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In July, French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte filed a defamation lawsuit against US alt-right podcaster Candace Owens.
The couple’s lawyers accused her of being at the helm of an online crusade predicated on the assertion that she would stake “her entire professional career on the fact that Brigitte Macron is a man.”
Owens is accused of “relying on discredited falsehoods” and “inventing new ones”, in a bid to “maximise attention and financial gain for herself”, with her podcast and video series, Becoming Brigitte, having amassed millions of views.
However, the false claims about Brigitte Macron first went viral in 2021.
Ahead of France’s 2022 presidential election, self-proclaimed journalist Natacha Rey alleged that Brigitte Macron was assigned male at birth and named Jean Michel Trogneux — which is Brigitte’s brother’s name — during a four-hour YouTube interview with spiritual medium Amandine Roy.
However, this is not an isolated incident. Many other female public figures, such as former US First Lady Michelle Obama, New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and former US Vice President Kamala Harris, have also been victims of similar transphobic social media campaigns, which academics have dubbed “tranvestigations”.
The rise of ‘tranvestigations’
Transvestigations emerged on social media, particularly image-based ones such as X, Instagram and TikTok, because of individuals who seek to uncover some kind of hidden transgender identity among cisgender celebrities, according to Lexi Webster, associate professor of digital culture at the University of Southampton.
Users post pictures where they examine “the size and shape of a person’s shoulders, of skulls and jaws, but they also look at people’s gait, as well as their genitals,” Webster said, which they accompany with conspiracy theories.
The fake claims about Brigitte Macron have become so widespread partly because they build on the public’s perception that politicians are inherently deceitful.
Other factors include “the conspiratorial element which is transphobic and is underpinned by discourses that there is some kind of trans cabal that is seeking to take power over particular industries”, explained Webster.
Candace Owens’ preoccupation with Brigitte Macron has led other prominent figures, such as known conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to also relay the claim.
“Barack Obama has been plagued with gay rumours for a long time, and this is embedded in those discourses of Michelle Obama secretly being trans, and Emmanuel Macron, who is also being discredited largely because of other elements of his relationship”, Webster told EuroVerify.
“Right-wing or alt-right users are fuelling these claims, but we also know many platforms are inundated with bots who construct and reconstruct discourses based on what they know works well, which creates an engagement trap as people like, comment and repost”, Webster added.
However, even those who reshare the content to laugh at it also help keep it alive.
“The online satirical community which points out these kinds of networks of hate and reshares them to laugh at the absurdity also generates engagement”, Webster said.
Fake news report about Brigitte Macron emerges online
Despite there being no evidence to back any of the false claims about Brigitte Macron, they have with time become increasingly bold and innovative — both in style and substance — rather than dying down.
For instance, in early July, a video styled as a TV news report surfaced on social media and garnered hundreds of thousands of views every time it was reposted.
The video opens with shots of a crime scene, as a narrator alleges that a surgeon named François Faivre — who had supposedly planned on revealing information about Brigitte Macron’s alleged gender reassignment surgery in a tell-all interview with a French tabloid — mysteriously fell out of a window in Paris on 29 June.
However, the video, just as the claim, is fake.
Through a reverse image search, EuroVerify traced the opening shots of the video to AFP footage available on YouTube, which showed a crime scene in Paris back in October 2022 — so not 29 June 2025.
Furthermore, the surgeon in the video claims he worked at the American Hospital in Paris. The private healthcare practice told EuroVerify it had no records of a surgeon named François Faivre.
Although the face of the fake surgeon could be a real person’s, he barely blinks in the video, which points to the fact that his speech has likely been AI-generated.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that the story of the surgeon is fake, conspiracy theories use tactful elements which sow doubt, such as the narrator’s claims that Brigitte Macron underwent gender reassignment surgery at the American Hospital in Paris.
This claim is intentional and appears to play on previously established stories, given that in 2019, Brigitte Macron sued Closer magazine for invading her private life, after the publication alleged that the country’s first lady underwent a three-hour plastic surgery at the American Hospital of Paris in July.
“They take alleged medical evidence, for example, this person went into a hospital at this point, knowing that the person in question is not going to tell us what they were in hospital for”, Webster told EuroVerify.
In this case, conspiracy theorists could be taking advantage of the fact that politicians and their partners rarely address plastic surgery rumours, “in the political sphere there is also a desire not to come across as vain or shallow about appearance, beyond political appearance”, added Webster.
“No evidence is good enough to stop the rumour. Even if Brigitte Macron did share her birth certificate, online users could claim it has been forged or altered”, said Webster. “Even if the Macrons win the defamation case against Candace Owens, I don’t think there’ll be any impact on the claims online.”
