BACKGROUND Motor imagery electroencephalogram (MI-EEG) play an important role in the field of neurorehabilitation, and a fuzzy support vector machine (FSVM) is one of the most used classifiers. Specifically, a fuzzy c-means (FCM) algorithm was used to membership calculation to deal with the classification problems with outliers or noises. However, FCM is sensitive to its initial value and easily falls into local optima. OBJECTIVE The joint optimization of genetic algorithm (GA) and FCM is proposed to enhance robustness of fuzzy memberships to initial cluster centers, yielding an improved FSVM (GF-FSVM). METHODS The features of each channel of MI-EEG are extracted by the improved refined composite multivariate multiscale fuzzy entropy and fused to form a feature vector for a trial. Then, GA is employed to optimize the initial cluster center of FCM, and the fuzzy membership degrees are calculated through an iterative process and further applied to classify two-class MI-EEGs. RESULTS Extensive experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets, the average recognition accuracies achieve 99.89% and 98.81% and the corresponding kappa values are 0.9978 and 0.9762, respectively. CONCLUSIONS The optimized cluster centers of FCM via GA are almost overlapping, showing great stability, and GF-FSVM obtains higher classification accuracies and higher consistency as well.