FRENCH FOLLIES

French President Macron’s wife Brigitte, 24 years his senior, is suing a self-proclaimed spiritual medium and a journalist, for asserting on YouTube that she is transgender. Specifically, her claim is for a “violation of privacy and fundamental personal rights” and “illicit use of her image”.

Consider this in the New Zealand context. Here, the defence would be that being a trans has now been elevated to virtually a superior form of existance and far from being damaging, in fact amounts to praise.

The “fundamental personal (unspecified) rights” claim would be dismissed as meaningless verbiage. And the “illicit use of her image” wouldn’t wash either as public figures are deemed to be fair game for comment, so long as the claims are not suggesting criminality and such-like.

I suspect Brigitte is wasting her time, still these events have the redeeming feature of providing a troubled world with much needed amusement. But given the weakness of her defence, is it possible Brigitte is in fact a bloke?

It’s currently fashionable here with the commercial real estate agency business as I pointed out yesterday re Bayleys Commercial in Auckland. But they’re not the pioneers, rather it wasn’t so long ago when well-known Wellington commercial agent Chris Gollins made the move, he/she hitherto making her mark as Christine. She made the change as she claimed the market never took female agents seriously and the results speak for themselves, Chris, as he now is, being a dominant player in today’s market.