How the FBI Turned a Custody Dispute Into Cheap Anti-Trans Fodder |
How the FBI Turned a Custody Dispute Into Cheap Anti-Trans Fodder
When the FBI took over an alleged international kidnapping case from local law enforcement—and sent a plane to retrieve a child from Cuba—certain details of the story changed in telling ways.
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........