UFC fighter's Michelle Obama smear reveals much about MAGA bigotry
There's a reason she's been a target for so long.
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Last week, following Trump’s drearily garish UFC White House South Lawn event, heavyweight Josh Hokit decided to lower the tone even further.
In a post-fight, in-the-ring interview with a desperately smiling Joe Rogan, Hokit bellowed, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” (Watch below if you can stomach it.)
The people gathered around the ring reacted mostly with silence and puzzlement. Dana White, the UFC CEO, subsequently sent out a text message calling the comment “nasty and false.”
Trump, though, did not disavow the remark. Instead, he appears to have smiled.
Given the depth of Trump’s submersion in right-wing derp, he probably knew what many others at the event did not: Hokit’s grotesque slur did not come out of nowhere.
The right has pushed conspiracy theories claiming that Michelle Obama is trans for over a decade. More, white supremacists and their ilk have degendered and defeminized Black women for hundreds of years, using the claim that Black women aren’t really women as an excuse for humiliating, brutalizing, enslaving, and murdering them.
Even if the disgusting smear is not new, it highlights the ways in which the status, dignity, and rights of marginalized people are intertwined. The attack on trans people is not just an attack on trans people; it is also, and deliberately, an attack on Black women, on women of color, and ultimately on all women, on all Black people, and on the political party which the majority of all those groups call their own.
Some Democrats have wavered in their support for trans people during the Trump presidency. But this kind of smear directed at a Democratic party leader at a White House event should make it abundantly clear that throwing trans people under a wheeled conveyance will inevitably mean allowing said conveyance to run down and decimate large parts of the coalition. We need to fight back for everyone if we are going to fight back for anyone, because it is the right thing to do, and because fascists, in their hate, do not distinguish between us.
History of a smear
The claim that Michelle Obama is trans appears to have started with comedian Joan Rivers in 2014.
Rivers, then 81, sneered following a book signing that then-president Barack Obama was gay. She added that Michelle was “a transgender”. (She used an offensive slur for trans people as well.)
Rivers refused to apologize, claiming that she was actually complimenting Obama since “the most gorgeous women are transgender.” Others on the right, however, understood that misgendering someone is in fact an insult, and they ran with it.
Far right conspiracy theorist and liar Alex Jones boosted the slur on his website InfoWars, claiming that “it’s fair to question everything this administration says.” He added that “every time I look at Michelle or Michael Obama … something doesn’t look right … she’s got shoulders that are wider than a man’s.” (He threw in the obligatory anti-trans slur as well.)
These smears rapidly spread and have continued to circulate for 12 years now. Photographs of Michelle Obama have been altered to make her look more masculine. Viral Facebook posts have questioned her gender identity. A fake video citing Amazon’s Alexa as a source asserted in 2023 that Michelle’s birth records show she is a man.
The reason these attacks have gained traction is, obviously, because the right is filled with disgusting bigots who hate women, Black people, queer people, and Democrats. But the attacks also resonate with a long, ugly history of masculinizing or (per scholar Jules Gill-Peterson) “ungendering” Black women. It’s not an accident that one of the pioneering American feminist statements by a Black woman, Sojourner Truth, is a passionate rebuke of gender stereotypes and of misgendering.
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?
Truth is saying that she is as good as a man and deserves the same rights as a man. But she is also insisting that she is a woman despite the fact that, as a Black women, has been expected to do hard manual labor throughout her life, in contrast to the (white) feminine ideal of delicacy, fragility, and domesticity. As scholar Jordana Davis writes, “while feminist movements were fighting for White women’s rights to pursue higher education, join the workforce, and take on more active roles in society, Black women were never expected to not work.”
The assumption that Black women are masculine, or that they are not really women, leads to ugly discrimination and violence. Black patients are 40 percent less likely than white patients to be prescribed pain medication. Doctors don’t trust Black patients, and often believe they have a higher pain tolerance — reflecting the ways in which both Black men and women are hypermasculized and seen as stoic, strong, and fit for drudgery and labor.
For Black women in particular, this has contributed to brutal maternal mortality rates; they are almost three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Unsurprisingly, this kind of gendered bigotry puts Black trans woman at especial risk; a terrifying 78 percent of trans women murdered in the US in 2024 were Black.
The defeminizing of Black women also affects their encounters with police and authorities. A 2021 study of interpersonal domestic violence found that police “often trivialized and discounted” Black women’s experiences of victimization “while masculinizing their use of force against their partners.” A 2017 study found that Black girls were viewed as requiring “less protection and nurturing” than their white counterparts, an attitude which helps explain why Black girls are six times more likely to be suspended than white girls.
One Black woman who has been repeatedly discriminated against through denying her identity as a woman is world-champion runner Caster Semenya. Semenya, a Black cis woman, has been fighting for years for the right to compete in Olympic events without artificially lowering her naturally high testosterone levels.
“These kind of people should not run with us,” Italian runner Elisa Cusma said after losing to Semenya in a heat, making the bigotry very plain. “For me, she is not a woman. She is a man.”
Intertwined hate
The attacks on Semenya recall, and are built on, the current global attack on the participation of trans women in sports. These attacks have been given credence not only by the wildly transphobic GOP, but by many Democratic party leaders.
California governor and 2028 presidential contender Gavin Newsom said it was “deeply unfair” to allow trans girls to participate in girls’ sports events. His words have been echoed by other 2028 hopefuls like former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Newsom, Buttigieg, and Harris might argue that Semenya is a special case given her elevated testosterone. But the fact is that Olympic athletes are all physically unusual. Swimmer Michael Phelps has flipper-like feet and an astonishing lung capacity. Fans and athletic bodies understand that that is a reason to marvel at his ability, not a reason to disqualify him.
More, there is extensive evidence that athletes of color are regularly singled out as too masculine by people who have very much not measured their testosterone levels. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has been repeatedly, and falsely, accused of being a man. So has Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Tang. The trans panic has also led to bullying and attacks on high school girl athletes who have been falsely accused of being trans — and there’s little doubt that such attacks will disproportionately target Black girls and girls of color.
Black women are associated with trans women in order to target them for degendering, discrimination, and violence. Similarly, people associated with Black women — like, for example, all Democrats, since Black women are the base of their party — can be smeared. This is what has been happening in the current Senate race in Texas, where Republicans have repeatedly claimed that Democratic nominee James Talarico is trans and not a man.
The attacks on Talarico seem ridiculous — as for that matter do the attacks on Michelle Obama. Talarico is a cis man; Michelle Obama is cis woman. This is the truth, and everyone knows it.
But when people lie about Michelle Obama’s gender, they aren’t really trying to convince voters (or UFC fans) of anything. Rather, these smears are deployed to assure an in group of bigots and fascists that they have the right, and the power, to determine who is male and who is female; whose identity is respected and whose is not, and who can be insulted, bullied, disenfranchised, and murdered with impunity.
Fascists believe they are the ultimate arbiters of the meaning and content of the identities of trans people, nonbinary people, Black people, Jews, women, Democrats, and more. And as Martin Niemöller famously pointed out, if you allow those fascists to come for one group you don’t care about, you will eventually find them at your own door.
The way to respond to the attacks on Michelle Obama or Talarico is not to try to distance Democrats from trans people. It’s to declare firmly that fascists are liars and bigots, and to refuse to allow them power over any of us.
That’s it for today
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For a buncha warriors, the MAGA cult is so scared of the wimmins. And blacks. And Latinos. And Jews. And Muslims. And (fill in the blank)
I have been told that transgender rights are unpopular, and therefore that if Democrats are to defeat MAGA Republicans we must abandon transgender people, and transgender children in particular. We must throw them under the bus, as the cliche goes. Nope. I won’t vote for any Democrat who isn’t a vocal supporter and defender of transgender people. And if you tell me that my attitude is dooming the country to more years of disastrous Republican rule, and that the triumph of Trumpism will be my fault if I don’t support the imperfect alternative, I will be unmoved. It’s everyone or no one.