This UFC fighter’s Michelle Obama insult showed how racist toxic masculinity can be

President Donald Trump celebrating his 80th birthday with UFC fights on the White House lawn was classless enough. Then Josh Hokit was given a microphone. After the UFC fighter won his cage match at Trump’s flamboyant celebration Sunday night, Hokit, who spoke mostly in disturbingly trite rhymes after his win, managed to further degrade the event. At the conclusion of his post-fight interview with announcer, podcaster and manosphere extraordinaire Joe Rogan, the athlete declared,“Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Many in the crowd of thousands of UFC fans ate it up, and expecting anything less would require an exceptional level of delusion. Misogynoir and transphobia have been lobbed against Obama at least since 2008, when America elected her husband, Barack Obama, president.

Misogynoir was coined by academic Moya Bailey in 2008 to describe the intertwining of racism and misogyny targeting Black women. As pervasive as misogynoir is, it took 15 years for Merriam-Webster to add the word to its dictionary. But even as I write this piece, each time I type misogynoir, spell-check suggests I have made a typo.

While it’s tempting to categorize Hokit’s remark as a random remark that came completely out of left field, the athlete was actually on brand. ESPN reported, “In his postfight interview at UFC 324 in January, Hokit called WNBA star Brittney Griner ‘a man.’” He’s a poster child for misogynoir.

Trump’s entire political persona is crafted in the mold of a strongman, an archetype that couldn’t exist without a heavy dose of toxic masculinity. And when he was elected to the presidency a second time, he brought back to the forefront that regrettable and antiquated version of manhood. Hokit, and a lamentable number of other public figures, have been empowered to borrow the microphone for the sole purpose of espousing misogyny and preaching the shallow gospel of toxic masculinity. 

But showmanship, repressed emotionality and a desperate adherence to benighted notions of manhood aren’t enough by themselves. Toxic masculinity also requires desirability politics informed by white supremacy. And Hokit gave that a shoutout Sunday night.

If toxic masculinity is a declaration of what we are expected to perceive as a quintessential depiction of manhood, then completing that picture requires a similar declaration about what we are expected to perceive as a quintessential depiction of womanhood. As has historically been the case, the beauty of Black women, as a whole, doesn’t align with mainstream ideals of attractiveness. Thus, a Trump supporter’s recycling of a racist trope about the first Black first lady being a man was a natural offshoot of Sunday’s glorification of masculinity.

Obama addressed the misogynoir-laden and transphobic insults, among others, that she has faced in her 2018 book “Becoming.” She writes, “I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel. I’ve heard about the swampy parts of the internet that question everything about me, right down to whether I’m a woman or a man. A sitting U.S. congressman has made fun of my butt. I’ve been hurt. I’ve been furious. But mostly, I’ve tried to laugh this stuff off.”