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Designer Maria B and columnist Orya Maqbool Jan — a pairing we never thought we’d be writing about — sat down for a conversation on a podcast together in which they inexplicably declared in no uncertain terms that Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, is transgender. This is something Brigitte herself has denied, therefore they are wrong. In fact, they’re so wrong they could be liable to a lawsuit.

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte filed a defamation lawsuit in the US in July against Candace Owens, the right-wing American political commentator and podcaster who also falsely declared that Brigitte was trans.

In their complaint, the Macrons said Owens waged a lie-filled “campaign of global humiliation” to promote her podcast and expand her “frenzied” fan base. These lies included that 72-year-old Brigitte was born under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux, the actual name of her older brother, the Macrons said.

“Owens has dissected their appearance, their marriage, their friends, their family, and their personal history — twisting it all into a grotesque narrative designed to inflame and degrade,” the complaint said. “The result,” the complaint added, “is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale.”

In 2024, a French court found two women guilty of slandering the first lady by repeating the claim that she was born a man. In December 2021, Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy spread the same unsubstantiated rumours as Owens later did and were taken to court by Brigitte. The defendants were ordered to pay €8,000 in damages to the first lady, and €5,000 to her brother.

In their podcast, Maria B, whose real name is Maria Butt, and Jan, made wild statements and claims about just about everything — the origins of trans people in Thailand, how the ‘Mera Jism Meri Marzi’ slogan was used to “let the transgenders in”, their support of Trump for saying there are only two genders, claims that “there is no school in Europe that is not teaching kids that they can’t change their gender at any time”, “every transgender person has an AIDS kit in their pocket”, whatever an AIDS kit is, and that you can go to NADRA and change your gender at your will, among many other things.

During their almost-hour-long conversation, they bounced from topic to topic, connecting seemingly unconnected things at warp speed. Case in point, their comments on Brigitte.

While speaking about the mistreatment of trans girls in South East Asia and later Morocco, the designer blamed the issue on the “white race” and “colonisation”. “The French are really into this. Macron’s wife is a transgender, did you know this?” she asked Jan, who said he did know and nodded along, much as he did throughout the podcast to everything Maria B said.

“You can tell from her face,” he claimed.

“From the start I thought she was a little weird. We can tell right away. There was something weird. But now I understand. No matter how much you change you cannot hide it,” said the designer. Making it a point to correct herself everything she referred to Brigitte as “she”, Butt said it was ‘apparent’ from the way Brigitte sat.

Jan interjected that God made women beautiful, to which Butt responded that women have been made naturally beautiful. “A man can do what they like [to change themselves], but at the end of the day, the way he sits, you can tell that this is a man, not a woman,” she said, slouching forward to seemingly indicate that slouching is a trait endemic to men.

We listened to the entire podcast, assuming that there must be some explanation given for this slander but there was none. There were a lot of claims stated as absolute truths, but nothing to back up their allegations about the French first lady. We wonder where Butt got her information from — right-wing American propaganda, perhaps, because these are the talking points that Donald Trump and his cronies so often espouse.

We’ve said a lot about Butt’s self-proclaimed ‘position of authority’ on the topic of transgender people and how much research she’s actually done but we do wonder how much research she’s done on the Macrons’ legal cases against people who slander Brigitte. Perhaps if she actually did some, she wouldn’t have gleefully thrown this misinformation about so casually at the risk of being sued.