right of reply to the article published in Le Monde on 15/09/2022

Read the article published in Le Monde "Feminism: 'It is absurd to say that the claims of trans people would slow down the cause of women'" with insertion of our right of reply.

Le Monde refused to publish our right of reply.

This article attacks us in a dishonest way by accusing us of being "anti-trans", and totally distorts our thinking. We are not anti-trans, we are pro-women. In the same way that criticizing Islam is not Islamophobic, criticizing transgender ideology is not transphobic. To be transphobic is to want to discriminate or call for hatred of trans people, which is absolutely not our case. This article is based on misinterpretations of our discourse, calling us "essentialists", even going so far as to associate us with the extreme right, which we dispute, rather than responding to our arguments. 

We are gender critics, which means that we think that the notion of gender should be deconstructed, instead of deconstructing bodies with surgery and hormones. We think that a man who likes pink and makeup is neither a woman nor born in the wrong body. 

Camille Froidevaux-Metterie states that "it is absurd to assert that the claims of trans people would hold back the cause of women". We respond that women are penalized by transgender ideology: whether in sports competitions, in enclosures where women should be able to feel safe, and even in militant action such as the collages against feminicides hijacked to call for the murder of women qualified as "TERF", or the call for a boycott of the feminicide count held since 2016 by the collective "Feminicides by mates or exes" on the pretext that it would not include transfeminine males.

To say that women are adult human females is incompatible with essentialism: it is what is philosophically called materialism. To say that being a woman is a feeling defined by "a relationship placed under the double sign of objectification and alienation" is an insult to women who are married by force, excised, sold, prostituted, raped, harassed and humiliated because of their sex. Camille Froidevaux-Metterie wrote however in her work "The body of the women, the battle of the intimate" : "The feminists had for a long time difficulty to think the body of the women otherwise than as a vector of alienation which locks them".

She accuses us of erasing three decades of feminist thought. The Amazons, the witches, the women of the MLF, the suffragettes, the Kurdish fighters of the YPG all have one thing in common: their gender. Our discourse is not reduced to biology: we note that feminism has always fought for females. To refute this is to want to change the definition of feminism.

She accuses us of reducing women to "their sexual and procreative bodies according to a typically patriarchal logic". We have never considered that women should be reduced to their bodies. On the other hand, we consider that this body is the only thing which makes it possible to define what a woman is. Admitting this biological reality does not oblige to reproduce or to have sexual relations and is not patriarchal.