a pretty big asterisk. These kinds of cases are very difficult to try. You know, it's a swell of procedural issues that get in the way of getting a trial date. But these cases are being worked along the entire time. Very few detransitioners have a viable case because states often have short statutes of limitations on medical malpractice claims Only a couple of years, but people usually take several years to decide to detransition. Detransitioners say it's not reasonable to expect a teen to realize within two years they've been badly damaged and decide to sue. At least a few detransitioners are challenging those statutes in their state supreme courts. In one of those cases, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in late June that Soren Al Dawko's case may proceed. Lower court said she had missed the filing deadline by a few months, but the Texas Supreme Court said no she had filed within two years of when the harm was done to her. Whether the case is significant in other states looks doubtful, but Texas House member Shelby Slauson posted on X that she intends to resubmit a bill to allow detransitioners to file lawsuits up to age 25. It's also hard to find lawyers willing to take detransitioner cases. That's because state laws generally limit the size of malpractice awards to a few million dollars at Most. Fox variants 2 million dollar verdict sounds like a lot, but nobody's making money on these cases. These lawyers are doing this as a cause. They might get a large settlement or a large verdict, but these cases cost several hundred thousand dollars to queue up, pay experts time in expense costs, spend weeks on the road. Detransitioner lawsuits could effectively limit the number of medical transitions. But even then they might also backfire, legitimize gender transition treatment itself, cemented even further into law as an accepted medical practice.
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I think that is a huge risk.
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Mary Hasson is a lawyer and runs the Person and Identity Project at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She points out that none of these detransitioner cases claim that transgender treatments are harmful in themselves. They're malpractice claims. The Fox Variant verdict earlier this year
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was based on not a finding that this is evil in itself. This is a violation of human dignity and medicine in its truest sense to restore health and form and function. It wasn't on that basis. It was you didn't do it carefully enough.
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They didn't follow accepted standards of care, didn't take their medical history into account, and so on. The implication is that transgender treatments are fine if you do them right. Similarly, a couple of the detransitioner cases filed in federal court argue that the problem with transgender treatments is that they're homophobic.
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The federal court cases are not coming at it from a medical malpractice standpoint, and instead they're coming at it from a civil rights standpoint, a violation of certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
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Kathleen Dooley is a lawyer and secretary of themis, the group that raises money to fight detransitioner cases. The Biden administration interpreted section 1557 of the Affordable Care act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
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So the theory is essentially, hey, hospital, you had an obviously gay male in your career with a real big case of internalized homophobia. And instead of exploring why the male was uncomfortable with that, you transed away the gay in violation of section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act.
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To be clear, Dooley and Themis support this approach. Recall the young man from the last episode, Johnny Skinner? He spoke at the detransitioner conference.
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There were frequent episodes with me growing up where people would attempt to pray it away or, you know, try to change my behavior, the way that I talk, or just my general, I guess, just way that I carry myself.
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From this perspective, a Christian parent trying to help someone like Johnny Skinner embrace a biblical view of his sexuality, and a doctor offering cross sex hormones are doing the same thing. Trans the gay away, pray the gay away, what's the difference?
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And while we have shifted public opinion, that is not where the battles remain.
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The EPPC's Hassan says that the detransitioner lawsuits, even if successful, leave intact the gender ideology that underlies transgenderism and still dominates our culture.
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And so that's why I'm uncertain whether there's going to be an actual day of reckoning. Because gender ideology, this idea that the person can self define an identity regardless of their sex, their biology is still embedded in very significant ways in law, in our higher education, in our K through 12 education systems, not to mention
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fields like social work, medicine, counseling, and all their professional associations. These are the people making decisions about whether to remove a child from parents who are insufficiently affected, affirming of their child.
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So you've got this tremendous institutional capture, we call it, and this pipeline of people who are entrusted with forming, caring, shaping the laws and the culture.
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All these places are soaking in gender ideology with all its bad ideas about who we are as human beings.
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Gender ideologues would say, whoever I say I am, that's who I am.
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They say that there is no created order or given human nature. Those limits are to be transcended. Sex is about pleasure and families should be chosen, not accepted.
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People are tired of the bullying. And yet we have the paradox that the institutions, you know, where much of the power resides in our system are still very much wedded to gender ideology and fighting like crazy to be able to keep that.
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There are other fronts in this battle. Dr. Kurt Micelli of Do no Harm says that people who want to detransition often have suffered serious complications from the surgeries and hormones, but they can't find doctors to take them as patients because there are no insurance codes for the diagnosis and billing of problems related to detransitioning. No codes means no insurance coverage for those treatments.
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And so we've petitioned the CDC to
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A
add a code for detransitioners to add a code for. Kevin Keller hopes state legislatures and Congress will work on laws that make it easier for detransitioners to sue, extend statutes of limitations in these cases, raise the malpractice award damage caps. And one more thing. What I hope happens is that there's legislation written that makes it actionable, private causes of action that can be brought by the parents who interfere with the rights of their children and without informing them or otherwise too aggressive with transitioning them socially or otherwise, because that's the way it always begins.
- [34:32]
B
And I think that would be very
- [34:33]
A
important, right to put lawsuits and money, the ability to get money there. For her part, Vanessa will continue the fight against bad ideas.
- [34:48]
B
I was fired in August of 2024. Remarkably and very surprisingly to me, maybe I was just very naive. I had a lot of trouble finding another job in Houston.
- [35:00]
A
So Vanessa started praying. She saw that she enjoyed sharing her story and that maybe she could help change things in Texas.
- [35:07]
B
And so that's really when I decided to launch a nonprofit. That's when Protecting Texas Children was born.
- [35:13]
A
One project teaches parents how to expose and remove sexually explicit materials from school and public libraries. Another is placing the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Protecting Texas Children is also preparing to release a documentary about the Kirwan family. We met last week. The entire thing, the entire time was
- [35:29]
B
a pretext to make this, to make
- [35:31]
A
us the test case to take away a child on the basis of the transgender identity from parents who would not affirm. Vanessa believes there will be accountability.
- [35:39]
B
Yes. To answer your question, I think there's going to be a reckoning on a number of fronts.
- [35:44]
A
She may be right and it will certainly take a while. The EPPC's Mary Hassan says rebuilding a culture that truly understands that humans as created beings is a long term project. It's a battle that Christians should fight regardless of the outcome.
- [35:59]
B
And I do think that the truth always wins out. But I think it's going to take a generation. So that's the reason for my caution, that when people say, ah, victory, because we've won, basically public opinion, it's going to take a generation to change the pipelines of formation.
- [36:17]
A
Vanessa adds that this is a spiritual battle.
- [36:22]
B
As a Christian, I think that ultimately this is a battle of good versus evil, of lies versus truth. But at the root of it, you have people who are deluded by the father of lies into actually believing that they're helping kids. They believe this with all of their being. They believe that they are changing the world by providing these irreversible drugs and surgeries to confuse children. They really believe that. I look at this as well. We saw this in the Garden of Eden with Satan deceiving Eve with an incredibly attractive and shiny looking piece of fruit. And he convinced her because he actually embedded just enough truth into the lie to make it feasible, to make it palatable, to make it sound attractive.
- [37:10]
A
Vanessa also helped me see something I hadn't really grasped before. I went into this story wondering if there would ever be a day of reckoning for the transgender movement. I realized that it's important to hold the guilty accountable, but it's just as important to heal the broken. I saw this in Soren Eldako's story. Vanessa had introduced me to her. She spoke at the D Trans Awareness Day conference. She started identifying as trans when she was 11 and had a very troubled youth in Texas.
- [37:44]
B
I was in a lot of Internet spaces, a lot of role play groups, both art and written form. And by chance, I ended up on the side of the Internet where people believed they could be the opposite sex.
- [37:57]
A
When Soren was 17, a nurse practitioner prescribed cross sex hormones after a half hour visit. She was too young to vote or drink, but she was obsessed with the idea that cross sex hormones and surgery would solve her problems. I interviewed her a few weeks after the conference.
- [38:14]
B
He prescribed me the testosterone. And there wasn't any questioning regarding, you know, my motivations. It really was just, you're here, I have the pad, I'm gonna write you this prescription.
- [38:24]
A
She was delighted with the results of
- [38:26]
B
the hormones, initially feeling very happy and satisfied at first, right. Cause I got what I wanted. But over time, I think reality catches up to that immediate gratification. You know, you feel the hot flashes and all the hunger you feel and you overeat and it's almost like you have the surface level euphoria. But Underneath, there is still that sickness, right? There's still that. That thing you were originally treating, the
- [38:55]
A
depression, the anxiety, the dysphoria. So at 19, she had a double mastectomy. It didn't help, and it went very badly. Her malpractice lawsuit against her providers is one of the 27 detransitioner cases we've been discussing. And as we mentioned a little earlier, the Texas Supreme Court will allow some of her claims to proceed some months after her mastectomy. The side effects of the testosterone were
- [39:19]
B
so bad, I think it was really apparent to me, even before I ideologically stepped away from the transgender identity, that I needed to stop the hormonal interventions.
- [39:27]
A
About three years ago, Soren decided to face who she really was. She gradually realized that it's impossible to be born into the wrong body.
- [39:35]
B
So I think when I was identifying as trans, for much of when I was identifying as trans, I didn't believe in God. Like, I considered myself an atheist.
- [39:44]
A
But as she detransitioned, she realized that,
- [39:47]
B
okay, there is something greater than me, and I see that working in my life. I feel that draw. And over time, I think I realized, okay, that draw was to Jesus.
- [40:02]
A
She didn't immediately accept Christ as savior, but she kept trying different churches. And then when Charlie Kirk was assassinated,
- [40:09]
B
it just really made me pause and think, okay, there is evil in the world. And, like, I do see the work that Jesus has done in my life, and I see. I see the way that my faith has shaped my call to speak out on this topic and to really, I think, prioritize protecting others over my own health, which is, I think, reflected in the way that Jesus sacrificed his life on the cross for us.
- [40:32]
A
She says she hasn't got all the
- [40:33]
B
answers, but what I think is important is I came to that understanding through observing creation first. And then I felt more affirmed in that understanding through getting to know God through the Bible and through going to church and communing with other Christians after.
- [40:49]
A
And that is so interesting. To be clear, nobody told me that you were Christian. And they just.
- [40:54]
B
Yeah, I don't think a lot of people know.
- [40:55]
A
Yeah. And, like. And, like, Vanessa didn't say anything. I'm like, I don't know if she knows, but I'm really glad I asked.
- [41:00]
B
Yeah, no, me too. Well, it's like, it's. I've lived such a chaotic life so far. Like, when I first started speaking out on the subject, I was in a lesbian relationship and was not really practicing any kind of faith at all. And not a lot of people have had the opportunity to know that difference in my life just yet.
- [41:19]
A
Soren says that as she detransitioned, she grew up, matured, recovered her true sexuality. Now she's married and wants to be a mom.
- [41:28]
B
After I met my husband, I think it really dawned on me. No, I have this very internal, instinctual desire to want to have kids, to put forth my philosophy of the world, and to just create young people who I think can create the kind of world I think all of us deserve. And especially I think it's just a blessing that I have a husband who I love so much and who I think would make an amazing father. What I've ultimately discovered is to truly have peace with who I am now. I had to view myself through the eyes of the Creator to realize that I am imperfect yet redeemable. And so being able to realize not only can I not be creator, can I not play Mr. Potato Head with my life and my body parts, but but I have to kind of have this perspective of the world and of myself that reflects, I guess, like God's love for us.
- [42:49]
A
I reported and produced this episode of Double Take. As always, I'd encourage you to check out wng.org for more great news and commentary. Don't forget to rate and review us on your podcast app. Please do recommend this program to any of your friends and family if you get a chance, and we'd really love to hear what you think of our program. Send a note, written or recorded, to editorng.org I'm Les Sillers. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. Additional support comes from Equip by Unbound Life Skills Coaching for high school enrollment for the coming school year closes July 31. More at beunbound US World.