right of reply to the article published in liberation on 12/09/2022
Libération refused to publish our right of reply.
The thread of this article, which consists, from its title, in presenting us as TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) close to the extreme right, to the Manif pour tous and to the conspiracy circles which lead an "anti-trans" fight, is devoid of any foundation. None of our writings express or translate a rejection of trans people and the right of each and everyone to equality and we deny being "anti-trans" or "transphobic". Our widely expressed and assumed positions for the constitutionalization of the right to abortion, for the sharing of domestic tasks, for the recognition of the Shoah, against anti-Semitism, for the reception of refugees, for gay and lesbian marriage are antinomic with any assignment or association of our commitments with the extreme right.Under the guise of an investigation multiplying the quotations, it consists in reality in a sum of unfounded accusations ginned up in particular by testimonies all collected from academics trans activists, which are notoriously unfavorable to us, and this with the only aim of making it lean in the direction probably wanted by its authors.
Ilana Eloit is quoted as saying that the gender critical movement "refers to the anti-gender movements that are the reactionary and conservative movements". This amounts to associating ourselves without explanation or justification to these movements that we are fighting. To be gender critical means that we think that we should deconstruct the notion of gender, instead of deconstructing bodies with surgery and hormones. In our opinion, this is neither reactionary nor conservative.
It is claimed that our current of thought "brews essentialist ideas shared by the extreme right". We say that women are adult human females, which is antinomic with essentialism: it is philosophically called materialism and it has nothing to do with the extreme right.
Ilana Eloit deplores that we did not understand a famous sentence of the essay "The second sex" of Simone de Beauvoir: "one is not born a woman one becomes one". Questioned by one of the authors of the article, Dora Moutot had answered the following without it having been taken up in the article: "To use this quotation out of its context to validate the trans ideology is highly fallacious and shows the ignorance of the work of Beauvoir. This is what Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman: one becomes one. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on within society; it is the whole of civilization that elaborates this intermediate product between the male and the castrate that we call feminine. Here is the true sentence. Simone de Beauvoir also wrote in the second sex: "these biological data are of extreme importance: they play in the history of the woman a role of foreground, they are an essential element of her situation (...) " therefore not, the second SEX is not a book which defends the theories trans activists "
To have pointed out that there would be billionaires like George Soros who would finance the trans lobby has earned us the label of conspiracy theorist. However, it is enough to read the report of LGBT funders to see that the Open Society Foundation founded by George Soros appears in a good place, and to consult the website of this NGO to see that a significant part of the subsidies which are destined to trans associations every year finance a lobbying work which tries to push an ideology.
Finally, Florence Rochefort opposes Anne Fausto Sterling to refute the dichotomous nature of our discourse. In response, we quote the evolutionary geneticist Edith Heard: "Most species on Earth have sex chromosomes. This is what makes them sexual individuals. In mammals, and therefore in humans, females carry XX chromosomes and males carry XY.
