Notoriously anti-LGBTQ+ professional mixed-martial artist Sean Strickland says he wants to “beat the s*** out of” Elliot Page.
Earlier this week, Championship Rounds, an MMA news account “powered by” online gambling platform Rainbet, shared an X post featuring a video of Strickland next to a photo of Page. In the brief clip, an off-camera interviewer asks Strickland to name a celebrity he’d love to fight.
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“Elliot Page,” Strickland, a Rainbet brand ambassador and partner, responds. “That’s f**king all day long, that’s a easy [win]. I’d beat the s**t out of him.”
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The two-time UFC Middleweight Champion also posted the full video on his personal Instagram page, encouraging fans to “be a man and bet your life savings on a UFC fight” in the caption.
The more than 500 comments on the X post — which has been liked by 24,000 users — include the kind of trolling and transphobia that has come to characterize the social media platform since it was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk. But some users blasted the 6′ 1″, 185lb Strickland for boasting that he could beat up the 5′ 1″ Page.
“This guy loves to talk about how classically ‘tough’ he is, and this is his answer?” one user wrote.
“He wants to fight a transgender man an entire foot shorter than him,” another commented. “Suddenly Jake Paul looks serious.”
“He can pick any celebrity and he chooses a trans person who is significantly smaller than him? Why didn’t he just choose a child instead?” another wondered.
Several other commenters expressed surprise that Strickland didn’t misgender Page — though as one noted, doing so would have resulted in Strickland joking about beating up a “woman” on camera.
Strickland has a well-documented history of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. In a 2021 social media post, he wrote, “If I had a gay son I would think I failed as a man to create such weakness.”
Asked about UFC’s partnership with Bud Light in the wake of right-wing outrage over the beer brand’s one-off partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Strickland told an interviewer in 2024, “Ten years ago, to be trans was a mental f**king illness and now, all of a sudden, people like you have f**king weaseled your way in the world.”
Earlier this year, Strickland repeatedly used anti-gay slurs and said that straight athletes would beat up teammates who came out as gay. In June, he posted an AI-generated video of himself beating up Mulvaney.
Page, meanwhile, spent his summer receiving critical acclaim for his performance in director Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Prior to the film’s release, the actor went viral in June after posting videos of himself training at Brooklyn’s iconic Gleason’s Gym with boxing coach Nolan Hanson.
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