A recent lawsuit filed by the French president and his wife accusing far-right conspiracy propagandist Candace Owens of defamation due to her repeated claims that the French first lady was born male highlights how such attacks enforce a male supremacist gender binary and restrict what it means to be a woman.
The 22-count defamation lawsuit filed in July by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, alleges that Owens’ actions have led to “a campaign of global humiliation” and “relentless bullying on a worldwide scale.” Owens has been at the forefront of an anti-feminist, anti-transgender movement to revive gender fundamentalism. Even when such attacks are at the expense of cisgender people like Brigitte, they further ostracize trans people from society. The rhetoric also commonly converges with white supremacy to disproportionately target Black women. What’s more, such attacks reveal the intersection between anti-trans bigotry and misogyny and highlight that anti-trans hate harms everyone.
For more than a year, Owens has used her platform to push the debunked conspiracy theory that France’s first lady is actually her own brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux. While Trogneux, 80, resides in his hometown, where he grew up with Brigitte and has appeared alongside her in public at her husband’s presidential inaugurations in 2017 and 2022, Owens and her supporters have been undeterred by evidence. This conspiracy theory has emboldened millions on social media to dissect Brigitte’s appearance publicly, critique her body and use dehumanizing language referring to her as an “it.”
In January, Owens launched an eight-episode podcast series focused on these claims called Becoming Brigitte, and even alleged that, in addition to being her own brother, Brigitte was actually Emmanuel Macron’s biological father. She claimed these videos helped her achieve record engagement on YouTube and helped her gain hundreds of thousands of new followers. In response to the lawsuit, Owens doubled down, asserting that Brigitte “is definitely a man.”
The French first lady is not the only victim of such an attack. Prominent public figures, including former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama, Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif, musical artist Lady Gaga and many others, have been accused of being born male and secretly transitioning without any credible evidence. The victims of the most high-profile harassment campaigns are typically cisgender women who are portrayed as insufficiently adhering to feminine gender norms based on their appearance, ambition or achievements.
These accusations have proliferated online in recent years alongside a broader panic about the existence of transgender people in society and a resurgence in gender essentialism. They are part of what Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, described as “an uncomfortable if inevitable evolution of a mass hysteria fixated on the bodies of trans people.”
Michelle Obama has been hounded by these false allegations for years. As recently as June 2025, the organizers of Turning Point USA’s annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit continued to uplift the conspiracy theory and accused her in a Mean Girls-style burn book of secretly being a man with more testosterone than former President Barack Obama.
At the 2024 Olympics, Khelif, an Algerian boxer, became the victim of a similar widespread global harassment campaign led by prominent figures including Elon Musk, J.K. Rowling and several international leaders. Following Khelif’s first Olympic win, Rowling called her a “male” who was “enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head.” Several months later, after signing an executive order to keep transgender women from competing in women’s sports, President Donald Trump claimed Khelif was “a male boxer” who “stole the women’s gold medal.”
The convergence of racism and misogyny leaves Black women especially vulnerable to these attacks. Black women have historically been stereotyped as hypermasculine and aggressive in part to justify violence against them. A 2008 study found that when participants were asked to guess a person’s gender, they were more likely to mistakenly identify Black women as men than any other race and gender combination. These attacks are not limited to public figures. In February, two male police officers followed a 19-year-old Black woman into a public restroom in Arizona and accused her of looking like a man, even after she lifted her shirt to demonstrate her gender. Just a few months later, a biracial high school student was the victim of a similar incident at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Minnesota.
These hate-driven conspiracy theories and harassment campaigns feed off a broader anti-trans ecosystem. Across the right and pockets of the left, trans people are consistently turned into scapegoats and have been blamed for the destruction of traditional American values, former presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ election loss and girls’ sports teams failing to win games (whether trans competitors are involved or not). The attacks on trans people operate within the same hard-right movement that strives to revive a white supremacist, male-dominated social order.
In a forthcoming article for the Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, scholars Michael R. Ulrich and Arpita Khanna explain that anti-transgender legislation ultimately limits the identities of cisgender women as well. They write, “These persistent efforts to limit the scope of womanhood reveal that it is not simply a biological category but rather a sociopolitical construct that is carefully crafted and enforced to maintain the gender hierarchy, exercise paternalistic control over bodily autonomy, and further disenfranchise marginalized groups.”
Owens is one of the loudest purveyors of anti-trans bigotry. She has repeatedly called the trans movement “satanic,” “evil” and “dangerous,” and claimed that “the entire LGBTQ movement brought with it a sexual plague on our society.”
Despite the Macron lawsuit and the lack of credible evidence to support Owens’ claims, she remains undeterred. Last March, she said, “I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.” Earlier this month, after the lawsuit had been filed, she doubled down on her claims and accepted a $300,000 bet with broadcaster Piers Morgan.
Image at top: Candace Owens speaks at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in Phoenix on Dec. 19, 2022. (Photo illustration by the SPLC; original image by Brian Cahn/Zuma Press/Alamy)