STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Doctored Pic

Does a photo show a young Brigitte Macron with the implication that it shows her before she transitioned from male to female? No, that's not true: The photographer who took the picture confirmed to Lead Stories that the person is not Macron. The image showing a topless person with French first lady Macron's face has been doctored. The original image is of a young man from 2009.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X on February 5, 2025. It said:

The French Government haven't denied the rumours, I wonder why that is.

This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Feb 5 19:39:30 2025 UTC)

A reverse image search (archived here) of the image on the left on the website tineye.com returned a link to a photo on the Shutterstock (archived here) agency website. The image is of a man with the same body and no tattoo on his chest. The caption says it was uploaded on March 7, 2009, and reads, "portrait of young man with pirsing in eyebrow standing at the wall." Here is a screenshot of the image on the agency website taken by Lead Stories:

(Source: Shutterstock screenshot taken on Wed Feb 5 19:48:43 2025 UTC)

Photographer Elena Rostunova confirmed to Lead Stories via direct message on Instagram on February 6, 2025, that the image was not of Macron.

The photo of Macron on the right is a black-and-white version of one from the Italian government website from a 2023 visit by the president of Italy to Paris at the Louvre. Here is the original photo:

(Source: quirinale.it website screenshot taken on Wed Feb 5 19:42:11 2025 UTC)

Macron has fought back against false claims that she was born a man and transitioned to a woman, winning a court case against two women found guilty of slander for accusing her of having undergone a gender transition, as the BBC reported (archived here).

At the time this was written, the claim had previously been reviewed by Reuters in 2024.

Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims regarding Brigitte Macron can be found here.