Josh Seiter's Transgender Experiment Hoax

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Overview

Josh Seiter's Transgender Experiment Hoax refers to a controversy related to former Bachelorette contestant Josh Seiter in which he pretended to be transgender for months as a social experiment. Selter first posted about being trans in May 2024 and revealed in an interview with YouTuber Alex Stein in October 2024 that he was pretending to be a transgender woman online as part of a social experiment to "expose how gullible and delusional the left is." The experiment was heavily criticized online and many LGBTQ+ content creators voiced their concerns against Seiter's fake transition. The former Bachelorette contestant's story also inspired various memes and jokes mocking the influencer as it spread and garnered media coverage.

Background

On May 20th, 2024, social media influencer and former Bachelorette contestant Josh Seiter^[1] posted a letter via Instagram about his struggle with "gender identity," asking for his followers' support as he started his "transition" (seen below).

Two days later, on May 22nd, 2024, Seiter posted^[2] a selfie wearing makeup and a black-and-blue wig, captioning it, "just me" (seen below).

Developments

Fake Transgender Experiment Reveal

On October 16th, 2024, Josh Seiter revealed on the Prime Time With Alex Stein podcast that he was conducting a social experiment online to "expose how gullible and how delusional the left is" by pretending to be a transwoman for months.

In the interview shared on the podcast's YouTube^[3] channel (seen below), he said, "The whole idea of postmodern gender ideology is ridiculous and absurd, and I tried to be the most extreme version of it and take it to its logical end to show how ridiculous it is that people can actually believe that biological men are magically transformed into women because they are having a gender crisis." The video amassed over 22,000 views and 1,600 likes in three days.

Online Reactions

Josh Seiter’s reveal and videos about his "social experiment" sparked backlash from many among the LGBTQ+ community and support from the right-wing online community shortly after it spread online. For instance, on October 17th, 2024, author J.K. Rowling reposted X user @thepeacepoet99's tweet^[4] promoting the influencer's transgender experiment in which he wrote, "Perhaps they’ll teach us the difference between ‘true’ trans & ‘fake’ trans." Rowling's repost (seen below) amassed more than 9,900 likes and 1,300 reposts in a day.

On the same day, X^[5] user @akafairyboy tweeted about Josh Seiter's fake transition experiment, mocking the influencer's effort to pretend to be a woman, writing, "I can’t stop cackling at the hand pose she was feeling her jush." The tweet (seen below) amassed over 67,000 likes and 1,600 reposts in a day.

In mid-October 2024, several posts on Reddit also appeared discussing Seiter and his reveal, including threads on the subreddits /r/WhitePeopleTwitter,^[6] /r/lgbt^[7] and /r/thebachelor,^[8] all of which received hundreds or thousands of upvotes and comments each within a day.