A Headline Grab!

How we made it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted list: Family battles turn into an international incident when a parent who is trans has custody of a child.

Couple accused of kidnapping child to Cuba for feared gender reassignment, DOJ says

The child's biological father, who transitioned to a woman after the child was born, and her partner are accused of faking a camping trip to Canada and going to Cuba instead, according to federal officials.

NBC Miami

By Briana Trujillo

April 22, 2026

A Utah couple is accused of kidnapping a 10-year-old child and taking them to Cuba for a family member believed was an effort to have the child undergo gender reassignment surgery, the Department of Justice said in a news release.

Rose Inessa-Ethington, who is the child's biological father, and her partner Blue Inessa-Ethington, were arrested by the FBI and are facing federal kidnapping charges, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Utah. Rose, 42, shares custody with the child’s biological mother, who is only identified as “LB” in federal court filings. Rose transitioned to female after the child’s birth, according to her family members.

According to court documents, Rose and Blue, 32, were supposed to take the child to Canada, along with Blue's 3-year-old child, for a planned camping trip, but never checked in to their hotel in Calgary, Alberta, or the campground they were scheduled to stay at for five days. The 10-year-old was expected to be returned to the biological mother on April 3, but the group had not been heard from since March 28.

Instead, they allegedly flew from Vancouver to Mexico City, and then boarded a flight to Havana, according to the criminal complaint.

The local police said,

"Concerns existed that the child was transported to Cuba for gender reassignment surgery prior to puberty," the FBI said, citing concerns expressed by a family member who they say blamed Rose for manipulating the child to identify as a girl.

But here is the kicker!

The complaint doesn't say if the couple actually planned on getting the child gender-affirming surgery in Cuba or how they would get it because that surgery isn't legal for children in Cuba.

Like hundreds of child custody cases where a parent abducts a child, it becomes a federal case—but when the parent is trans, it makes national headlines. As the article mentioned, Cuba doesn't even perform these surgeries, so why is this being blown so far out of proportion? Like I said, there are numerous custody cases where a parent abducts a child to a foreign nation that never become front-page news. The New Republic has a few ideas on why this is happening.

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.

Melissa Gira Grant

April 30, 2026

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.”

That is what this is all about: the headlines!

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.

And they just made this child the poster child for the current administration’s anti-trans pogrom. However, there is no evidence that she was planning on doing this to her child.

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.

Remember in Minneapolis when ICE killed those two people and the first thing out of FBI Director Kash Patel’s mouth was, "They're terrorists!" and "Antifa!" just to grab headlines? The New Republic writes: "For the people who have had perhaps the most painful, frightening experiences of their lives transformed into FBI headline fodder... it must be profoundly disorienting and upsetting."

All of this is simply an attempt at grabbing headlines and inciting anger against the trans community.