We at Wonkette are known for our celebration of outlaw heroes (no, we will never tire of relinking the story of Dee Farmer), but there also exist outlaw villains who outlaw tirelessly in the name of villainy and yet still want to see themselves as the hero of the story (cf. Young Guns’ Emilio Estevez if you want a hip up-to-date reference the youngs will treasure).

If you believe Assigned Media and your average grand jury, this story is one of those, with Eithan Haim, doctor, unauthorized data accessor, and leaker of personal information being the villain of the piece.

Back in the days of trans people being too invisibly small a minority for anyone to bother sabotaging our health care, doctors created a weird tradition of providing “therapy” and “medicine” and “help” to us. As adults, even “surgery.” But as more trans people came out of the closet and more normal people started giving bigots side-eye for ranting about gay marriage — which was somehow legalized without destroying Western Civilization, NASCAR, and country music — some particularly noxious people decided that they’d take a page out of Janice Raymond’s playbook and treat trans folk simultaneously as deluded victims of an abusive, predatory, and anti-woman medical establishment AND horrifying super-powered rapists bent on the destruction of all women.

Haim is one of those particularly noxious people. As a medical student at Baylor (so of course we expected the best of him), he worked as a resident at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston beginning in 2019 and ending in January 2021. A year later, in February 2022, Texas assface and state Attorney General Ken Paxton unilaterally declared gender-affirming care to be child abuse (another Janice Raymond favourite). Texas Children’s then announced a “pause” in care for trans children and adolescents in March.

Later in 2022, despite not working at Texas Children’s and his login credentials having expired, Haim began repeated attempts to access information from TCH employees and its computer system. It seemed he wanted to prove that the TCH pause was a big lie. Sometime between September 2022 and February 2023, the DOJ alleges that Haim successfully gained access to confidential data for patients he had never treated in a clinic where he had never worked. In April of 2023 his login credentials were fully restored as a result of a deception in which he convinced someone at TCH that he somehow required access.

The information gained, though, had nothing to do with providing medical care. Instead Haim printed out numerous records and provided them to Chris Rufo — yes, that Chris Rufo — for the purpose of writing an article about how the lying hospital had never actually paused gender-related care and was actually secretly and nefariously mutilating abused children in the conservatory with the lead pipe!

It’s not clear from anything currently published that the TCH “pause” policy was ever detailed publicly, and it appears that many if not most of the visits were regular checkups on children who had already had implanted a device to release puberty blockers over time. Others appear to have been checkups for adolescents on masculinizing or feminizing hormones. Refills may or may not have been prescribed for medications minors were already taking, but no new implant procedures were performed and it certainly appears no new medications were prescribed to patients.

In other words, it certainly appears that care was indeed “paused” but that patients were not abandoned, which may have been (absolutely was) the outcome that Rufo and Haim preferred.

In writing his exposé, however, Rufo portrayed the hospital as secretly backtracking, rather than worrying about the health of kids who were being affected by implants already in their body and hormones already prescribed. More than that, he published the records of appointments those patients had at TCH. While the names of the patients were crossed out with red pen at or before publication, it’s not at all clear that Haim struck the names before providing the documents to Rufo. That would already be a serious violation of HIPAA, but there’s more:

Carmel Shachar, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, disagrees that the records leaked by Haim have been sufficiently de-identified to ensure compliance with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Shachar’s own work focuses on health policy and the law.

“The most commonly used way to ensure compliance is to remove certain identifiers, and there are 18 identifiers listed by the HHS, with the argument that once you remove all of those nobody would be able to re-identify your data,” Shachar explained. “The most prominent one here that I see [referring to the material leaked by Haim] is the date and time of appointment, which is one of the identifiers.”

The HHS confirms on its website that the standard requires far more than simply removing a name. Ages, birthdates, and more may also have been released in violation of HIPAA. And Haim’s actions were knowing, having been through extensive training on the law’s requirements while at Baylor.

While the normal response to HIPAA violations is to fine an institution for its record keeping, the normal violation is, in fact, bad or careless record keeping. Texas Children’s was one victim of Haim’s fraud, and it makes little sense to punish the hospital for Haim’s bad acts. As a result, Alamdar S. Hamdani, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, convened a grand jury which has now chosen to indict the ratfucker on four criminal counts.

Haim and Rufo are now claiming that Haim is a whistleblower being targeted for political retribution, an assertion that some naïve (or ideological) news outlets have accepted and repeated. But Haim knew what to do if he wanted to blow the whistle on child abuse. He could have reported to his professors or superiors at Baylor, to superiors at Texas Children’s Hospital, to state AG Paxton’s office, or to either of at least two different anonymous tip lines. All of these were options he was trained to use if he ever witnessed harm or abuse.

Instead he went to the press with the confidential identifying details of child patients, the entire time touting himself as a persecuted hero trying to stop this crazy “health care” as one’s doctor does. And while like an outlaw hero he is being hounded by law enforcement, yr Wonkette is sure that he’s no more deserving of prosecution than Billy The Kid and a lot less attractive than Emilio Estevez.

Reap the whirlwind, Eithan. Reap it.

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