Karla Sofía Gascón is a man and very much looks like one. He identifies, however, as a woman, and also attempts to “present” as female. The Spanish actor has appeared in a number of TV shows and movies — mostly minor ones — but because our culture currently celebrates delusion, Gascón was granted the Best Actress Award along with three of his co-stars at the Cannes Film Festival for his role in Emilia Pérez.
The press celebrated the award as a win for everyone, announcing that Gascón is “the first openly trans actor to win a major prize at Cannes.” Gascón tearfully dedicated the award to “all the trans people who are suffering,” which triggered more delighted press accolades and celebration from LGBT groups.
“Tomorrow, there will be plenty of comments from terrible people saying the same things about all of us trans people,” he said. “But I want to end on a message of hope. To all of them, like Emilia Perez, we all have the opportunity to change for the better, to become better people.” Just in case anyone missed his hope-filled, uplifting message, he ended on a menacing note: “Let’s see if you bastards change.”
As usual, many people who do not, in fact, think that Gascón is a woman obediently played along. Except for Marion Maréchal, a conservative politician and the head of France’s Reconquête! party list for the European elections. On May 26, she posted her objection on X:
Her remarks, translated, read: “It is therefore a man who receives the prize for best actress in Cannes. The progress for the left wing is the erasing of women and mothers.” Maréchal is a conservative Catholic politician, the niece of National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen, and one of the most interesting politicians in France — I interviewed her several years ago about her views on a range of social issues and met her at the farmer’s protests in Brussels earlier this year. She has been a staunch opponent of gender ideology for years and one of the few French politicians willing to speak up.
In response, Gascón is suing her. This might be a good time to mention that Gascón, who is 52, lived as a man until the age of 46 before identifying as a woman.
Six LGBT groups filed a complaint with the authorities against Maréchal for the sin of “transphobic insult. Gascón followed that up with his own legal complaint for “sexist insult on the basis of gender identity”; a faux woman accusing the blond darling of the French Right of a faux crime. (Consider the irony of a man accusing a woman for calling him a man, of sexism. Anyone who invented this storyline and pitched it to a Hollywood studio 10 years ago would have been laughed at.)
The accusation is serious. The 34-year-old French politician could, if convicted of “transphobic insult,” be sentenced to a year in prison and be subject to a €30,000; if the authorities decide to charge her with “sexist insult due to one’s gender identity,” the fine would be a lesser but still substantial €3,750.
In an interview with Radio France Internationale, Maréchal responded to the legal complaint: “I will not be prevented from continuing to say what is the truth. Being a woman or a man is a biological reality, whether you like it or not. The XX or XY chromosomes cannot be surpassed.”
As G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.”
He was right — except these days, it’s usually a woman getting howled down.
