A symposium in Nantes intended to raise awareness of the plight of Afghan and Iranian women has been postponed after trans activists threatened to violently ambush the event because of the presence of a gender critical speaker.
The Comité Laïcité République (CLR – Republic Secularism Committee), an organization dedicated to promoting secularism “as a force for reflection, dialogue, with a balanced tone,” issued a statement on April 5 announcing that their symposium – entitled “Women, Life, Freedom” after the mantra of the Iranian women’s protest movement – would be postponed to a later and as yet unspecified date. The event had previously been planned for April 15 at the Château des ducs de Bretagne in Nantes.
The activists were enraged over the planned presence of Marguerite Stern, a French women’s rights campaigner known for having critical stances on gender ideology and the sex trade.
“Numerous threats inciting violence were made on social media, including the distribution of our poster announcing the event crossed out with a knife, with calls for counter-demonstrations due to the presence of Ms. Stern, an activist feminist, critic of transgender ideology,” read the CLR’s statement.
“This led the organizers to postpone this event for the sake of preserving the safety of the speakers, of all the participants, and to prevent the Château from suffering any damage. The Comité Laïcité République lodged a complaint and informed the Prefect of these threats.”
The CLR added that as a “staunch defender of freedom of expression since its creation,” the group would not participate in the censorship of Stern, and especially not “under the threat of violent groups who excel in insults, and do not ever argue.”
Speaking with Le Figaro regarding the threats of violence from trans activists, Stern compared the accusation of “transphobia” to the label of “Islamophobia”, saying that both terms are used to silence critics. She noted that, according to her detractors, “recalling biological facts and wanting to protect women and children is considered the worst affront.”
Stern is set to speak at the event regarding the state of feminism following the Me Too era. The description of her presentation also mentions that Stern was ousted from her own movement in direct response to her concerns about transgender ideology. Les Collages Contre les Féminicides, a direct action campaign she launched in 2019, involved the creation of murals calling attention to male violence against women and girls.
By January 2020, just under a year after she founded the collective, Stern’s project had been “hijacked” by gender ideology, a situation that she described in a series of posts on Twitter.
“Debates on trans activism are taking up more and more space in feminism, and even garnering all the attention. I interpret this as a new male attempt to prevent women from expressing themselves,” she wrote. “At all times, men have tried to silence women by silencing their revolts. Today they are doing it from within by infiltrating our struggles and taking center stage.”
“I am in favor of deconstructing gender stereotypes, and I believe that trans activism only reinforces them. I observe that men who want to be women suddenly start wearing makeup, to wear dresses and heels. And I consider it an insult to women to consider that it is the tools invented by the patriarchy that make us women. We are women because we have vulvas. It is a biological fact,” Stern elaborated.
She revealed that as the collective made the decision to expel her, they posted a photo to the group’s Instagram account of some of the members next to a mural which read, “Des sisters, pas des cisterfs“, or, “Sisters, not cisterfs,” a portmanteau of the term “cisgender” and “TERF,” a slur frequently used to call for violence against women who reject the belief that men can become women.
Over the past three years, Stern has become a lightening rod for trans activist aggression, enduring harassment both online and in public. After being ostracized by her own collective, Stern continued to campaign for women’s rights and in 2020 she created L’Amazone, which expands upon her previous street artwork but also organizes demonstrations against the prostitution and pornography industries.
Trans activists have targeted L’Amazone‘s street murals, and last summer went so far as to destroy a memorial to the infant victims of shaken baby syndrome.
The mural was paper-based art plastered near a sidewalk creating a collage with the names and ages of 14 babies who had died as a result of the injury. Most of the infants were aged 1 to 13 months.
On International Women’s Day 2021, Stern was pelted with eggs by trans activists in a coordinated and premeditated assault. She, along with members of L’Amazone and the Collective for the Abolition of Pornography and Prostitution (CAPP) had gathered to hold a demonstration at the Place de la République in Paris. The women soon found themselves swarmed and outnumbered by trans activists who called them “SWERFs”, for Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and shouted, “No feminism without whores.”
Many of the women protesting against the sex industry were themselves survivors of prostitution, but this didn’t deter the trans activists. A menacing threat was spray painted on a statue where the women were gathered which read, “Save a trans person, kill a TERF.”
Last October, women of L’Amazone were physically assaulted by trans activists who tore up their signs and hurled slurs at them while they marched in Paris. Surrounding the women, trans activists screamed “men can have abortions” in apparent retort to the participants’ opposition to gender ideology. They also yelled “TERFs get out,” and “stop transphobia!” During the attack, one women’s rights advocate sustained a broken finger as she was grabbed and shoved.
“I got used to the idea that my life, on a personal and professional scale, will never be the same again. When we start to speak publicly about transgenderism, there is a before and an after,” Stern told Le Figaro. “Only one thing terrifies me more than the threats I receive: the idea of stopping talking.”
A venue has offered to host a talk by Stern in May in support of her campaigning. Café Laïque Bruxelles shared news of the speech by praising “her courageous fight” and promising prospective attendants that “this conference will not be cancelled.” Just three months prior, the cafe was targeted by trans activists who stormed inside and hurled feces in protest over speakers critical of childhood medical transitioning.
Most recently, Stern has partnered with female sexuality influencer Dora Moutot on a project they call Femelliste, which “fights to maintain the sex-based rights of women.”
“Being a woman is not a feeling or a sentiment or a fantasy or a taste in clothes but a biological and sexual reality,” the Femelliste manifesto reads. “Gender is a set of social constructions that lock women and men into stereotyped shackles from which feminists have always tried to free themselves.”
For discussing female anatomy and sexuality, co-founder Moutot was similarly targeted by trans activists for abuse, and is currently facing a criminal complaint, the first of its kind in the nation, over accusations of “misgendering” two transgender public figures.
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