Former Bachelorette contestant Josh Seiter Photo: Blaze TV
“Yawn.”
That was the collective verdict online following news that Josh Seiter, the grifting former Bachelorette contestant, had duped the public and a far-right outrage machine hungry for anti-woke content into believing he had transitioned.
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“He’s trolling hard 😂,” posted one keen observer on Reddit months before Seiter confessed to the hoax.
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Seiter made the admission on the right-wing BlazeTV podcast Prime Time with Alex Stein, revealing his four-month journey into womanhood was a social experiment to “expose how gullible and delusional the left is.”
Seiter “came out” as trans in May, announcing to his Insta followers, “I have struggled with my gender identity — and resulting feelings of guilt and shame — for as long as I can remember.”
“I spent the last three decades trying to keep this side of me private. I felt I had no choice, given my upbringing in a strictly religious, conservative family.”
Seiter said at the time he wasn’t undergoing hormone replacement therapy and wouldn’t elect to have gender-affirming surgery.
Instead, Seiter spent four months playing dress-up on Insta, reveling not in “trans joy” but in the rush of provoking online outrage and fooling the public.
His widely covered “transition” granted Seiter an audience he’s struggled to maintain with other desperate attempts at self-promotion: “coming out” as bisexual during Pride Month in 2023 in a play for gay fans; announcing he was dating a fellow male stripper while secretly keeping a girlfriend; teasing thirsty fans with the promise of “adult films” that never came to pass; claiming he fathered a “son” that doesn’t exist; and faking his own death on Insta with an announcement of his passing — a charge he’s denied — followed by an apology “for all the pain” the “cruel joke” hatched by haters caused his fans.
The cruel joke, though, was Seiter’s own as he coopted the stories of real trans people and the tropes surrounding them in service of his elaborate fraud.
Seiter came to so-called fame with his appearance as a contestant on ABC’s The Bachelorette, where he infamously stripped on his first date with the show’s namesake.
He parlayed that reality show celebrity into influencer status and an OnlyFans account, mining the depths of the TV dating genre for hook-ups with other self-promoting contestants from shows like 90 Day Fiancé and Love After Lockup.
“I hope that this could help some people understand that just because you put on dresses and makeup as a man doesn’t magically make you a woman,” Seiter told Stein at his big reveal. It was the one true thing he said in the interview.
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