Bachelorette star’s trans ‘hoax’ isn’t just pointless, it’s also just weird

Bachelorette star Josh Seiter has revealed that he faked coming out as trans earlier this year. Not only is this hoax an offensive and strange attempt to apparently try to get one over on LGBTQ+ people and their supporters, but it’s a pointless one too.

The Bachelorette star revealed during an episode of Blaze TV’s Prime Time with Alex Stein on Tuesday (15 October) that his recent posts claiming to be transgender were in fact a “social experiment to expose woke culture” and an attempt to “own the libs” and “gullible and delusional” leftists.

Wow, good job Josh! All you proved without a shadow of a doubt is that your average, woke lefty liberal, accepts people as they are, subsequently leaves them alone and doesn’t spend countless waking hours scrutinising strangers’ identities on the internet. What a slam dunk. Let’s just ignore the fact that it was historically right-wing publications that reported on your faux coming out without scrutinising your social media posts, and conservative trolls posting hate in your comments for months.

The real question on the tip of my and, I’m sure, several other people’s tongue is: why? Seiter spent months posting a total of 131 Instagram posts and 108 reels to convince people he was trans, and for what? To convince people that queer folk accept anyone?

Seiter’s self-obsessed venture into the grim pits of “social experimentation” instead reveals what the LGBTQ+ community already knew and didn’t need another reminder of: people like this are really weird.

Whether it’s Seiter going to worrying lengths to mock trans people, right-wing commentator Steven Crowder doing an embarrassing impression of a Chinese person, or The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh saying he’d rip off his own arm rather than have gay parents, anti-LGBTQ+ and generally hard-line conservative pundits have to go to absurd lengths to justify their own wretched beliefs.

The issue is that bigotry has no tangible end goal: Wanting groups of people with an innate quality to stop existing is impossible, so those who believe they can, ramp up the outlandishness of their efforts to prove that it somehow is possible.

As for Seiter, his apparent view that trans people choose to be transgender – they can’t and don’t – means that he thinks it is perfectly valid to scrutinise those who do, and, as a result, anyone who bought into his charade is “gullible” or “delusional”.

What he’s missing in all of this is that trans people owe him nothing, neither do their friends, allies or family who choose to stay in their lives and support them. Seiter’s warped standards for what it means to be a woman, cis or trans, mean nothing. They’re worse than nothing: they are the acts of a desperate man clutching to any fleeting piece of fame or attention he can possibly grasp.

The result of this is that anyone not caught in the furore of this right-wing nonsense is simply concerned by Seiter’s actions: posts on The Bachelorette subreddit are filled with people telling Seiter to “go to therapy” or questioning why he hates trans people so much.

The most prevalent question among the stream of concerned comments, however, is probably the most pertinent one, and the one that will continue to be asked: who the heck is Josh Seiter?

Share your thoughts! Let us know in the comments below, and remember to keep the conversation respectful.