What was claimed
Brigitte Macron, wife of the French President Emmanuel Macron, is allegedly a man and a picture shows her as a boy during childhood.
Our verdict
This is false. The boy in the picture is Mrs Macron’s brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux.
Picture doesn’t prove baseless conspiracy theory Brigitte Macron is a man
A picture is being shared online with false claims it shows the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, as a boy in childhood.
A screenshot of a post on X (formerly Twitter) includes a picture of a young boy in a checked shirt, alongside a 2018 photo of the French First Lady, and is being shared as a video on Instagram. The posts say: “Brigitte Macron, The French President’s Emmanuel Macron’s Wife is allegedly a MAN and it’s now going Mainstream in France.”
But the claim is false, and is part of a baseless but enduring conspiracy theory which has been fact checked many times that Mrs Macron was not born female.
The picture of the boy is a cropped version of a photo of Mrs Macron’s family. The larger image shows Mrs Macron (whose maiden name was Trogneux) as a child sitting on her mother’s knee, next to her father, Jean Trogneux, and five siblings.
The boy on the left wearing the checked shirt is Mrs Macron’s brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux.
In September 2024, two women who falsely claimed Mrs Macron was transgender, and was actually her brother Jean-Michel, were found guilty of libel.
Mrs Macron and her brother, Mr Trogneux were awarded €8,000 and €5,000 in damages, respectively.
But in a ruling in July, the two women who had been found guilty of libel in September 2024 had their convictions overturned, after the Paris Appeals Court stated they had made the mistake in “good faith” and will no longer have to pay damages.
Mrs Macron is now taking the case to France’s highest appeals court.
We have previously fact checked a post that used an altered picture of a male model with Mrs Macron’s face imposed to claim it showed her as a young man.
False and misleading posts like this can spread quickly online, so it’s important to consider whether what you are seeing comes from a verifiable and reliable source before sharing on social media.
Update 24 July 2025
Update: We’ve updated this article to include the fact that the convictions were overturned on appeal in July 2025.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the claim that Brigitte Macron is a man is a baseless conspiracy theory, and two women who said she was transgender have been found guilty of slander in France.