Pauline Ferrari: Understanding Masculinist Movements to Better Defend the Rights of Women

You have been documenting masculinist movements for several years, particularly in your book Formés à la haine des femmes. How would you describe these movements today, and what role do attacks against LGBT people play within them?

Masculinist movements have never received as much media attention as they do today. We are at a point where we understand them increasingly well, thanks to the many scientific and journalistic studies, reports, and data available on the subject. Yet, despite all this knowledge, we still struggle to place their political dimension—and particularly their anti-LGBT attacks—in the proper context. These movements continue to be caricatured as relatively recent internet phenomena, supposedly driven by frustrated men, while their political significance is completely overlooked.

What we have observed in France over the past decade is that targeted, politically motivated attacks against LGBT people, particularly transgender people, have been carried out by conservative and reactionary far-right movements working in conjunction with masculinist movements. In the hierarchy these movements have constructed around the respective positions of men and women, LGBT people occupy the lowest rung. According to their logic, anyone who does not conform to their gender norms is placed at the very bottom of the hierarchy.

Social media has played a decisive role in this development. It has enabled these movements to come together, build networks, organize themselves, and spread their ideas more widely. Masculinist theories that circulated mainly online a decade ago have now moved beyond those spaces and entered the mainstream through social media. This phenomenon has helped normalize their rhetoric on a large scale.

In your contribution to the study Anti-LGBTI+ Acts in France: Naming, Classifying and Measuring to Take Action, you explain that anti-LGBT hostility was long underrepresented in your analyses of masculinist movements. What led you to make it a central focus of your work, and how has this changed your understanding of these movements?

I was a member of the Association of LGBT Journalists for several years, and this issue has always been central to my work. When I wrote Formés à la haine des femmes, the section devoted to anti-LGBT hostility associated with masculinist movements was initially much more substantial. However, editorial decisions meant that some sections had to be cut.

Observing the simultaneous rise of reactionary, anti-rights, and anti-choice masculinist movements, alongside what is known as gender disinformation—that is, disinformation primarily based on gender studies, including allegations that well-known women are transgender and attacks against drag queens, among other things—made the connection increasingly obvious. When the Jean-Jaurès Foundation offered me the opportunity to work on these two interconnected issues, I saw it as a chance to address years of silence and focus fully on this subject.

This work confirms something I had been considering for a long time: examining the positions political parties and movements take toward LGBT identities also reveals their broader political orientation. We can see that movements targeting transgender and LGBT people are consistently anti-rights, anti-choice, and anti-feminist. They all belong to the same reactionary political current. The researcher Christine Bard refers to this as the “intersectionality of hatred,” and I think that is a very apt description.

Masculinist movements do not simply hate women—they hate everything feminine, everything they consider insufficiently masculine.

They are particularly violent toward anyone who falls outside their gender norms, regardless of how that person identifies or presents themselves.

You also discuss the long history of links between masculinist movements and attacks on LGBT rights, from La Manif pour tous to campaigns against drag queens and sex education. Focusing on France today, which types of masculinist rhetoric do you find most influential or concerning, and through which channels does it spread?

I feel that we have returned to the kind of moral panics seen in 2012–2013, during the period of La Manif pour tous. The difference is that, at the time, the focus was on same-sex couples, with attempts to draw misleading connections between homosexuality and child sexual abuse. This rhetoric has never disappeared. Today, the figure of the child who must be protected is more central than ever.

This narrative makes it possible to target drag queens who perform shows and read stories to children, as well as gay and transgender people, under the pretext of “protecting children from state-sanctioned mutilation.” It promotes the idea that transgender identity is socially contagious: young people supposedly become transgender because they feel uncomfortable in their own skin and are influenced by online networks that are more powerful than they are.

This disinformation spreads extensively on social media, particularly on X (formerly Twitter), which has become a favored space for conspiracy theories and the far right, as well as on Facebook. But these narratives do not remain confined to the internet. They move into the media and political arenas. Questions are raised in the National Assembly, and politicians sometimes ask, apparently in all sincerity: “Are we not in the process of mutilating children?”

What is striking is the continuity. I have done a great deal of work on EVARS—education in emotional, relational, and sexual life—which was already generating considerable moral panic in 2013, driven by the same groups we see today. The arguments are virtually identical: “Children are being taught to masturbate from kindergarten onward.” The difference is that, in the past, the claim was that this was being done “to make them homosexual,” whereas today the accusation is that it is being done “to make them transgender.”

Journalist Rozenn Le Carboulec demonstrates this very clearly in her book Les humilié·e·s (The Humiliated). There was an attack on civil partnerships (PACS) in the 1990s, an attack on same-sex adoption in the 2010s, and today the target has shifted to transgender people—the most vulnerable members of our communities, who often face several overlapping forms of vulnerability.

Invoking children is an effective rhetorical strategy because everyone claims to love and want to protect them. Yet we know that approximately 160,000 children experience sexual violence every year in France. There is an enormous difference between using children as a moral and political symbol and actually protecting them, an area in which serious shortcomings remain.

This moralizing rhetoric is primarily a way of saying, “We are not homophobic, we are not transphobic; we simply want to protect children.” In practice, however, it amounts to homophobia and transphobia.

Masculinist movements are also very skilled at using pseudoscientific theories to support their worldview. These include evolutionary psychology, social Darwinism, and anything that can supposedly prove both the hierarchy between the sexes and the claim that men biologically need sexual relationships with women, meaning that their behavior is not their fault.

Using pseudoscientific theories to legitimize moral values based on domination, under the guise of “science says so,” is particularly effective among young men. Science carries a strong sense of legitimacy, making it possible to manipulate real or fabricated studies to support almost any argument.

We must also mention movements that describe themselves as feminist, particularly TERF movements (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and femonationalist groups such as Némésis in France. They rely on the same paradoxical combination: on the one hand, biological essentialism and pseudoscientific arguments; on the other, a morality strongly influenced by Christian tradition.

This combination is strange, especially in France, where the separation between faith and science is culturally significant. In every case, these narratives target groups that are already more vulnerable.

In your analysis, you show that many masculinist narratives invoke a conspiracy supposedly intended to “emasculate” men. In your view, how does this victimhood narrative fuel anti-LGBT rhetoric and attacks by masculinist movements?

The Quebec researcher Francis Dupuis-Déri, who has done extensive work on masculinities and masculinist movements, explains this very well. There is no crisis of masculinity, but there are narratives claiming that masculinity is in crisis. Since Antiquity, men have repeatedly used media and political discourse to claim that men are in crisis and that something must be done about it. The substance of this narrative has changed very little, whether we are talking about the time of Julius Caesar or the present day.

Feminist and emancipation movements, whether they concern civil rights or the liberation of LGBT people, provide an ideal opportunity to fuel this narrative. These movements represent groups whose identities do not conform to established gender norms, whose sexuality is not necessarily reproductive, and who demand inclusion in political and professional spaces. All these developments are perceived as a direct threat to cisgender, heterosexual, and male privilege.

This gives rise to particularly revealing conspiracy theories. One of my favorites is the idea that estrogen in drinking water—supposedly originating from female contraceptives—makes men less masculine and explains the increase in homosexuality.

This theory was popularized by Alex Jones on Infowars in 2015. It spread from the United States to English-speaking Canada, then to French-speaking Canada, and eventually to France, retaining essentially the same content throughout. It perfectly illustrates the mechanism: pseudobiological arguments are used to justify the belief that gender roles are innate and that anything disrupting them constitutes an existential threat.

This logic also explains how minor events are blown out of proportion. When Kiddy Smile, a queer Parisian DJ and waacking dancer, performed a DJ set at the Élysée Palace with his dancers—racialized queer performers practicing waacking and voguing—a photograph with Emmanuel Macron immediately fueled conspiracy theories about a supposed “LGBT lobby” at the highest levels of government, along with speculation about the president’s sexuality.

We saw the same mechanism at work during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

You identify several possible solutions in your article: underfunded associations, poorly regulated platforms, and insufficient education. Among these proposals, which concrete measures do you consider most important for curbing the spread of masculinist and anti-LGBT rhetoric?

I believe we need to act on three fronts simultaneously.

First, education. Since September 2025, France has had a new EVARS curriculum—education in emotional, relational, and sexual life. However, it remains very limited: it addresses anti-LGBT hostility only to a small extent and barely covers digital issues, even though teenagers’ friendships, romantic relationships, and sexual relationships increasingly take place online.

The organizations working directly with people on the ground do not have the funding they need. Neither do schools, and teachers who want to address these issues cannot access the necessary training.

This curriculum does not make it possible to combat cyberviolence effectively or to challenge misinformation about sexual health. A great deal of work remains to be done on EVARS, and urgent funding must be provided to organizations carrying out this work on the ground, in schools, in sexual health services, and through advocacy with local and national authorities.

Next, platform regulation. We have seen that when a masculinist account is shut down, an army of fan accounts can immediately spring up in its place. This was notably the case with Andrew Tate in 2022.

Simply saying, “We are shutting down this account,” often reinforces the victimhood narrative: “They want to censor us.” Finding the right balance is difficult. Beyond that, however, platforms are required to comply with French law, which prohibits racist, sexist, and Islamophobic speech.

Yet TikTok, like other platforms, fails to enforce these rules adequately because viral content generates revenue for them. Action must be taken at the European level to require genuinely effective moderation, using both algorithms and human moderators.

Human moderation also presents challenges related to cultural and linguistic context. In French, many insulting expressions can appear harmless once translated into another language. Sexist and misogynistic statements are still treated as forms of “lesser violence,” considered less serious and therefore moderated even less frequently.

Finally, training professionals—including social workers, law enforcement officers, and judges—is essential. Without proper training, victims do not file complaints, and acts of violence go unpunished even when the law would allow them to be sanctioned.

Organizations such as SOS Homophobie produce valuable data. However, that information must actually be used, and the people on the front lines must know how to recognize these narratives and respond appropriately.

This is a systemic, long-term undertaking, but it is absolutely essential.

Notes

Waacking is a dance style that originated in LGBT clubs in Los Angeles during the 1970s. It is characterized by rapid, expressive arm movements.

Voguing is a dance style that emerged in the ballrooms of New York’s Black and Latino LGBT communities during the 1980s. It developed within these cultural competitions and was inspired by fashion-model poses.

Interview conducted by Cristina Asensi-Rodriguez, Communications Officer Apprentice at the RAJA-Danièle Marcovici Foundation.