“More and more people are calling me a conservative feminist. And I’m actually fine with that. If keeping a sense of reality, saying that there are 2 sexes and that 2 + 2 = 4, is conservative, don’t worry, I’m conservative. I’m conservative! I’m conservative!”
These are the facetious words that Dora Moutot, a committed feminist, posted on her X account just over a year ago—a rather unexpected ‘coming out’ from a young woman who was in no way predisposed to such declarations. With a degree in arts and fashion, Moutot had started a blog on Le Monde designed to disinhibit women’s sexuality, followed by a successful Instagram account aiming at criticising traditional sexual relationships, which she accused of being subject to male domination. She was deputy editor-in-chief of Konbini, a website aimed at young people that poured out its share of politically correct opinions on everything from ecology to the cause of migrants to the fate of porn actresses—all things that would normally produce an allergic but healthy reaction in the average reader of The European Conservative.
And what about Marguerite Stern? Speaking to the conservative weekly Valeurs actuelles, she said a few days ago: “On the place of the Catholic Church in France, I’ve changed my position a little: without being a believer, I think it has a structuring role to play in the country.” This is the same woman who, at other times, paraded topless around Notre Dame de Paris as a member of FEMEN—a feminist collective that has made a speciality of execrating anything that still vaguely links French society to its traditional Catholic roots. Today, she’s thinking of taking up her pilgrim’s staff and making the journey to Santiago de Compostela.
As Hegel (for dummies) would say, the cunning of reason is to be found everywhere; and as Voltaire would say (again, for dummies), open-mindedness brings unexpected surprises. An authentically free mind cannot definitively classify people without taking the time to find out exactly what is behind the scenes. An authentically Christian mind knows that even a sheep apparently lost still deserves to be taken care of—and that surely, it will repay you well one day or another. With this in mind, we needed to look beyond our own noses and listen to what these two charming ladies had to say. We met them, and we for sure had an excellent time in their company.
Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern were approached by The European Conservative not because of their past achievements but as the impertinent authors of Transmania, which denounces the inexorable and destructive advance of transgender ideology in our Western societies.
It is the original defence of the cause of women that has led them to wage a new battle, this time against the evils of ‘transgenderism,’ which is not so much the existence of transgender people as their aggregation into an ultra-powerful lobby whose aim is to violently deconstruct reality and bodies—with women as its first victims. Formerly feminists, Stern and Moutot have become ‘femellists.’ (femalists). This neologism allows them to underline an eternal truth, namely that women are the female of the homo sapiens species to which we are supposed to belong—even if our ‘sapiens’ side, quite frankly, leaves more and more to be desired.
Stern and Moutot put forward arguments that make good sense but that nobody wants to consider as valid anymore: A woman is not a man. Her body is configured to bear life, because she has a vagina and a uterus, and this is true whatever her sexual choices and practices. There is no such thing as a ‘woman’s penis.’ To claim that you can change your sex biologically is an illusion, because every cell in your human body is sexed. Performing surgery or hormone treatments on children is dangerous medical experimentation. These are just a few examples of what is now forbidden to say.
The transgenderist offensive is making headway through an effort to manipulate language, weaving in and out of logical contradictions, relativism, and mental confusion—all of which are conducive to recruitment to the cause. “Inversions are symptomatic of transgender ideology. The mental fog that is deliberately maintained deprives fragile populations of their brains, who become the privileged victims of this ideology,” explains Marguerite Stern.
Their pasts as feminist activists has left its mark. In the course of their investigation, these two women, profoundly free and intellectually honest, were led to question some of the fundamentals of their past commitment. What about that icon of feminism Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre’s companion, whose mantra was that “you are not born a woman, you become one?” What about contraception and abortion? These are sensitive subjects. For Marguerite Stern, abortion remains non-negotiable: we sensed from our exchanges that we wouldn’t convert her on this point. For Dora Moutot, chemical contraception deserves to be questioned, because it is an alteration of natural processes, which, in a way, has links with the transgender transition by destroying the extraordinary and fluctuating hormonal balance specific to the female body. Consistently, the young woman explains that she has been interested in and trained in natural methods of observing the cycle.
Obviously, such positions open doors and columns to them—ours, for example—but have closed many more. For some time now, their ‘feminist’ positions have earned them a place in the publicly beleaguered category of ‘TERFs’ (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). The publication of Transmania accelerated the process. Every day, they are subjected to insults, threats, and sometimes death threats. Their mailboxes, both physical and virtual, are overflowing with reports of hatred and filth, some of which they post on their X accounts. Their conferences are cancelled, their business contracts terminated, their professional collaborations ended, their social media accounts blocked. Friends drift away. Even family sometimes turns away.
We must not underestimate the intensity of the ‘social death’ to which they are being subjected, which only proves what they are denouncing: a tyranny of a handful of trans activists who have sworn to silence them. These lobbyists have objective allies, sometimes in very high places, for example in the Democratic Party apparatus in the United States. In France, it comes as no surprise that the Paris City Council has made common cause with transgender people and has obtained the removal of posters promoting their book from the streets of the capital.
“E pur, si muove,” as Galileo once said. Progressives may not appreciate this daring analogy, but there is something of Galileo about these two women. The reactionaries are not who people think they are. Moutot and Stern have cast off their ties with the Left from which they came, and are keeping a firm grip on the truth. They know how to target their arguments because they know by heart the milieu that is attacking them today. They discover that they share a number of values and ideas with a system that they have fought against in the past. For Marguerite Stern, this is a form of “intellectual liberation.” She considers that those who attacked them helped them to become “better”—her words—by helping abandon some of their prejudices. Labelled ‘transphobic’ and ‘TERFs,’ they have learnt to laugh at the labels they themselves once applied. Obsessed in the past with a façade of ‘tolerance,’ they believe that they have become genuinely tolerant, and recognise that it is strictly impossible to engage in dialogue with a fringe of the Left that knows no language other than that of invective.
In retrospect, Dora Moutot realises that she has always been “a bit conservative”—in fact, genuinely free. She never believed in the injunctions made to women to have an unbridled sexuality, according to a male pseudo-model, and understands in hindsight that there is a real question of worldview behind all this. The real revolution they both experienced was the abandonment of fear—fear of being frowned upon; fear of being labelled extreme right-wing; fear of being ostracised. “Before, I was afraid of being lumped in with the Right. Now I’m no longer afraid,” explains Dora Moutot.
They have few regrets about their former lives and say they are proud of their path, which they see as the continuity of a coherent commitment now expressed in a different way. Today, Marguerite Stern is more willing to talk about the ravages of uncontrolled immigration and militant Islam as a threat to Western women, but she sees no contradiction between this and her fierce desire to defend women. In fact, in a way, it is the logical outcome of her fight for secularism, against domestic violence, and against sexual violence.
For several weeks now, the book by Dora Moutot and Marguerite Stern has been topping the sales charts on Amazon.
Online sales have made it possible to bypass the stubborn censorship of booksellers who hide books or refuse to order them, and the publisher has just launched a second print run: a real message of hope. Let’s borrow the final word from Saint John: the Truth will set you free (Jn. 8:32).
