Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on May 14, 2025. The Observatory translated it into English from French. I have edited it, to the best of my ability, to align with Minding the Campus’s style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.
I am one of the many feminist writers and left-wing activists—women and men—who are being “cancelled” for thinking that does not conform to “woke” dictates.
My sin is threefold. Having spoken out publicly against marriage—whether heterosexual or homosexual—when it had become a left-wing indicator. Having opposed the medicalization of assisted reproduction for non-sterile lesbians, because I believe it is unnecessary to go to a clinic to be inseminated with frozen sperm when it can be done at home. And today because I dared to write a book about girls becoming boys by proposing a so-called “butch” alternative to gender transition, as the Americans say. “Butch” refers to “masculine” girls who “pass” as a man, that is, who “pass” from one sex to the other by dressing in pants and openly assuming their desires for women to lead a free and independent life. When 75 percent of people who “transition” from one sex to a gender are girls, this raises questions about the status of girls in our society. And when they’re offered hormones and surgery as a solution to their malaise, it deserves scrutiny. And it should spark debate on the progressive left. But the woke don’t want to hear about it. Homosexuality is no longer emancipatory. Gender transition is becoming the solution to loves that don’t conform to heterosexual stereotypes.
So, we boycott books, we hide them in bookstores, we pressure journalists not to review them, we sabotage open places, like in Rennes, the bar “La Part des Anges,” which had to close after a neo-feminist-trans attack. The violence of the refusal of any critical speech has taken on unimaginable proportions in our democracy, a sign that our society is in serious trouble.
But that’s not all.
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Today, our work is being stolen with complete moral impunity, as happened to me recently with two documentaries about Violette Morris, even though I am her biographer. I was excluded from the first after doing a three-hour interview with the director because the team wouldn’t tolerate the presence of a historian who had written a supposedly anti-trans book, which they hadn’t read, obviously. The other documentary filmmaker censored me because my presence hindered her plan to make Violette Morris an icon of trans activism. Falsifying history by silencing any argument that contradicts ideological presuppositions has once again become a practice that has become acceptable. Because ideology has replaced history. And on the political side, ideology has supplanted any sense of justice. Thus, lesbians are simply thrown out of LGBT centers funded by the public authorities to defend “LGBT rights.” Colonized by trans activists, these centers no longer want universalist feminists in their territory. Trans ideology rules, speaking loudly and clearly in place of women under the pretext that they “feel like a woman” and, for some trans people, “feel like a lesbian,” which is the height of irony.
But can we really call the cohort of censors who are rampant everywhere to restore norms and prohibitions woke? In fact, an entire ideological system of thought control, of revisionism of history and science, has been put in place in recent years, part of a long history of repression. From Renaissance inquisitors hunting witches to royal censors stifling any challenge to the absolute monarchy of Divine Right, through Stalinism, Nazism, and all dictatorial powers, there has been no shortage of ways to silence criticism. What’s new today is that the censors claim to be oppressed minorities. They demand justice by relying on the power of technoscience, that of the pharmaceutical industry and, last but not least, by activating the equally powerful spring of blaming the West for slavery and colonization.
It’s a great honor to call them woke. What’s so woke about these persecutors of heretics who ignore psychological bisexuality and believe that sex is “assigned” at birth, that the Other does not exist, that equality is identity, and that the restoration of gender stereotypes is an identity-building process?
Freedom of thought has been a long struggle led by truly awakened people who had distanced themselves from the mainstream and dominant beliefs.
For Buddhists, spiritual awakening is synonymous with self-realization and “liberation.” Our censors are more like enlightened people blinded by the certainty of having found THE answer to their existential problems. The fact that they violently cancel those who don’t fall into line clearly shows that deep within themselves lies doubt about the validity of their beliefs. Wasn’t it the psychoanalyst Jung who said: “Fanaticism is the overcompensation of doubt.”
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Image: “Transgender Pride Flag” by Mfhelms on Wikimedia Commons
