In France, Dora Moutot convicted of transphobia for identifying a TW as male when asked.

[Emilesgran]

While we await the full implementation of the FWS judgment in the UK, Australia and now France show that the battle is far from over.

In 2021, Dora Moutot was taking part in a televised debate along with a transidentifying male who was being celebrated for becoming the first TW mayor in France. She was asked if she saw Marie Cau, the TW as a man or a woman, and basically told the truth.

She was taken to court for hate speech for this plus another comment about women needing to be careful around all “people with penises” - and has just lost the case.

https://twitter.com/doramoutot/status/2057180176484647069?s=20

Seeing how it’s reported in the French media (barely at all, and that, unsympathetically) I’m not sure what happens next in France, and the EU more generally. The Minister for equality between men and women spoke against… Dora Moutot.

This is her own description of the events.
https://unherd.com/2023/12/french-feminism-is-being-corrupted/

And a link to the original debate, in French:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8elggw

I’m not sure whether she can appeal, but I think this is worrying. There is a level of capture in the French media that most people are completely unaware of. Like Australia, it’s still very much at the “Be Kind” level of debate, but this judgment will have a chilling effect and make any future discussion all the more difficult.

I don’t even know what can be done now - how can anyone dare tell the truth in the French media now, or indeed in a discussion at work or similar?

Thanks for the link.
Shocking but not surprising, it's the hill the lefties are all prepared to die on. I think France has always been a patriarchy, and this is definitely a man's rights movement, so a women being punished for telling the truth fits right in.
I hope she appeals, if it's possible, but as so many countries have brought out hate speech laws and as men hate women telling them no, she may well not have the right to appeal.

Yes, in my experience for a country that has the revolution at the core of its identity, France can be surprisingly conservative when it comes to women’s rights.

What shocked me is that she was explicitly asked the question, in a debate: clearly she was meant to lie. I don’t understand why that isn’t a bigger issue. In hindsight, it seems like Maya Forstatter’s approach of using freedom of expression and getting clarification on the right to believe that TW are not women may have been more brilliant than many people realise.

The panel she described being on sounded more like the experience of someone who found themselves in front of the revolutionary committee. Back in the day she definitely would have been sent to the guillotine.

Vive lae France: Constrainte, Inégalité, mais toujours Fraternité - pour les mecs.

🙄

Revolution, yes. But it was a men’s revolution that resulted in the Napoleonic Code that, in 1804, provided that women were the property of and under the control of either their father or their husband.

Thank you for posting the story. Very depressing.

Utterly depressing.

Thank heavens we had JK Rowling and others (Sex Matters?) to finance the Supreme Court case. It will be the saving of us from this kind of horror show.

Only a few weeks ago Australia found the organiser of a female only online group guilty of discrimination against a trans identified man.

Yes but I think it wasn’t an inevitability. If self ID had been brought in, as Theresa May (I think, or was it Liz Truss?) wanted to do, no doubt there’d have been a little clause put in there by activists, equating or even replacing sex with gender. That’s what makes it so much more complicated in Australia and now in France, to win a case based on identifying someone’s sex correctly.

I don’t really know where this will go now, because Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern seem to be very isolated figures compared to anyone in the English speaking world. Even Amy Hamm and Sall Grover, for all that they have much the same mountain to climb as Dora Moutot, have access to moral support from the rest of the English speaking world. Including the comfort of knowing that the rules in the UK are clearer so they have that precedent. There’s nothing comparable in the French legal system and no way (that I know of, but IANAL - I hope someone will tell me I’m wrong) of remedying that.

(Sorry to be so negative but I’m really quite depressed about this, for personal reasons. I’m not Dora Moutot, nor one of her friends!)

I agree. I think we are very lucky indeed to have that Supreme Court ruling to back us up.

It was May. Liz Truss’s opposition to it was one of her few redeeming features.

I am saddened that Dora has lost her case and I hope that she can appeal.

I have watched a panel discussion with her and Marguerite where they pointed out that a male caller phoning in to comment was very clearly male and not a female person. They are very clear in their campaign to support female single sex provisions.

How close the UK came to be in this very situation. I will never forget the feeling of my thoughts being silenced and my words being policed for simply stating true biological facts. Never thought it possible in our land of liberty. It's a scary position to be in where for speaking the truth you risk being prosecuted. And that journalists and media are forbidden from reporting the truth. So thankful here that the Supreme Court saw through it. Thankful to FWS who we are all indebted to.

France, Australia, Ireland, Spain, Canada and others all have that hill to climb. I wish Dora strength in her case and that she will have success in her appeal.

Ludicrous judgement (IANAL and not familiar with French law so it may be entirely correct in law but it is still ludicrous). I feel so sorry for Dora and just 🤯 that journalists in France are not all rushing to condemn this.

Asked a question, then taken to court for telling the truth. If I live to be 100 I will never understand how they are getting away with this.

Reading that Unherd piece reminded me of the very beginning of The Handmaids Tale, when Serena and Fred were just sitting around in cafes, sipping lattes. How easily it all happens; frog-boiling, if you'll forgive the phrase! 😁

I cant find all the threads but there were a few, women who have spoken up about women's sex based rights have faced real violence.

See https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5170737-trans-activists-attack-feminists-with-fire-in-france

There are other threads from that time.

So not just the establishment - but also antifa politicos.

I think that to put it mildly, patriarchy is entrenched in France.

Merde de taureau

This is horrendous, she basically said that women have good reason to be wary of people with penises.

I mean, fucking hell.

She's got an article in Unherd

https://archive.ph/eKviC

https://unherd.com/2026/05/how-france-stole-my-freedom/?edition=us

It's long but worth a read. The whole thing is insane but this struck me as an excellent point

Then there was the phrase “people with penises”. The judge suggested that it sounded like a punchline, a provocation. I explained that I was in fact using a term that is deemed by many progressives to be more inclusive than merely “men” (since as we now know, not all men have penises). Indeed, “people with penises” comes from the same <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.ph/o/eKviC/saskatoonsexualhealth.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Guide-to-Inclusive-Language-in-Sex-Ed-2-1.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">discursive universe as “people with uteruses”, “people who menstruate”, “sex assigned at birth”, and so on. However, it seems that when linguistic logic is applied in the wrong direction, it suddenly becomes indecent.

She says she's going to appeal.

Yes, though I heard KJK say that the SC ruling was a sop to shut women up on a Spiked podcast.

This is the question of whether the SC ruling is enough: it’s becoming clear that so many people in administration and government are determined to empty the SC ruling of its substance that KJK is right to be suspicious - but I think Australia and now France are showing us how much worse it is NOT to have that basic guideline.

Given that the clarification was a year ago, and the government and other state bodies are ignoring it, it's beginning to feel like less and less of a victory and I'm starting to come around to KJK's view.
I'm not sure we're any better off than the women in France, not if we have to keep taking recalcitrant state bodies, and others, too court to force them to follow the law.

The SC ruling only covered the EA2010, leaving the trans lobby able to say 'Ah yes but there nothing to say that any other law that says 'sex' means 'biological sex'.

Justice Swift said it also applied to workplace regs, in a way that suggested that he would also apply sex=biological sex to any other law or regulation, because duh.

It needs to be confirmed somehow that if the highest court in the UK has ruled that sex=biological sex in one piece of legislation, sex=biological sex in all legislation.
It seems so obvious, doesn't it?😒

It was Theresa May, Maria Miller and Penny Mordaunt who wanted to bring in gender self id.

It was Liz Truss and later Kemi Badenoch, who stopped it. People make fun of Liz Truss, but we should be grateful to her for knocking gender self id on the head.

I'm gonna say it - one of the very clear benefits of BREXIT is not dealing with this shit and getting further and further away from their madness by the day.