A UN expert has warned that France is punishing women for stating safety concerns about men in women’s spaces, after a Paris court fined the French journalist Dora Moutot for comments on a television debate about transgender prisoners.
Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, said on October 2 that she was seriously concerned by Moutot’s conviction and by other proceedings linked to her statements on sex and gender.
“As women, saying that we need to exercise caution around men, particularly where there are reasons to fear for our safety, does not in itself constitute hate speech,” Alsalem said.
Women “should not be sanctioned for expressing concerns about their own safety or that of other women and girls”.
On May 20 the 17th chamber of the Paris judicial court, which hears press-law cases, convicted Moutot of public insult against a person or group on the grounds of sex, sexual orientation or gender identity, and ordered her to pay €4,754 in total.
The judgment included a €1,000 fine, with damages to the civil parties and their legal costs making up the rest.
She has appealed.
The case began as a prosecution for incitement to hatred, violence or discrimination, brought under the 1881 press freedom law by three LGBT associations — Stop Homophobie, Mousse and Adheos — after a France 2 debate on October 15, 2022.
The court reclassified the offence as insult.
It found that her words did “not call, implicitly or explicitly, on the public to engage in violence, discrimination or hatred” against transgender women, but still treated them as “a form of expression that spreads hatred based on intolerance”.
The remarks were made on the programme Quelle époque !, opposite Marie Cau, the first transgender woman elected mayor in France. Cau took the village of Tilloy-lez-Marchiennes, northern France, in 2020 and stood down in January 2025.
Discussing prisons, Moutot referred to cases in the United States and England in which male prisoners convicted of violence against women had been transferred to women’s prisons after identifying as female, and had then assaulted female inmates.
She said she was not claiming that all transgender people did this, “far from it”, but that “as women, we have to be wary of people with penises”.
The court held that describing transgender women as “people with penises” of whom women must be wary reduced them to a male sexual attribute.
This was deemed a public insult.
Moutot also said of Cau: “For me, Marie Cau is a man, a transfeminine man.”
The conviction is not the only case she faces. Moutot is also being pursued over Transmania, the book she published in 2024 with the feminist campaigner Marguerite Stern, after a complaint by another association, SOS Homophobie.
Alsalem has also raised death threats, calls for physical violence, online harassment and doxxing reported against Moutot, and complaints she says were closed without the authors being identified.
She has asked Paris for information on the conviction, the appeal, the other cases, and on what it is doing to let women debate sex and gender without violence or disproportionate limits on expression.
The UN expert has urged the French authorities “to take appropriate measures” to protect the essayist, “while respecting the independence of ongoing judicial proceedings”.
Alsalem, a Jordanian lawyer who has held the mandate since 2021, is one of the independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council. Such experts serve unpaid and do not speak for the UN.
The French Government has not yet replied in public.