It is an increasingly widespread practice in the American complosphere and which has made a sensational arrival in France in recent years, with the Brigitte Macron affair.
Two women, the “medium” Amandine Roy and the self-proclaimed “self-taught independent journalist” Natacha Rey, argued in a video published in 2021 that the First Lady was in reality a transgender woman who was born under the male identity of Jean-Michel Trogneux – her brother – before changing gender. They claimed that Emmanuel Macron's wife was not the mother of his three children and that she had undergone surgical interventions. These two women were convicted of defamation last September.
To affirm all this, these two women engaged in what is called “transvestigation”. The word was invented about ten years ago by its followers, who call themselves “transvestigators”. A contraction between the words transgender and investigation, the practice consists of pseudo-investigating on the internet to prove that public figures are secretly trans people.
“Transvestigators” mainly attack women, ranging from Madonna to Michelle Obama, including Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian. Internet users are engaging in somewhat eccentric photo analyzes. They compare the shape of the skull, the jaw, they measure the size of the forehead, the distance between the eyes, the roundness of the hips, and they conclude, for example, that the actress Jennifer Anniston or that Stéphanie de Monaco are not born women, since they have a square jaw. Pseudo-evidence that the “transvestigators” consider irrefutable.
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Sometimes, they also target men like Andrew Tate, the masculinist influencer, whom Internet users accuse of being born a woman, because, in certain photos, they do not see the shadow of a penis.
The practice can make you smile and is sometimes derided by other Internet users. Nevertheless, “despite their ridiculousness, these accusations are not at all harmless”warns Lexi Webster, associate professor of digital culture at the University of Southampton, England, in an article published in May 2024 on the linguistics studies and discourse analysis site ELAD-SILDA.
The transphobic undertones of these pseudo-surveys are beyond doubt, in the eyes of the American association for the defense of the rights of LGBT people GLAAD. She describes transvestigation as “hate-motivated conspiracy theory”. Indeed, followers of this practice intend to “denounce” hidden gender transitions because they believe that being trans is a bad thing, even a threat to traditional values. In this they adhere to a transphobic discourse which has become widespread in recent years in the political and media sphere, particularly on the far right, which ensures that a trans lobby is currently at work. These pseudo-investigators often attack cisgender people – who are not trans – by launching waves of harassment, GLAAD sees this as proof that transphobia is everyone's business.
“Besides the transphobia (and, more often, misogyny) inherent in pejoratively questioning a person's birth gender by referring only to physical traits, these discourses closely resemble historical applications of pseudo-science for violent purposes”also deplores Lexi Webster. It refers in particular to phrenology, a pseudo-science born in the 19th century according to which the bumps of the skull made it possible to reveal the character of an individual. Some phrenologists then thought that the so-called “primitive” forms characterized vagrancy and criminality.
In addition to its discriminatory nature, transvestigation veers into conspiracy because its followers denounce in turn “illuminati” trans people, the pseudo-trend of “gender inversion of the elites” which prove, according to them, that the elites are morally perverted and want to lead the world astray, especially children. Some still claim that the trans lobby is financed by Jews, favored targets of conspiracy theorists for centuries. Obviously none of this is true.
