“Girl, can you be-LIEVE what they’ve done to the White House since we left??”
(Public domain photos of UFC Freedom 250, June 2026, and Michelle Obama, December 2014.)
This week, Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday by hosting a UFC cage match on the White House lawn. Given this totally normal and dignified event for a POTUS to hold on Flag Day, it’s entirely unsurprising that a participant would make headlines for derogatory comments about an internationally recognized, widely respected Black woman. Said participant was the mixed martial guy Josh Hokit, who concluded a post-fight interview by shouting, “Michelle Obama is a man.”
Like the lies about President Barack Obama’s birth country, lies about Michelle Obama’s birth-assigned sex have persisted long since the couple left the White House. Of course, the people peddling these lies would not use such vocabulary as “assigned sex”, nor acknowledge that transgender identity is legitimate. To them, gender and sex are strictly binary, and any woman who does not perform femininity to their standards might justifiably be labeled a man – or, perhaps, a lesbian.
Even referring to this baseless claim about Obama as a “conspiracy theory”, as many articles classify it, is giving the peddlers too much credit. This is a lie steeped in misogynoir, a term coined by the Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey to describe the combination of sexism and anti-Black racism. Throughout American history, Black women have been stereotyped as unattractive, animalistic and hypersexual. That Obama is a Princeton- and Harvard-educated woman who has worked as a lawyer, executive director, and author, in addition to being FLOTUS for eight years, does not alter this assessment in the small minds of the bigoted.
All of these harmful stereotypes about Black cis women are frequently applied to trans women as well. Black trans women routinely experience transmisogynoir, the triple malice of sexism, racism, and transphobia. This is the current reality of marginalized women living in a country rooted in white supremacist patriarchy, under a presidential administration working hard to outlaw their existence.
As a transmasculine person, I cannot relate directly to what trans women experience. I did live as a Black girl/woman for over 40 years before my gender transition, including all of Obama’s first term and part of the second. But my body configuration and lived experience do not make me more qualified to speak on womanhood than transfeminine people.
Still, I imagine that to many trans women, it must be distressing to know that, in the minds of many reactionaries, a cis woman being called a man is a horrible insult. Part of this, of course, is the distress and dysphoria trans women feel when they themselves are referred to as men. But I also worry that the way these bogus claims are covered in the mainstream media imply that being trans is itself a horrible thing, instead of the normal variation on humanity that it is.
A cis woman being called a man is certainly entitled to be angry about it, as she is being falsely accused of lying. But there is nothing actually wrong with being a trans woman, which is what transphobes imply when they call her a man. Since many of these bigots liken simply existing as a trans woman to being deviant, predatory, or even a child molester, calling a woman a man is, to them, a grave insult. Trans women, who are susceptible to depression and suicidal ideation, really don’t need more stories suggesting how terrible it is to be “accused” of being one of them.
It certainly doesn’t help when cis women react the way comedian Joan Rivers did after she was recorded referring to Michelle Obama as trans in 2014. Rivers claimed that her remark was “a compliment. She’s so attractive, tall, with a beautiful body, great face, does great makeup.” Besides adding fresh fuel to the lies about Obama, Rivers’ response promoted another stereotype about trans women: that they are glamorous beauties, akin to drag queens. Her equating trans women with gay cis men in drag is evident from her next sentence: “Take a look and go back to La Cage Au Follies (sic). The most gorgeous women are transgender.”
Many trans women absolutely are gorgeous, and some do perform drag. But this conflation of feminine gender expression with gender identity — assuming this “compliment” was even genuine, given the source — does not excuse her ignorant, unfunny remark.
Let’s throw these ridiculous lies and stereotypes into the dustbin of history, where they belong. In the spirit of Pride Month and Juneteenth, let’s celebrate Black womanhood for the joy that it is.
Pax Ahimsa Gethen (they/them) is a queer Black trans writer and editor. They live in San Francisco with their spouse Ziggy.
