The Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fight ended on the lawn of the White House with Josh Hokit beating Derrick Lewis. A total surprise. An unexpected victory for Hokit. With the eruption of cheers, Hokit was asked about his victory. While mentioning a list of joys with the victory, he reached out to President Donald Trump, gave him a chain, and offered praise of him. Not surprisingly, President Trump, who is a fan of MMA, was in attendance as a major supporter of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Josh Hokit’s praise of President Trump was not a surprise. While not a surprise, such hyperbolic flattery looks pathetic for these highly trained fighters, but to each is their own way of life.
What then followed surprised me, even though it should not have. Josh Hokit, without any prompt but in the presence of President Trump, said, “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right America?” Podcaster, UFC commentator, and former actor Joe Rogan laughed. In fact, there was not a single rebuke by the UFC, CEO of UFC Dana White, President Trump, or the White House. Only a day after the fight and with backlash from various corners of the US did Dana White respond by condemning it.
Why should any of this matter? Was it just a harmless use of words? The naming of Michelle Obama as a “man” did political ideological work that wove together very dangerous and toxic American politics at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Anti-Black racism, misogyny, and transphobia structured the space, in and outside the ring, of normative and desired whiteness.
The attack on Michelle Obama is vile to say the least, and despicable and racist to be honest. This naming of Michelle Obama as a “man” is part of the long history of the simultaneous fascination with and defiling of Black women. In her brilliant book, Vénus Noire (2020), Robin Mitchell examines the case of Sarah Baartman and the transhistorical practices of white supremacy, misogyny, and anti-Black racism. Mitchell details that Baartman was born in South Africa and taken away to show across Europe for the entertainment of the white European audiences. Men and women in Europe paid to see Sarah’s half naked body, there was a public fascination with her body as the sign of difference from normative, desired white femininity. Her body was also used for scientific studies, but without her consent. Sarah Baartman’s body was central to the white gaze as a way to claim itself in relations of opposition, while at the same time desiring the very same Black body. The juxtaposition of Blackness in close proximity to whiteness in colonial Europe was necessary to construct the Black body as also human, but not fully human and without the qualities of whiteness. This contradictory relationship supported and legitimated the corresponding forms of violence—slavery, lynching, incarceration.
Positioning Michelle Obama as a man in disguise engenders the act of surveillance upon her body, Black women’s bodies, and the bodies of trans people. It displaces the moral and ethical failures and the dangers of white men, like Hokit and Trump, onto the bodies of Black, Brown, and trans people. Hokit, even though he won the fight, was basically unknown in the larger public media landscape, with little to no traction within the sporting media landscape, and was recognized within MMA as a controversial, petty, and juvenile-minded fighter. Thus, his lack of iconicity could be managed through the racist, transphobic depictions of Michelle Obama.
This is not too far from Donald Trump mocking the Obamas as apes. In this respect, for Hokit to portray a strong MMA (white) masculinity, his skill level and merit did not matter on this racist landscape as much as his diatribes against a wide swath of minoritized, marginalized communities. Like Trump, who rose to fame through racist, transphobic, xenophobic discourses, Josh Hokit, through his anti-Black and transphobic language, secures a valued place within the MAGA racist landscape.
What we see with this attack on Michelle Obama is also an attack on all women. Hokit’s horrible statements refuse the many possibilities for how women want to live their lives. He stigmatizes women who are tall and fit by stating that they are men and not feminine. His gaze becomes a disciplining, stifling logic that polices women. This is evident not only in what Hokit said about Obama but also in the very structure of this outrageous MMA spectacle to celebrate the 250-year anniversary of the United States. Basically, the event socially, morally, and politically regressed to 1776. 1776 came alive on the White House lawn in 2026. Even though there is a tremendous rise and popularity of women’s sports, including women’s MMA, not a single card featured a match between women.
All the fights were between men. Since women were enfranchised only in 1920, the UFC fight did not pretend to care about women and women’s sporting pleasures. Rather, women were at the event only as audience members, not even as commentators. With all the important fights for Title IX and the rise of women’s sports, the presidential grounds and the UFC fighters claimed their sporting grandeur through the exclusion of women fighters.
If this heterosexual tough-white-guy trope is the dominant form of masculinity, why does it have to address itself in relation to anybody other than other men who practice this form of hegemonic masculinity? Why did Hokit go after Michelle Obama? Why did Hokit not try to use this moment to verbally or physically spar with Donald Trump? Michelle Obama’s Blackness and woman-ness were not a threat to him. However, her Blackness and woman-ness are needed for the very structuring of this heterosexual white masculinity. As Judith Butler (1993) and E. Patrick Johnson (2003) have shown in their scholarship, masculinity, especially the white heterosexual kind, needs the very thing that it must repudiate.
This is the trend of power. It is weak. It is unstable. It is anxious. For Hokit, his heterosexual masculinity in a very homoerotic sport like MMA has to be consolidated through racist, transphobic rhetoric. In fact, in sporting circles across the United States, which I discussed in my book Desi Hoop Dreams (2015), the homoerotism in men’s sports is mediated through homophobia, misogyny, and transphobia. If you look at his actions on the sporting ground where he is expected to practice this dominant heterosexual, cis-gendered white masculinity, it is not guaranteed. He can lose matches, which puts his tough masculinity in doubt. But he can always secure it and secure his whiteness through the attacks on women, communities of color, and marginalized communities.
Our worlds and our lives are at risk when men feel that their manhood is only possible through various forms of violence. Let us reimagine masculinity and practice ways of being with each other that is affirming, caring, and loving. We need vulnerable, caring, and coalition-centered practices of masculinity to create and sustain vibrant worlds. Instead of attacking trans girls and trans women in sports, instead of attacking Black people in the streets and in our sporting venues, and instead of positioning a toxic white masculinity as the only site for desire, let us imagine identities and relations that opens a wide set of social spaces for everyone to claim belonging and sustain each other.
Stanley Thangaraj studies immigrant and refugee communities in the U.S. South to understand how they manage the black-white racial logic through gender and the kinds of horizontal processes of race-making. His monograph Desi Hoop Dreams: Pickup Basketball and the Making of Asian American Masculinity (NYU Press, 2015) looks at the relationship between race and gender in co-ethnic-only South Asian American sporting cultures.