A woman pled guilty on Thursday to calling in a fake bomb threat at Boston Children’s Hospital while the hospital was at the center of a controversy about its transgender youth surgery program.
Catherine Leavy, 37, pled guilty in Boston federal court to one count of making a false bomb threat and one count of intentionally conveying false or misleading information that a bomb was on the way to the hospital, prosecutors said in a press release Thursday.
Leavy called in the hoax bomb threat in August of last year, just as Boston Children’s Hospital was facing a flood of criticism over its transgender youth surgery program. The next month, Leavy was arrested at her home just west of Springfield. She was charged and later indicted by a federal grand jury in October.
She is scheduled to be sentenced in March and faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for the false bomb threat, the more serious charge. The other charge carries five years in prison, and both carry three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000.
On August 30 last year, the hospital got a call in which the caller said, “There is a bomb on the way to the hospital, you better evacuate everybody, you sickos.”
The hospital and nearby area was put on lockdown, and a bomb squad arrived on the scene, but no explosive devices were found.
When police showed up at her house, Leavy expressed her disapproval of Boston Children’s Hospital in an interview with law enforcement, but she said she had no plan to actually bomb the hospital, according to the DOJ.
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Last summer, the hospital, which is one of the nation’s top hospitals and affiliated with Harvard Medical School, came under fire from critics over its transgender surgeries available to children.
Boston Children’s Hospital’s Center for Gender Surgery lists chest surgery with parental consent for girls 15 and up who identify as male.
Initially, the hospital’s website had stated 17-year-olds could qualify for vaginoplasty surgery, but that language was removed, and the hospital claimed it was “misinformation” that they ever performed transgender genital surgeries on minors.
The hospital also lists “gender-affirming hysterectomies” for women 18 and older.
Over the last few years, critics have sounded the alarm about the permanent effects of both gender hormone treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgical procedures, especially on children.
The number of gender surgeries nearly tripled in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, according to an analysis published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open. In 2016, there were about 4,550 procedures, and that number spiked to around 13,000 in 2019.
Hundreds of girls in the U.S., some as young as 12, have gotten elective, gender-related double mastectomies to remove their healthy breasts over the last few years.
Meanwhile, it is more popular than ever for youth to adopt new gender identities. An estimated 300,000 minors aged 13 to 17 identified as transgender as of last year.
