Forcing Brigitte Macron to court to prove she is a woman shows how mad (and powerful) conspiracists have become

Brigitte Macron, the wife of French president Emmanuel Macron, is going to court in Delaware to prove that she is a woman. This is where the mind-boggling world of conspiracy theories has led us and it has consequences for us all, writes Kat Brown

Please excuse me if you’ve only just recovered from Wednesday’s conspiracy theories. Then, social media was abuzz with the suggestion that Melania Trump had been temporarily replaced by a stand-in during her visit to Windsor Castle due to her hat obscuring her face. Now, it’s all about President Macron’s wife, Brigitte, being a trans woman, and, more specifically, also her brother.

But this time, the conspiracy theory will be tested in a court of law.

In July, the Macrons filed a defamation suit against rent-a-view influencer Candace Owens, who has long claimed – with no evidence – that Brigitte was born a man. Extraordinarily, Brigitte will now be presenting evidence to a court in Delaware to prove that she is indeed a woman.

The rumours embraced and amplified by Owens, formerly an anti-Trump blogger until clocking how lucrative being on his team could be, have been around for a while. In 2017, a blogger named Natacha Rey or sometimes Nathalie Rey, claimed in a YouTube video that Brigitte was in fact her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, who had, she said, changed gender and used the name. This claim went viral before the French presidential election in 2022, due to a 2021 video in which Rey was interviewed on YouTube by a spiritual medium.

In another time, this would have been dismissed with an eye-roll and shrug. But we are living in a different – and more dangerous – era. The “evidence” that Rey claimed was a picture of Jean-Michel as a child, looking similar to Brigitte now. Watching the rumours escalate online, Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron denied the claims and sued Rey and her medium Delphine Jegousse, known as “Amandine Roy”, for defamation at the Paris Judicial Court, where they were found guilty in September 2024.

The court made them pay Brigitte and her brother – now 80 and still living in the northern town where he and Brigitte grew up, and who attended Emmanuel Macron’s inauguration ceremonies – $8,000 and $5,000 in damages, respectively. The Paris Court of Appeal then overturned the verdict in July 2025, on the grounds that the allegations were made “in good faith” and therefore did not constitute defamation.

In court, Jegousse said that she had not met Rey before their video and simply wanted to give a platform to a story that she argued was being ignored by the mainstream. While Jegousse’s video interviewing Rey is no longer on her channel, clones of it are on YouTube. Natacha Rey is not seen in the video with Jegousse – she is interviewed with her camera off. Nor did Rey appear in court, pleading illness. Curiously, Natacha Rey has no website or online presence – unthinkable for a blogger, let alone a self-described “journalist” at the centre of a global news story. Any further comments have come through her lawyer, François Danglehant, also referred to online as Francois Dangléan. Moreover, Rey’s name is used interchangeably with “Nathalie Rey”, depending on the news outlet, and this individual again has no digital footprint. Cue counter-conspiracies over whether she exists at all.

But the fact is that we are here and the wife of the president of France is now in the ludicrous – and hurtful – position of having to prove to a court of law that she is a woman. How did we get here?

Candace Owens’ campaign against the Macrons leans into an alarming right-wing conspiracy subculture rooted in transphobia called transvestigation, which targets people with fake claims that they are trans, usually trans women. They then take it on themselves to “investigate” the truth to expose celebrities as being “secretly transgender”. This can include analysing their bone structure, gait and limb length and then circulating this information to try and “work out” if they are male or female.

According to the American LGBT+ organisation GLAAD, “The practice maliciously targets cisgender public figures from Madonna to Melania Trump to Olympic boxer Imane Khelif to Kyle Rittenhouse and then ‘investigates’ them, offering fake pseudo-scientific ‘evidence’ that they are transgender, with the underlying bigoted and ignorant implication that being a transgender person is a bad thing.”

French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron arrive at Downing Street in July 2025 (Getty)

When I appeared on the BBC Two quiz show Only Connect in 2022, I felt a small fraction of what this is like. I was clocked as a trans woman by someone tweeting along to the show. In fact, I’m actually a very tall Alto 2 who was born with my dad’s jawline. I didn’t mind being described as a trans woman, but this just showed that you cannot “tell” at a glance.

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling on sex earlier this year, butch lesbians and post-mastectomy women have shared stories of being confronted for being exactly where they’re supposed to be. Caz Coronel described her experience in The Guardian, saying that she only managed to stop a man shouting at her by bluntly asking him if he wanted to see her breasts as proof. A lot of this is done under the guise of protecting “safe spaces” for women, although arguably, being shouted at in a loo queue is not safety. For conspiracy theorists, however, chaos is the aim.

It’s telling that the Macrons’ actual scandal – they first met when Brigitte was a teacher at his school, and her daughter was his classmate, and married 14 years later – was not deemed lurid enough to be their focus, not least because France had shrugged and moved on from what many would consider an inappropriate relationship.

But what is more revealing is that the Macrons are addressing Owens’ campaign rather than ignoring it, as so many public figures have had to over the years. And this is where it becomes even more alarming. Owens has the ear of the US government through her podcast, YouTube channel, and her willingness to make outlandish, headline-grabbing claims.

Since her abrupt turn from Trump naysayer in 2015, she has said and done the most contrary and appalling things – many about Black people – which have led to her being embraced by the right, although Trump has apparently distanced herself from her, as she claimed in a podcast that he asked her to stop talking about the Macrons.

Owens has refused to back down on a series of outlandish claims (Rumble)

What is particularly grim about the Macron court case is that Owens’ lawyer has even asked for proof that Brigitte was pregnant and raised the three children – now in their forties and fifties – she had with her first husband, banker André-Louis Auzière. The trial starts later this week, and I am concerned about them having to roll out proof of each child in turn, family photo albums, and perhaps even Jean-Michel Trogneux himself for such a ridiculous case.

In an interview with Paris Match last month, President Macron said the suit was “a question of having the truth respected”.

“This has become such a big issue in the United States that we had to respond,” he said. He added that Owens’ right to free speech didn’t give her the right to spread “nonsense”.

The Macrons’ lawyer, Tom Clare, said that attempts had been made to engage with Owens over the past year, “request after request after request that she just simply do the right thing,” but she had not replied. The suit claims that Owens doubled down on this claim to “promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money.”

After the lawsuit was filed, Owens said: “I am fully prepared to take on this battle. On behalf of the entire world, I will see you in court.”

And there lies the problem with conspiracies – taking them on becomes a lose-lose situation. In the topsy-turvy brain of a conspiracist, if their victims ignore it, it’s “proof of it being true”, and if they deny it and prove claims aren’t true this becomes new evidence of a deep-state “cover-up”.

The insane, the unbelievable and the incredible are merely the 21st-century equivalent of UFOs and Area 91 multiplied by the intrusive claims of “free speech”. People love a conspiracy theory, and simply cannot comprehend something as dull as a famous person’s sibling not having a trackable digital footprint.

The insanity is the point, of course. Since Trumpism took hold in the mid-2010s, the world has effectively been living in an extended retelling of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Whether emperor, president, or Tommy Robinson bully boy, the far-right has moved entirely away from anything approaching fact in favour of shouting loudly, often on X.

Brigitte Macron with Queen Camilla on the French president’s state visit, 8 July 2025 (AFP/Getty)

However, conspiracy theories are by no means limited to the right – rumours are whizzing around about everything from whether Trump was really shot to the validity of Tyler Robinson’s text messages to his roommate over the killing of Charlie Kirk. An analysis of a photo posted by the author JK Rowling on X last year led to gleeful commentary by X progressives saying that her house was troubled by black mould and was therefore turning her mad.

However, it is the right’s conspiracy theories that have the most significant impact on the world at large: the riots of 6 January. Banned books. Hillary Clinton’s “emails” and pizza. The “birther” conspiracy over Barack Obama’s birth certificate. The dedication of people on social media, often encouraged by algorithms powered by Elon Musk and other tech bros to rally behind these lies, leads to bemused confusion by anyone who isn’t 100 per cent digitally literate.

No photos or scientific proof from the Macrons will make any difference to the outcome. The conspiracy theorists will rummage through the Macrons’ personal lives with delight before throwing them on the floor behind them, just as the “doxxers” of the right-wing GamerGate movement did in the mid-2010s by sharing the addresses and contact details of high-profile figures, and just as did the men behind the leaks of celebrity nudes. That chaos and feeling it creates is the important thing.

Those fuelling these wild theories, from bots to bad actors, and even some politicians, want to see faith in our institutions wobble. Not being able to believe anything anyone tells you is part of that. Anything that someone doesn’t like can be dismissed as “fake news”. We have seen Trump doing this for years.

But the Macron court case is necessary because the West has become timid of consequences. It has long relied on public shaming to subdue a wrongdoer into resigning, apologising, or otherwise stepping away. That simply does not happen now. If – when – Candace Owens loses this case, she too has a playbook to follow. It’s the same one the president of the United States followed after the 2020 election. Never apologise, never explain, and cling to the BIG lie at all costs.

Another grift will be along in a minute. There’s always a spot at the table for an ambitious person who believes in nothing and will say anything.