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New Statesman​

Why do right-wing 'transvestigators' believe Michelle Obama is a man?

Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP A new fetish has evolved. For a long time, it was easy to predict the archetypal sexist vitriol spewed by anonymous, vaguely Nordic X accounts whenever a woman came close to the highest seats of political power. But lately, their fascination with female authority has deepened – and twisted. Welcome to the world of the transvestigators: the West is falling, family values are under attack, and Michelle Obama is secretly a man. The objective of this conspiracy among far-right internet sleuths is to use phrenology to 'prove' that cisgender celebrities – namely the wives of political figures – are secretly transgender (or 'inverted,' as they are typically referred to). These detectives scrutinise the physical features of these women – from their height and voices to their jaws or 'energy'– in search of supposed deviations from arbitrary beauty standards. While it began with posts about the former First Lady and Angela Merkel, transvestigation has now proliferated throughout the online far-right ecosystem, where each new day brings another avalanche of outlandish claims and AI transvestigation sludge. The most recent swell came when Meghan Markle shared footage – in her uber-cheery, classically cringey Instagram mode – of herself and Prince Harry dancing in a hospital. The choreography in the video was allegedly a labour-inducing ritual and, also allegedly, a successful one: Rachel from Suits and the Spare made the post to celebrate four years since Lilibet's birth. The far-right saw through all that: 'At first, I didn't buy into the rumours', an X post began. But 'there's no denying this: Meghan Markle is a fraud'. Markle's great swindle? Trying to convince the world that she gave birth to her children. Anyone with two eyes and a lot of free time could see the truth. That was no baby bump – that's a scrunched-up 'puffer jacket,' a balled-up 'blanket,' or, as one user astutely proposed, a rumpled 'hotel sheet.' The ruse confirmed what they had always known: Prince Harry had married a woman who was unwilling to carry her own child, so insisted on having Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet via surrogate. Transvestigation is part of a broader 'emasculation fetish' within the online right. That sense of emasculation was formed by the twin pressures of two perceived threats: the woke left's crusade against traditional masculine values and an influx of 'fast-breeding alien immigrants'. The persecuted and surrounded envisioned a new image of virtue – then stuck it in the White House. This new model was the fertile patriarch: Donald Trump. He was Christian (sort of), nationalist, strong, with a perfect (mute) Mar-a-Lago-faced wife and a legion of grinning, preferably white, children. J.D. Vance said, 'I want more babies in the United States of America'. In an essay explaining his conversion to Catholicism, Vance remembered 'the achievement that mattered most to me for so much of my life: a happy, thriving family.' With the new pride came a new fall. The most disgraceful shame, now, was to lose control over your woman and her womb. And with the emergence of transgenderism, 'cuck' (from cuckold), the old insult, metastasised into a still more fearful peril for dominated husbands. Your wife could secretly be a man. Thus a new ignominy was mapped out, where the children weren't children, the wives weren't wives and, above all, the men weren't men. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It was only a week before the Markle video that the world had stopped to watch Emmanuel Macron pushed in the face by his wife, Brigitte, as they deplaned during a state visit to Vietnam. Here was a head of state reduced to a trembling 'man-child' – emasculated and humiliated by a wife who groomed him as his teacher. X and Reddit filled with AI memes of a black-eyed, arm-slung Macron cowering beside his wife. But in 2025, scenes that we once might have called 'unfortunate' now supply more complex implications. Right-wing talking-head Candace Owens was willing to stake her considerable professional reputation on this one. Owens told listeners of her multi-part series Becoming Brigitte to 'stop everything': she had unravelled 'likely the biggest scandal that has ever happened in politics in human history'. The French president's wife was a man. This she was a he, the femme was a homme, and there were prehistoric, grainy zoom-ins on Brigitte's crotch to prove it. In this world, few passions are more dearly cherished than the transvestigation. Even while interviewing Renaud Camus, the originator of the 'Great Replacement' theory, the key online right guru Curtis Yarvin could not resist questions about Brigitte's sex. A baffled Camus protested, 'We are dealing with the most important thing in the history of the Continent,' referring to the rise of nonwhite immigration to Europe. 'What does it matter if Mrs. Macron is a man or a woman?' But to some, it very much does matter. And the 'Brigitte = Jean-Michel' hypothesis has but a fraction of the traction of 'Michelle = Michael'. This is the idea that Michelle Obama, whose husband has long been a hate figure for the American right, is Michael LaVaughn Robinson. It's absurd, sometimes even laughable. But emasculating non-compliant figures like Prince Harry, Macron and Obama – while deploying the triumvirate of far-right insults: racism, sexism, and transphobia against their wives – has generated an almost guaranteed formula for viral outrage, meme fodder, and reinforcement of reactionary gender norms. It's a wider endorsement of traditional general roles that promote the restriction of women to domestic roles, while offline, a broad backlash against feminism has led to legislative changes that reduce women's bodily autonomy. Most irritating, if not most serious, is the unavoidable suspicion that all this noise has rather more to do with the accusers than the accused. Seeing anonymous crotch-zoomers lamenting the downfall of Western civilisation on X, I remember Christopher Hitchens: 'Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner, rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed on.' As it happens, a 2022 lawsuit unearthed a Republican enthusiasm for transgender porn. Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, and Kansas – five valiant defenders of Bible, bullet and boot – came out on top of the charts. The new beau idéal of the right-wing family is a familiar one. In fact, the idea beneath it is very nearly a cliché: that behind every successful man is, well, another man. [See also: Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?] Related