Why Candace Owens won’t stop her “transvestigations”

One doesn’t need to have expensive legal counsel to know that, if someone is suing you for defamation, it’s unwise to keep repeating the lie in public. The “just keep saying it” strategy did not serve Donald Trump well when a jury awarded his victim, E. Jean Carroll, $83 million in damages in her second defamation trial — $78 million more that she won in her first trial. Fox News channels kept airing lies suggesting Dominion Voting Systems stole the 2020 presidential election for weeks after the company warned them to cut it out. When they refused, the accusations cost Fox $787.5 million. MyPillow founder Mike Lindell would not stop lying about the election, either, and he got hit with a $2.3 million judgment in a similar defamation case — which probably would have been higher if the jury had thought he had any money left.

Despite this history, the wildly popular right-wing podcaster Candace Owens did not stop telling obvious lies about Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, even though the couple sued her for defamation in late July. The lie Owens tells, over and over again, has been widely reported in right-wing media: That Brigitte Macron is, in fact, a “man.” But the situation is much weirder than that. As Will Sommer of the Bulwark reported, it’s also that the French first lady is actually her own brother, that she fathered her own husband and it’s all part of a cabal aimed at ending Western civilization. This conspiracy theory is a very big deal for Owens, who even created an eight-part “documentary” detailing these ridiculous allegations, which got millions of views on YouTube.

But what really matters here is that, by going so hard after the Macrons, Owens has gotten herself into serious trouble. Not only has she been sued, but the French first couple have also hired a high-powered private investigation firm to dig into Owens herself. They uncovered her ties to the French far-right, which could create further legal complications for the podcaster, as those groups are in constant legal trouble in Europe due to anti-fascist laws. Even though Trump himself reportedly warned Owens to back off, she has refused. She declared on her own show that she won’t “shut up” because the conspiracy theory is too “delicious.” She went on Tucker Carlson’s show to accuse the Macrons of “sexual perversion.” On “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” she bet the host $300,000 she could prove Brigitte Macron is “a male.” As recently as Wednesday, Owens continued to mock the Macrons on social media.

Why is Owens doubling down in the face of such serious consequences? The short answer may be that she’s just very stupid and reckless. Or she’s betting she will make more money off the controversy than she eventually pays out. But Owens’ motives are less interesting than what is driving her audience. One way or another, she’s dogged about promoting this conspiracy theory because her MAGA followers can’t get enough of it.

We can be sure it’s not because her audience gives a hoot about French politics. This is about the right’s gender obsession, and their inability to square the internal contradictions in their own, screwed-up views about men and women.

“There’s this overall belief that women’s bodies are community property,” Imara Jones, the founder of Translash Media, told Salon, noting she just recently had a stranger on the street demand to know if she was pregnant. One way to “undermine women’s equality,” she said, is to regard women as bodies to “be investigated and inspected.”

Transphobia, she explained, creates the pretext for that. Policies banning trans girls from sports, for instance, “allow for strangers to inspect the bodies of girls they suspect are trans.” She pointed to the number of occasions where people, often angry their own child lost in a sport, have claimed the winner is secretly trans — which usually isn’t true. Earlier this week, a Minnesota teenager sued Buffalo Wild Wings because a server accused her of being a “man” in the women’s room and didn’t relent until the cisgender girl relented and showed the woman her naked breasts.

“The attack on trans women is just an excuse to police all women’s bodies,” Jones said.

Conspiracy theories claiming various public figures are secretly trans have been nicknamed “transvestigations.” But while the name is funny, the practice is almost always gross and intrusive to a truly unsettling degree. It’s also a huge phenomenon with thousands of celebrities, online influencers and political leaders becoming targets. For the largely right-wing communities that get caught up in transvestigations, the obsession is about trying to resolve a paradox caused by their own gender ideology. On one hand, they argue gender isn’t just inborn and immutable but that it’s wholly deterministic. Men are born to be strong, domineering and intelligent, while women are fated to be weak, submissive and emotionally irrational. On the other hand, they see gender as a category to be heavily policed, requiring severe social punishment for any person stepping even an inch outside their proscribed roles.

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These two beliefs cannot be reconciled. If gender roles are “natural,” people don’t need to be trained into them. One way to reconcile the cognitive dissonance is to accept that gender roles are a social construct and, actually, it’s okay if women want to be firefighters and men want to be manicurists. Instead of chilling out, however, transvestigators dig themselves into wild conspiracy theories where anyone who shows even a little divergence from a gender stereotype is accused of being “secretly” the other sex.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson shows his softer side in social media posts? Must be a woman! Phoebe Waller-Bridge succeeds as a show runner? Must be a man! This allows conservatives to both police people’s gender performance while also reassuring themselves that women with leadership qualities are “born” male, and men who display nurturance are “actually” female.

That’s why, Jones said, Owens and her audience have fixated on Brigitte Macron. She’s 25 years older than her husband, an age gap they believe is “natural” if the man is older, but perverse if the woman is. In their eyes, Jones said, “she can’t be a cis woman who he finds attractive. There has to be something nefarious or darker that they’re hiding.”

What’s darkly funny about this is that it’s true the Macrons’ relationship is pretty unusual, and it’s not unreasonable to have questions about how they met when he was a student and she was a teacher. But it’s safe to say that Owens’ MAGA audience is not worried about inappropriate behavior towards minors and they wouldn’t bat an eye if the genders were reversed. They can’t console themselves by writing off the Macrons as outliers, which, statistically speaking, they are. The problem with gender essentialism is that even a solitary divergence suggests that the “natural law” is not, in fact, a law. If people started floating on air suddenly one day, but only for one day, it would call into question the law of gravity. So even one woman who is much older than her husband rattles conservatives to their core and becomes a “problem” that can only be fixed by ever-wilder accusations that she’s the mastermind behind some outrageous conspiracy to end Western civilization.

This also helps explain why Owens can’t let go of this conspiracy theory, even as she is risking serious legal and financial consequences from it. Her brand is largely built on reassuring her audience that their rigid ideas about gender are correct. She is forever arguing that “biology” constrains women to “traditional gender roles.” For both her and her audience, a woman who deviates even slightly — such as by marrying a much-younger man — simply can’t exist. When faced with evidence that such women do exist, members of the far-right hide behind the convoluted logic of conspiracy theories to deny what is obvious: That plenty of women act in ways “biology” was supposed to prevent.

Brigitte Macron is a rich, powerful woman and, as this lawsuit shows, she can defend herself just fine. But the lies about her have a much broader impact, hurting all women — and men — who express themselves, even in small ways, that right wingers don’t like.