Dora Moutot is a feminist who has dedicated much of her life to fighting for women’s rights and has built a following on social media. Like other feminists, Moutot does not view transgender women as the same biological women. She has now joined others who are facing criminal charges for expressing those views. Transgender advocates have demanded that she be punished for her views in France.Moutot recounted how transgender activists demanded that she be more “inclusive” in how she referred to “women. She “refused, and explained that being a woman is a biological fact and that I didn’t think saying so should be controversial.” She was immediately denounced as a “transphobe and a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), a term I’d never even heard before.”
What followed was all too familiar. A cancel campaign led to her brand partnerships being canceled.
In 2022, she was invited on a French TV program to discuss transgender issues with Marie Cau, France’s first transgender mayor. On the program, she was asked if she thought Cau was a woman. Moutot responded, Cau “is a man, a transfeminine man.”
That was all it took. Transgender advocates had their case and filed charges for “public insult,” which is a crime in France with a maximum punishment of one year in prison and a fine of up to €45,000 for insults committed against a person because of their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. Free speech has long been in a free fall in France.
These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to “inciting” or “intimidating” others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using ‘dirty whore” in criticism.
In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority “smelly.” A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a “religion of hate.”
This is a nation that still echoes the cry of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (“liberté, égalité, fraternité”). However, in today’s France, “liberté” is no longer valued. Individual rights of religion and speech are routinely sacrificed in the name of “equity” and “fraternity.”
In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss the decline of free speech in France and other nations. As we face our own growing anti-free speech movement, citizens need to take a long look at countries like France to see what awaits us down this path. Europe went down this slippery slope of censorship decades ago, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.
As in this case, activists spend more time silencing opposing views than responding to them. For transgender activists, it is intolerable for feminists like Moutot to hold contrary views. Instead of addressing her viewpoints in public, they want her declared a criminal. Censorship then becomes an insatiable appetite for groups to silence their own critics.
Moutot describes the Orwellian take on free speech in France today.
“The judge did not impose the course, but in May, I was found guilty of “public insult” and fined €4,754. The judge found that though my statements were made in the context of a debate, they constituted an “abuse of freedom of expression warranting the imposition of a criminal penalty commensurate with the harm thus caused to the values protected by our democratic society.” In other words, the judge concluded my intent had been to cause harm.”
It is chilling to think of a judge willingly participating in such censorship, but this is now standard in the country. In the meantime, transgender activists are not done with Moutot, whose very existence appears to outrage them:
“In June, just weeks after my conviction, another LGBT organization filed six more complaints against me and my colleague Marguerite Stern. These new charges target specific statements we made on social media and on our feminist blog and YouTube channel Femelliste. They include our opinion that ‘men’ were ‘demanding access to our spaces’ and the question: ‘On what grounds should trans women’s fear of being mocked in men’s toilets take precedence over women’s fear of being raped?'”
This speech would be entirely protected in the United States. However, the case is a chilling cautionary tale for Americans fighting a resurgent anti-free speech movement. This is the slippery slope of censorship that awaits us if we abandon our defining commitment to free speech. After the removal of much of the censorship system established during the Biden Administration, American censors did not take jobs at Starbucks. They continue to peddle their expertise in regulating and silencing the speech of others.
It is a dire future. Just ask Dora Moutot.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
France, leading the charge to attain the “égalité, fraternité” of third world status!
This is the rise of Fascism in Europe. Nobody is less tolerant than today’s left. They censor and punish anyone who says something they don’t like, using the power of the state to do it. If it sounds like Hitler’s Germany to you, you’d be correct.