In his comment to our recent work (Simakov et al2008 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion50 105010), Aydemir has asserted that poloidal plasma flow reversal is not a valid response to toroidal magnetic field reversal in an up–down symmetric tokamak, and that the toroidal plasma flow must reverse instead. We show that this assertion is wrong due to his misunderstanding of the corresponding symmetry transformation.