Dr. Rachel Levine let a notorious child sex-change clinic use Pennsylvania’s government office space to meet with a minor patient, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation discovered.
Linda Hawkins, co-director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Gender and Sexuality Program and counselor, was granted permission by Levine’s deputy secretary, Sarah Boateng, in 2017 to use the space for a private visit, emails obtained through a public records request show.Hawkins wrote to Levine and Boateng in September 2017 asking, “Would it be possible to get a meeting room to talk with the youth and mom,” to which Boateng responded, “Sure we can make this work. You can use my office if needed. Let me know.”
The evening before the planned meeting Hawkins confirmed the offer still stood, writing to Boateng, “Reminder that I’ll be meeting with a family in one of your offices,” to which Boateng responded “Yep. We got you!” according to public records.
Emails of communications from Linda Hawkins and Sarah Boateng that were obtained by the DCNF through a public records request.
The correspondence serves as a prime example of public officials leveraging their positions to promote radical sex-change procedures for children, which the American public largely opposes.
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the medical watchdog group Do No Harm, told the DCNF “it is no surprise” that CHOP worked with Levine.
“It is no surprise that one of the worst offenders on Do No Harm’s Stop the Harm database, CHOP, worked hand in glove with the radical pro-affirming activist Dr. Levine,” Goldfarb told the DCNF.
“Levine’s later work with the Biden administration pressuring WPATH into removing age guidance for transgender procedures highlights how political activists pressure medical organizations. It would not be a shock to find Levine helped make CHOP one of the hospitals most responsible for pushing transgender treatments on minors,” Goldfarb told the DCNF.
Published in 2024, Do No Harm’s Stop the Harm database catalogs the number of child sex-change procedures occurring at pediatric hospitals across America and gave CHOP the title of “worst-offending” children’s hospital in the country for “promoting sex change treatments for minors.”
Both Levine and Boateng left their Pennsylvania government positions in early 2021 to work at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the Biden administration. Unsealed court documents reveal Levine used his position as Assistant HHS Secretary to pressure the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) to remove sex-change surgery age minimums from their medical guidance, called the Standards of Care Version 8 (SOC-8). This pressure was applied “through a staff member,” specifically Boateng, who served as Levine’s chief-of-staff at HHS and communicated with WPATH leadership about the SOC-8 on Levine’s behalf, documents show.
Levine said he planned to return to central Pennsylvania after Biden the presidency, in January 2025 interview with Politico. “I’m going to go home to Central Pennsylvania. I’m going to take a long nap, rest and center myself, and then I’m going to consider what my next steps are,” Levine told Politico.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health told the DCNF they do not comment on former employees. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Dowshen and Hawkins did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment. The DCNF was unable to reach Levine.
‘Do The Right Thing!’
The relationship between Levine, Hawkins and Nadia Dowshen, co-founder and co-director of the CHOP Gender Clinic, included in-person visits, dinner plans and working together on child sex-change activism, emails show.
Levine was appointed as Pennsylvania physician general in 2015 and promoted to secretary of health in 2017, where he served until joining the Biden administration in 2021 as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Several posts from CHOP’s social media accounts show Levine visiting the gender clinic in 2018 and 2019, including an outing celebrating its fifth birthday. After one of his visits, Dowshen directly praised Levine, writing in an email that “Pennsylvanians are so lucky to have you at the helm of state government.”
Hawkins and Dowshen had a direct line of communication with Levine’s office, which they used to further transgender policy at the local level, public records show. For instance, Hawkins reached out to Levine’s office for help when a local school district wouldn’t allow a “transgender” student to “choose their bathroom.”
Hawkins wrote to Boateng about the situation in detail, asking for a “good plan of attack” to get the district and school “to do the right thing!” emails show.
Boateng honored Hawkins request, alerting the Pennsylvania Department of Education about the situation and asking to be put in direct contact with the “transgender” student’s mother, emails show.
Hawkins thanked Levine for helping her create a program that enabled the CHOP Gender clinic to train “nearly 2,000 therapists across the state” in gender ideology in a June 2020 interview.
Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services granted the CHOP gender clinic more than $176,000 over from 2018 to 2021 to create “Transgender Therapy Training Workshops,” a series of trainings that teach mental health professionals to affirm the falsehood that a person can change their sex, documents show.
In 2017, Levine called on the expertise of the CHOP Gender Clinic and emailed Dowshen asking if there was “any literature to support” children under 18 undergoing “sex-change” surgeries, such as a double mastectomy and genital surgery. Dowshen wrote to Levine she was “not aware of existing literature but it is certainly happening.”
Levine personally invited Hawkins and Dowshen to present at a government hearing on transgender health in March 2020 in Harrisburg. After a delay due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Dowshen testified in September 2020 on the importance of child sex-changes before the Pennsylvania Health Subcommittee on Health Care in September 2020.
Transgender Health Workgroup
Records show that while working in Pennsylvania government, Levine facilitated a monthly statewide Transgender Health Workgroup, which sometimes met in his office. The workgroup was comprised of activists and government agency leaders who collaborated to push transgender policy throughout Pennsylvania. In October 2016, Hawkins accepted an invitation to join the workgroup, writing in an email that she was “honored to be a part of this group of wonderful people focusing on the lives of our children and youth.”
At a December 2016 Transgender Health Workgroup meeting Hawkins discussed “an issue of private insurance coverage for top surgery” and noted that she would follow up with Levine and the PA Insurance Department “for help,” according to the meeting minutes.
Dowshen and Hawkins co-authored a study, published in 2021, on the impact of double mastectomy surgeries for gender confused minors and young adults ages 13 to 21. The study claims that after having their breasts removed, all youth “reported near or total resolution of chest dysphoria, lack of regret, and improved quality of life and functioning."
In 2017, when Hawkins contacted Levine’s office asking to use government property for a patient meeting, she was planning on traveling to Harrisburg for the monthly transgender workgroup meeting. Hawkins stated she could “reduce” travel for the minor patient, who lived more than two hours from Philadelphia, by hosting their second meeting in Harrisburg, emails show.
At the time, new patients to the CHOP Gender Clinic met with a “mental health gender specialist,” who performed an assessment and referred them to medical and social support services if needed, according to their 2017 Annual Report. KC Miller, a former patient of the CHOP Gender Clinic, described to Reuters how she was started on testosterone at age 17, after just two 90-minute meetings with Hawkins in the fall of 2017, in a December 2022 report on detransitioners.
In December 2017, CHOP, Levine and the transgender workgroup opposed HB 1933, a bill which would have prohibited state insurance programs from funding pediatric gender medical procedures such as puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and sex change surgeries. Dowshen kept Levine’s office up-to-date on meetings lobbyists scheduled with state representatives, records show. The bill was tabled and coverage of pediatric sex-change interventions was included in the reauthorization of CHIP, which transgender activists applauded.
From 2015 to 2022 Pennsylvania taxpayers spent more than $16.7 million dollars on child sex-changes, increasing from $78,073 in 2015 to $3,928,854 in 2021, a public records request by the PA Family Institute found. The CHOP gender clinic grew from seeing 40 families in 2014 to seeing 1,500 patients and families by 2020 and expanded to a second location in New Jersey, according to its website.
The Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s law banning child sex-change interventions on June 18, 2025.
