In September 2025 — following years of people accusing France’s first lady Brigitte Macron of being a trans woman — she and her husband, Emmanuel Macron, said they were preparing to present “scientific evidence” to prove she was born female.
Speaking to BBC, the Macron’s lawyer said they were planning to present the documentation as part of a defamation suit against conservative pundit Candace Owens, who has repeatedly claimed Macron was a man.
Owens has made the accusation with an eight-part audio and video series, “Becoming Brigitte,” which was released in March 2025, as well as X posts (archived):
This is verifiably false. She isn’t suing me for saying she’s a man.
She has never sued anyone ever for saying she’s a dude. Because she is one. https://t.co/SFcidIaOBz
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 18, 2025
The rumor about Macron began in France in April 2021, a year before the 2022 French presidential election in which incumbent President Emmanuel Macron ran successfully for a second term. It first appeared in a French far-right publication named Faits & Documents (“Facts & Documents”), which purports to be a “confidential” newsletter (it requires a subscription and its sole distribution format is paper). Known for its antisemitism and conspiracy theories, its writer is a man named Xavier Poussard. Poussard was later interviewed in the series Owens released in 2025.
Faits & Documents publication hired Natacha Rey as a contributing writer for a story that claimed Brigitte Macron was born as a male and was named Jean-Michel Trogneux. The same story alleged that before her transition, Macron had her three children with a woman named Catherine Auzière. According to the writers, Macron’s former husband, André-Louis Auzière, never existed.
The publication went on to elaborate on this story in six other issues of the newsletter published into the fall 2021, months before the election.
Importantly, the allegations built on and revived a rumor that started in 2016 during Emmanuel Macron’s first presidential campaign, claiming that he was gay. Not one of these rumors holds up under close scrutiny.
The story that Brigitte Macron is trans, however, did not go viral until Dec. 10, 2021. On that day, Rey was invited to do a live interview by YouTube personality and self-proclaimed psychic Amandine Roy, whose real name is Delphine Jégousse. In that four-hour live video, Rey and Jégousse discussed the rumor and its details. While the conversation garnered more than 450,000 views, it was ultimately taken down and Emmanuel Macron was reelected against his main contender, far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.
The rumor arrives in the U.S.
On March 11, 2024, Owens brought the allegations to a new audience in the United States. Owens repeated the rumors in great detail on her podcast, citing Pressibus — a French site that previously peddled unfounded hypotheses about the COVID-19 pandemic — as a source. She shared a link to her podcast on X; the post (archived) had amassed more than 7.6 million views as of this writing.
Brigitte Macron’s actual family tree
Contradicting the rumors, Brigitte Macron, née Trogneux, and Jean-Michel Trogneux are siblings. They are the two youngest of six siblings. The family includes sisters Annie, Maryvonne (who died in 1960) and Monique and brother Jean-Claude (who died in 2018). Jean-Michel was still alive at the time of this writing.
“At a given point, I realized that they were subverting my genealogy,” Brigitte Macron declared to a French radio station in January 2022. “They changed my family tree. It was fine for three quarters of my family, but then we get to my brother and I am my brother … They are messing with my parents’ genealogy, it’s impossible.”
Macron’s ex-husband was named Louis-André Auzière. The two divorced in 2006 after 30 years of marriage, and he died on Dec. 24, 2019, at 68. Together they had three children: Tiphaine, Sébastien and Laurence.
Catherine Auzière, the supposed mother of Brigitte Macron’s children, also exists and lives in Normandy as of this writing. Contrary to the allegations, she never had children. She is married to Jean-Louis Auzière, the uncle of Brigitte Macron’s late ex-husband.
The way Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron met was widely reported, including by Snopes. It happened in 1993, when she was a drama teacher and he was her 16-year-old high-school student. The two became very close and he swore at 17 years old that he would marry her, which he did in 2007.
Lawsuits
Agence France-Presse reported in early 2022 that Brigitte Macron, her brother and her three children sued Rey and Jégousse for invasion of privacy and violation of personality rights, which protect a person’s right to control the use of their identity, voice, likeness, name and other identifiers. This lawsuit was dismissed in 2023 on the grounds that the complaint should have been for public defamation, according to AFP.
In parallel, Brigitte Macron and her brother also pressed charges for public defamation, AFP said. This criminal procedure was ongoing as of this writing.
Another criminal procedure in Normandy, which was launched after Catherine Auzière pressed charges, resulted in the conviction of Rey and Jégousse, who were sentenced to a fine of 2,000 euros each. The judge also ruled that they should cover the legal expenses of the Auzière couple, up to 3,000 euros for Catherine Auzière and 2,000 euros for her husband.
On July 10, 2025, an appeals court found that while the information was indeed false, Rey and Jégousse had spread it mistakenly and “in good faith,” relieving them of having to pay damages, according to TV5 Monde. On July 14, 2025, Macron and her brother announced through their lawyer Jean Ennochi that they would take the appeals court’s decision to the country’s highest court in an effort to have it reversed. Ennochi had spoken to France’s most prominent newspaper, Le Monde, and to the government’s news service France Info. Snopes reached out Ennochi seeking more details and we will update this report should he respond.
Then, on July 23, 2025, the French presidential couple filed a defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens in Delaware. The 219-page complaint accuses Owens of not only spreading false allegations about Brigitte Macron’s birth sex but knowing “they were false when she published them.”
On Sept. 18, 2025, the Macrons’ attorney in the U.S. spoke to the BBC, saying they would bring “expert testimony that will be scientific in nature” to prove their case. The BBC posted a clip of the interview on its TikTok account (archived):
@bbcsounds Brigitte Macron will present scientific evidence to prove she’s a woman. French president Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron filed a defamation lawsuit against the right-wing influencer Candace Owens after she promoted a theory that Brigitte Macron was born male. The BBC has approached Candace Owens’ legal team for a comment. She has previously said she believes what she is saying is true and there is nothing more American than free speech, the ability to criticise. Fame Under Fire | Listen on BBC Sounds and Watch on YouTube #BBCSounds #FameUnderFire #CandaceOwens #BrigitteMacron
President Macron fights back
On March 8, 2024, Emmanuel Macron denied the rumor for the first time. His exchange with a journalist was caught on camera:
MACRON: There are small, daily gestures, upsets and humiliations that are unbearable and that continue to exist in the behavior of some people. There are fake information and made-up scenarios that people end up believing, and that upset you including in your private life.
JOURNALIST: You are thinking of people who say that your wife is a man.
MACRON: Yes, that’s it. Truly, there are nutcases.
Other baseless allegations of women being trans
Brigitte Macron is not the first high-profile woman to be targeted by rumors of being born a man. We’ve previously reported on similar claims regarding former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama and Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky.
These rumors are often rooted in misogyny, transphobia and homophobia. In the case of women who are married to politicians, the allegations often start during electoral campaigns in attempts to discredit their spouses in the eyes of voters. For example, the story about Obama being a trans woman first appeared in 2008, when her husband, Barack Obama, became the Democratic presidential candidate.
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‘Brigitte Macron : deux femmes condamnées pour avoir affirmé que l’épouse d’Emmanuel Macron est un homme’. ladepeche.fr, https://www.ladepeche.fr/2023/02/15/brigitte-macron-deux-femmes-condamnees-pour-avoir-affirme-que-lepouse-demmanuel-macron-est-un-homme-11000376.php. Accessed 18 Mar. 2024.
‘Brigitte Macron et Jean-Michel Trogneux, itinéraire d’une infox délirante’. Le Monde.fr, 31 Mar. 2022. Le Monde, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2022/03/31/la-premiere-dame-et-jean-michel-trogneux-itineraire-d-une-infox-infamante_6119987_823448.html.
‘Brigitte Macron revient sur les débuts de son couple et sa différence d’âge avec Emmanuel Macron :”C’était le bazar dans ma tête”‘. Femme Actuelle, 16 Nov. 2023, https://www.femmeactuelle.fr/actu/news-actu/cetait-le-bazar-dans-ma-tete-brigitte-macron-revient-sur-les-debuts-de-son-couple-et-sa-difference-dage-avec-emmanuel-macron-2165853.
‘Court Fines 2 Women for Spreading Lie That Brigitte Macron Was Born Male’. POLITICO, 15 Feb. 2023, https://www.politico.eu/article/brigitte-emmanuel-macron-fake-news-two-women-convicted-for-spreading-transphobic-rumors-about-brigitte/.
Faits & Documents. Faits & Documents, Apr. 2021, http://pressibus.free.fr/gen/trogneux/brigitte.pdf.
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INSANE. This Is The BIGGEST Political Scandal In Human History. www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v81g1tldi4c. Accessed 18 Mar. 2024.
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—. ‘No Proof For Rumors That Katie Ledecky Had “Come Out” as Trans’. Snopes, 27 July 2023, https://www.snopes.com//news/2023/07/27/katie-ledecky-trans-rumors/.
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