The now infamous UFC fighter, Josh Hokit
After winning his match at UFC 250 Josh Hokit famously concluded his remarks saying, “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a MAN!! Am I right America?!” Not since Joan Rivers called Michelle a “transgender” in July 2014 has anyone so publicly dared to question Michelle’s sex. The fact that Rivers died unexpectedly two months later did little to discourage speculation.
To be sure, the media expressed horror at Hokit’s allegation—not that there’s anything wrong with being a man—but the allegation did not surprise me. Having written several books about the Obamas, I am asked if Michelle is a man all the time. Inquiring minds want to know.
Not until I consulted with filmmaker Joel Gilbert on his 2022 book and film, Michelle Obama 2024, could I say with confidence that, although Michelle has remade herself in any number of ways, she did not remake herself into a female. She was born that way.
From age seven on, Michelle attended the Mayfair Academy, a tap and jazz dance institute. There are plenty of photos from her Mayfair days to confirm she is, in fact, a female—a large female, but a female. Height runs in the family. Her brother Craig is 6’ 6.” If Michelle had transitioned, she would have had to do so before the age of seven. That didn’t happen.
Less easily debunked—much less—is the question of Barack Obama’s sexuality. The reader may recall Joan Rivers’s full quote from 2014. Having just officiated a gay wedding, Rivers was asked whether there would ever be a gay president. Rivers replied, “We already have it with Obama, so let’s just calm down.” She then added without prompting, “You know Michelle is a trans….a transgender. We all know it.”
I have explored much of the gay Obama trope before—the Larry Sinclair accusations, the suggestive poems about Frank Marshall Davis, the Donald Young murder, the drowning of Tafari Campbell—but what remains irrefutable are the letters Obama wrote as a young man to college girlfriend Alex McNear. These letters are not a right wing hoax. They were unearthed by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian David Garrow after Obama left office.
Years before homosexuality was fashionable, Obama told McNear that he viewed gay sex as “an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life.” He continued, “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination. My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so.” What straight man thinks such thoughts, much less expresses them?
The Obamas have spoken openly about the strife in their marriage in and around the year 2000. Both have attributed it to Barack’s outsized political ambitions, not to his adventures in androgyny. His political ambitions would have precluded him from ever speaking honestly about his sexual ambiguity.
This ambiguity did not stop Obama from becoming a father. Both of his daughters, however, were conceived through in-vitro fertilization, a lengthy and expensive process that requires close cooperation of both husband and wife, with the wife bearing the daily burden.
Sasha Obama
In her bestseller Becoming, Michelle speaks at length about the IVF conception of daughter Malia who was born in July 1998. About daughter Sasha’s IVF conception she spares barely a sentence. Born on June 10, 2001, Sasha would have been conceived around September 10, 2000. This was not a happy time in the Obama’s marriage.
In his 2020 memoir A Promised Land, Barack tells a revealing story about an August 2000 trip to Los Angeles to attend the Democratic National Convention. Still smarting from his landslide loss in the Democratic congressional primary months earlier, Barack faced even more humiliation in Los Angeles.
Malia Obama
When Barack arrived at LAX and tried to rent a car, he was turned down because his “American Express card was over its limit.” The credentials a friend had promised him, he discovered, did not allow him access to the convention floor. “Almost forty” and “broke,” Barack ended up spending the night on his friend’s couch and heading back to Chicago just as Al Gore gave his acceptance speech.
Roughly a month later, Sasha was conceived. Gilbert found it “implausible” that the Obamas would have decided to undertake a process this emotionally fraught at a time when they were deeply in debt and barely on speaking terms. In Becoming, Michelle describes how the ordeal caused her to feel “a first flicker of resentment involving politics and Barack’s unshakable commitment to the work.” It was far from the first and more than a flicker.
Martin Nesbitt
In Michelle Obama 2024, Gilbert speculates: “Close Obama family friend Martin Nesbitt, whose wife was Michelle’s obstetrician, is the one person in the Obama orbit who looks strikingly like Sasha, right down to the teeth pattern. His daughter Roxanne Nesbitt closely resembles Sasha as well. Could Martin Nesbitt have been consoling Michelle a little too much during her relationship strain with Barack?”
To get the inside skinny, Gilbert ventured to the Chicago home of Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson and asked her an admittedly uncomfortable question, an exchange that is captured in the documentary:
Roxanne Nesbitt
“Can I ask you one personal question?” said Gilbert..
“What is that?” Marian replied.
“Is Sasha Obama the daughter of Barack and Michelle? They say she doesn’t look like Malia.”
Marian did not even seem shocked by the question. “No she doesn’t,” she answered, “but she sure does look like Michelle.”
Now if only someone in the media with Gilbert’s moxie would ask the Obamas an equally direct questions about Russia collusion.
I am trying to plumb the depths of how deeply I do not care about any of this and still have not hit bottom.
I only care that Barack Obama was a lousy, divisive President and she was a lousy entitled hostile First Lady.
Oddly enough I forgive them both if they would just both STFU already. Go away.
I don't really care if Obama was the first gay president, or even whether Michelle Obama is a chick or a dude. What upset me was when he totally destroyed my health insurance.