Earlier this month, someone at the FBI made an extraordinary decision: to send a plane to Cuba to bring home an American child who had allegedly been kidnapped. It was a possibly unprecedented intervention, apparently connected to a family member’s reported fear that the child’s alleged kidnappers sought “gender reassignment surgery” for the 10-year-old. On April 21, federal prosecutors announced that they had apprehended and charged the child’s parent and her partner. That parent, now in federal custody, is a transgender woman.
As yet, it’s difficult to know how much truth there is behind any of these accusations. The details, as they were reported in The New York Times and elsewhere, were sparse. That didn’t stop FBI Director Kash Patel from boasting about his agency’s having foiled the alleged kidnapping in a post on X, one of his favored communications channels. “FBI and our partners acted quickly and saved a young child who was kidnapped and ended up in Cuba,” he wrote, “with the alleged kidnapper parent hoping to transition the child.” Patel then shared a story from the right-wing website The Daily Wire, titled “FBI Spoils Trans Father’s Plan to Transition Son In Cuba.”
The story spread rapidly across both right-wing and legacy media, told from a mix of angles. The New York Times, a publication that has published numerous articles casting doubt on the need for minors to have access to gender-affirming care, described the situation as a “transgender custody case.” Nearly every article advanced federal prosecutors’ claim that the trip to Cuba was an attempt to kidnap a child for the purposes of “gender reassignment surgery,” a statement attributed to federal court filings. The Daily Wire seemed to find validation for its yearslong project to present transgender people as predatory and gender-affirming care as dangerous. (The Daily Wire was behind the high-profile anti-trans propaganda film What Is a Woman?; in 2022, it staged a “Rally to End Child Mutilation,” with host Matt Walsh and Senator Marsha Blackburn, to demand a ban on gender-affirming care.) In the flood of headlines and in the narrative they helped push, one important detail—assumptions about which fueled the already raging anti-trans panic about children and offered a key reason for the FBI’s strange international rescue mission—was lost. “It’s not clear from court documents if the defendants … actually planned on getting the child surgery,” the Associated Press reported.
In the available court documents, the only source for the “surgery” claim came from an FBI agent, Jennifer M. Waterfield, who identified herself as part of “the Violent Crimes Against Children squad in the Salt Lake City field office.” Waterfield’s sworn statement was filed on April 16 in federal court by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Utah District, as part of the criminal complaint against the alleged kidnappers. That complaint was also published with the office’s press release about the case. These four pages of narrative in this one agent’s sworn statement appear to be the primary source for the reported claims that the child was kidnapped for “gender reassignment surgery.” In the statement, it is not clear whether Waterfield had heard the claims firsthand or was reporting something learned secondhand. Few news outlets seem to have paid attention to the distinction, and the oversight is telling. When included in a criminal complaint, what very well may amount to a game of telephone can appear as authoritative as anything else in the filing—after all, a reader (or a reporter) may conclude, these are sworn statements.
To judge from Waterfield’s brief recounting, the apparent rationale for the FBI’s dramatic retrieval of the child related to “concerns” raised by others in the child’s family about the reason for the kidnapping: “Interviews of [child’s] family members provided significant concerns for [the child’s] well-being, as [the child] was born a male, however, identifies as a female child, which is largely believed to be due to manipulation by [the child’s transgender mother].” As if to substantiate these “concerns,” Waterfield details some of what was found in the alleged kidnappers’ home, including a to-do list with such items as emptying a bank account and having $10,000 in cash on hand. On the list as well, according to Waterfield: “get haircuts,” and “write out and start what we can for tourist visa.” Waterfield then describes another note that she does not quote from: “Recovered notes included instruction from a mental health therapist located in Washington, D.C. including instruction to send the therapist the $10,000.00 and instructions on gender affirming medical care for children.” There is no mention of the therapist’s name, or any indication that they were ever sought out. There is no date given for when the notes were obtained. There is no family member named, no date on which the interview took place. Instead, the agent offered a strange and detached summary: “Concerns exist that [child] was transported to Cuba for gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.”
Concerns exist. That’s the basis for these stories, “concerns” without attribution or detail, along with some handwritten notes, presumed to belong to the alleged kidnappers, describing purported instructions from an unknown therapist. It is not at all clear what was meant by the agent’s description of “gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty.” Is the FBI agent alleging that a family has “concerns” about a 10-year-old child undergoing a vaginoplasty or an orchiectomy? Breast augmentation? The Times spoke to the brother of one of the defendants—the child’s uncle—who may well be the same family member referred to in the FBI affidavit. The article says he told the newspaper that the parent “had been ‘rather adamantly pushing’ for the child to get transition surgery since the child was about 5 years old.” But surgery at 5 is even less plausible than surgery at 10.
Typically in the United States, the gender-affirming care offered to a child who has not reached puberty consists of puberty blockers; genital surgery is very rarely available to adolescents, let alone to prepubescent children. Some puberty blocker medication can be implanted by a clinician, but that procedure does not involve what most people would consider “surgery.” The child would be unable to obtain blockers in Utah, along with hormones and surgeries, due to a statewide ban on such care for minors. Some have speculated that this is why Cuba was the chosen destination. In Cuba, transgender adults are theoretically guaranteed legal access to free gender-affirming surgeries through a national health system, although trans Cubans have reported that such care is difficult to access. According to the Associated Press, “gender-affirming surgeries are banned for minors” in Cuba. The New Republic asked an agency in Cuba that coordinates gender-affirming care for adults, CENESEX, if that was the case, but received no reply by time of publication. (In 2023, when a Teen Vogue reporter attempted to visit CENESEX, they were told the office was closed and only seeing patients “on an as-needed basis.”)
Setting aside, then, whether “gender reassignment surgery” was even available at the alleged kidnappers’ destination, it is difficult to substantiate what that would mean in this case. Waterfield so thoroughly couched her statements regarding concerns about surgery in passive terms—interviews “provided concerns,” “concerns exist”—that it is impossible to know how credible the FBI agent finds the concerns to be. It could well be true that this agent heard that concerns “exist.” But that doesn’t mean they have any factual basis.
Before the FBI got involved, local law enforcement conducted its own investigation, which resulted in warrants for the arrest of the alleged kidnappers. A similar sworn statement based on that investigation was included in filings made to the Fifth Judicial District Court in Utah, and obtained by The New Republic. In the statement, a detective with the major crimes unit in Logan City, Utah, Mikkael Hardison, relates the story without mention of gender in any form. After the child didn’t return home when expected on April 3, the child’s mother called the local police “to report a custodial interference of their ex-spouse.” Two days later, she filed a missing person report. The next day, when the alleged kidnappers’ home was searched, the detective wrote, “various lists were discovered detailing their travel plans to Cuba.” Some items, as the detective related them, which included “pulling out large amounts of cash, emptying bank accounts, canceling cellphone service, and forwarding of medications,” were checked off as complete.
These state court filings don’t mention anything about anyone involved being trans. Nobody is described as having “concerns” about “gender reassignment surgery.” There is no mention of notes purportedly about a therapist or “instructions” for gender-affirming care. Is it possible that the local detective had not found or even heard of these purported elements of the situation before submitting this affidavit on April 7, the day after the search? Of course. But if he did know of concerns that a child was potentially being compelled to undergo surgery, they apparently did not merit inclusion. Indeed, when interviewed by the Associated Press after the kidnapping arrests, members of the Logan City Police Department confirmed that their investigators did not learn of any concerns about gender-affirming surgery at first, and that the concerns they did learn of came from a single family member, whom they did not name. “They just had the concern about it, no actual physical evidence,” the department spokesperson said.
On April 8, Utah law enforcement issued two warrants seeking the alleged kidnappers for a possible charge of “custodial interference,” a third-degree felony in Utah, with bail set at $5,000 each. Eight days later, according to the Utah U.S. Attorney’s Office, officials in Cuba found the alleged kidnappers and the child. The same day, the federal complaint, which included the FBI agent’s sworn statement, was filed. On April 21, just shy of three weeks since the child was reported missing, the Utah U.S. Attorney’s Office announced the arrests, in a press release headlined, “Utah 10-Year-old Reunited With Biological Mother After Transgender Parent and Partner Allegedly Kidnapped Child to Cuba; Defendants feared by family of taking child to Cuba for gender reassignment surgery.”
It’s obvious that some news outlets did not dig any deeper than the press release. This isn’t unusual. News stories routinely repeat law enforcement press releases with little to no additional investigation or context. The defendant, who may be in custody, rarely gets to comment on claims made after an arrest or in a criminal complaint, whereas the police have paid press relations staff to pick up the phone. The Logan City Police Department issued its own press release about the case on April 22. Notably, it was headlined only “Custodial Interference,” the initial charge, and, like its detective’s sworn statement, it did not mention anything about the gender identity of anyone involved. It was also posted to Facebook.
Police and prosecutors are used to getting to tell the story they want told. When the media doesn’t play along, they just post their version of events to social media instead. The typical law enforcement communications strategy, however, pales in comparison to the “flood-the-zone” tactics favored by the law enforcement officials now installed in the federal government, such as FBI Director Patel, who seem unable to stop themselves from posting on X or going on friendly podcasts. Patel was having a particularly rough public relations moment when the Justice Department apparently sent a plane to Cuba to pick up a 10-year-old child and return them to their mother in Utah. At the time, Patel was facing well-sourced claims that he is “erratic, suspicious of others, and prone to jumping to conclusions before he has necessary evidence,” as The Atlantic had alleged on April 17. The Atlantic article came not long after stories that Patel had delayed an FBI team’s response to a shooting at Brown University because he had tied up the FBI’s two available jets, sending one to a different team, and taking the other to south Florida. (And that followed reports that Patel had used the bureau’s private jet to take his girlfriend out on cross-country dates.) A story about the FBI’s bringing down an alleged kidnapper who was transgender, who intended to force their own child to transition with “surgery,” is certainly a story Patel would rather tell.
Some might say that Patel would rather divert scrutiny from himself and onto some perfectly cast scapegoats. I’m not convinced it’s so straightforward. If Patel, who is reportedly fighting to keep his job, wanted to deliver his boss a story perfectly aligned with the president’s agenda, this story of an alleged kidnapping hits most of the marks. Of course, Patel has already moved on: He’s been touting an incredibly thin criminal indictment of a group investigating white supremacists, the Southern Poverty Law Center. And now he has the case of an alleged assassination plot targeting the president and other members of his administration at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.
Given this, it’s useless to refer to anything this administration does as a distraction from some worse action. There is always something worse coming down the pike, and the “distraction” in many cases is usually bad enough on its own. For the people who have had perhaps the most painful, frightening experiences of their lives transformed into FBI headline fodder, only for the story to be replaced by another a handful of days later, it must be profoundly disorienting and upsetting. That reality—chaos, fear, abandonment—is the one this administration would prefer that trans kids live in, if it even thinks of them at all.
