Dylan Mulvaney was born on the internet. And it is where she nearly died.
In 2022 she began 100 Days of Girlhood, a series of video diaries published daily on TikTok. Speaking straight to camera, the 25-year-old described her new life as a trans woman, posting variously about laser hair removal, pronouns, tampons, hormones and facial feminisation surgery.
Hers was a brand of “hyper-femininity”, as Mulvaney calls it. She was Breakfast at Tiffany’s by way of Legally Blonde, kitsch ballgowns and satin Alice bands, open-mouthed smiles and ditzy one-liners. Within a month she had gained a million followers. Within a year that had multiplied by ten. Her dopamine was out of control as videos went viral. “I love to share,” she says. “Whether that’s considered oversharing or not, I’m still trying to figure that out.”
Mulvaney, now 28, was a very modern star. Sponsorship deals followed. In spring 2023 she was approached by America’s bestselling beer, Bud Light, which was trying to move away from its blue-collar bro reputation and towards something more inclusive and Gen Z-orientated. As both a lager drinker and a jobbing influencer, she said yes, and on April 1 she posted a video of herself drinking Bud Light. “I kept hearing about this thing called March Madness [a college basketball tournament] Turns out… it has something to do with sports!” she said in the advert. It was a cutesy, 60-second video — and it triggered what the Harvard Business School called “one of the biggest boycotts in American history”.
Within days there was an enormous and vitriolic public backlash from some on the conservative right, lead by commentators and Republican politicians including Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis and the former Olympian and trans woman Caitlyn Jenner, a Trump supporter, who said Bud Light made a “huge mistake” by going too “woke”. The singer Kid Rock, a vocal Republican, posted a video of himself in a Maga hat shooting cases of Bud Light with a rifle.
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The advert was seen as a symbol of a wider problem, the perfect example of “wokenomics”: corporate brands trying to wash their image with “woke” culture. It showed the dangers of right-on advertising and marketing execs taking sides trying to be on the right side of America’s culture war — and losing their original and loyal customers in the process.
Several of the company’s bottling factories received bomb threats. In the next few weeks Bud Light sales fell an estimated 17 per cent and it was knocked off its perch as America’s bestselling beer. Its marketing vice-president Alissa Heinerschied was placed on leave and later left the company. The total backlash is thought to have wiped nearly £16 billion off the value of the parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev. Mulvaney says she had to hire security. She received a bomb threat, lost jobs and had photographers camping outside her home in Los Angeles. She became suicidal and left the US for Peru for two weeks.
In the following months there were boycotts of other brands for their attempts at diversity and inclusion: Target, Bank of America, Disney and BlackRock. “Go woke, go broke,” went the new saying.
Today, Mulvaney is both a hate figure and a mainstream name (9 million TikTok followers, 1.5 million on Instagram), a professional internet celebrity who makes it onto the guest lists of the big parties and events: the premiere of Wicked, Time’s Women of the Year awards, Heidi Klum’s Halloween party, fashion parties. She has a publicist, agent, lawyer, life coach, “glam” team and assistants. She interviewed President Joe Biden about trans rights, released a single (Days of Girlhood), toured an Edinburgh Fringe show (Faghag) about her internet fame and fall, and this month was an interviewer on the red carpet at Elton John’s Oscars party. She has published a memoir, Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer, a mixture of diary entries from her “euphoric” transition and reflections on her very public crash, an account from the front line of the battle over sex and gender and bodies.
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“I’m a little bit dishevelled,” Mulvaney says on a video call from her home in LA. Her make-up, despite protestations, is perfect, two wings of jet black on each eyelid, her lips flushed. Her reading glasses are bright pink, her blouse pink gingham and the sofa, curtains and the cupboards are all pale pink. A wall is covered with framed pictures of “her ladies”: Audrey Hepburn, Oprah Winfrey, Frida Kahlo, Princess Diana, Michelle Obama and the full cast of Sex and the City. She is close friends with another of her childhood idols, Lady Gaga.
Doing “full glam” — hair and make-up for an event or photoshoot — takes two hours minimum, three and half max. “When I get glam, especially to talk about potentially hard things, it’s like my armour,” she says. “It’s very gender-affirming for me.”
In spite of her “intense ADHD”, Mulvaney says she loves the monotony of routine. But that’s hard to come by in a life lived for the internet. She starts the day online at around 10am, followed by photoshoots, or podcast recordings, or video editing; or flights to London or New York to do even more. “For the past three years I haven’t had a day that looks the same.”
Mulvaney is immediately likeable and much more softly spoken than she is on social media, where her facial expressions and intonation are exaggerated to the point of caricature, a brashness that seems to perform well on TikTok.
“I have been told that my version of womanhood was too much, too [much] in excess,” she says. “But I have always loved princesses and if my soul had a colour it would be pink.” It is this version of womanhood that has drawn criticism.
“Day one of being a girl and I’ve already cried three times,” she said in a video posted in March 2022. “I wrote a scathing email that I did not send. I ordered dresses that I could afford. And then when someone asked me how I was, I said ‘I’m fine!’ when I wasn’t fine.” After applying a few swipes of lip gloss, she asked: “How’d I do, ladies?”
Nike sponsored her to model a sports bra for women and she has posted about carrying tampons in her handbag in case a woman needed one. “I thought the letters stood for small, medium and large based on the size of your Barbie pouch,” she said in a social media video, holding up the tampon, “but after googling I found out it’s actually the level of your flow.”
What does she think of the argument that her way of being a woman can feel condescending, that it’s a stereotypical view of femininity that many women spent many decades fighting to overturn? “This is part of who I am, this is not a caricature, and trans women should be allowed the same opportunities to love and enjoy the feminine things in life,” she says. “I have never been one to judge the way a woman perceives her version of womanhood. And I find myself really enamoured by every version, even if that version is the one that maybe isn’t as fond of me as I am of them.”
Ever since she began posting, Mulvaney had always been the centre of small internet storms. But it was the Bud Light advert that made her a mainstream name. Mulvaney was paired with the brand by the California-based influencer marketing agency Captiv8 around the same time that Heinerscheid, the first female vice-president in Bud Light’s 40-year history, said on a podcast that the brand needed to be more “inclusive” and that its “fratty image” was “out of touch”. Mulvaney was one of around a dozen influencers hired to add a new spin. The first video she posted of the beer (drinking it in a bubble bath) went unnoticed. The second one — which was greenlit by both the agency and Bud Light — did not. The backlash was swift. “Baby, get ready. You just got a lot more famous,” Mulvaney’s life coach — acquired in and for Los Angeles life — told her when it started going viral. “You were meant for this.”
Why does she think the response was so extreme? “Because extremists needed a poster child and they needed an enemy to unite them,” she says. “Trans people are less than 1 per cent of the population and yet we are the ones so often talked about in these horrendous ways — as if, [should] they fix or eradicate us, it will somehow heal the world.”
The tidal wave of death threats was overwhelming. “My desire to vanish into thin air was occurring multiple times a day,” she writes in her book. “I would fall asleep thinking about not waking up, and how peaceful that sounded to me.” In hindsight, she says she should have checked herself into a mental health facility. “There has been so much darkness. I spent a long time waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Bud Light has since returned to its more traditional, testosterone-fuelled roots. In 2023 it ran an ad titled Backyard Grunts, featuring the Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce (Taylor Swift’s boyfriend) and other men puffing as they get up from garden chairs, and, this year, Big Men on Cul-de-Sac, another wink at middling men’s lives next to the barbecue.
Today Mulvaney says she is only “half healed”. “I didn’t know I’d ever feel that scared or that isolated. There was just this sense of being out of control. Like a moving train that I couldn’t stop.” But the vitriol and oppression, in some ways, made her feel more like a woman. “I don’t think they’d have talked about a man that way and there is something weirdly affirming about that.”
Dylan Mulvaney was born in San Diego, California, into a conservative Christian household. Her father, James, was an insurance executive who attended Catholic mass every Sunday, and her mother, Donna, was a member of a new-age Christian church. She was an only child and her parents divorced when she was a teenager.
Aged four, Mulvaney told her mother: “I think God made a mistake he put me in a boy’s body,” she writes in her memoir. “God doesn’t make mistakes,” her mother replied. “You are perfect the way you are.” Her father, too, seemed to want a boy’s boy. “My dad was sweeping the [baseball] bases when I was a baby; he wanted to be the Little League coach,” she says. “So he was in for quite the surprise when I wanted to go to dance classes instead.”
Mulvaney fell in love with musical theatre, labelling herself as a “flamboyant gay boy rather than facing the reality of my impending gender journey”. But it was not an easy coming-out process. Mulvaney’s mother put campaign signs protesting gay marriage on the front lawn and confiscated her mobile phone when she found out about a teenage boyfriend. “It was very conflicting for me as a young person because I didn’t feel wrong,” Mulvaney says.
After graduating from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music in 2019, Mulvaney was cast as the Mormon missionary Elder White in the hit musical The Book of Mormon, which was touring the US, Mexico and Canada.
Until Covid. With no stage and no audience, Mulvaney went to live with her father in California, where she spent hours on social media. “All the thoughts and feelings and questions I’d been blanketing in performance came rising up to the surface,” she writes. “It was in this reality that I was able to find the best thing: my true identity.”
Mulvaney came out, both online and to her family, as non-binary in 2020, then as trans in 2022, when she went to a private doctor and started hormone therapy. During her transition, her love life “took the back seat”. Today she is dating for “fun”, “not running into anything” and defines herself as queer, meaning she is open to different genders and sexualities.
She has since had nose reconstruction, a lip lift and facial feminisation surgery, including reshaping the bones in her chin and brow, bringing her hairline down and “shaving off” her Adam’s apple. It was “the greatest gift to myself”, she says.
How does she know when to stop? “It’s funny because I grew up in southern California, where all sorts of procedures and treatments are so normalised,” she says. “For me, I think there’s an ideal version of myself out there that I’m still working towards. But I also know there are plenty of people that will always be moving the line away, so I have to be the one to find that line myself.” She remains private on whether she has had or is considering full gender-reassignment surgery.
Her mother in particular, she says, grieved for the son she lost. “I can’t know what it would be like to watch your child go through such a large physical, emotional, spiritual transition,” Mulvaney says. “But what I could empathise with was this idea of thinking that something is going to go a certain way and it going another Like, OK, this grief that she might be feeling is tied to this idea of a person that I am not. But hopefully the person that I am is someone that will make up for the grief in joy.”
Now she speaks to her parents nearly every day on the phone. Recently she has talked to them about their differing versions of her childhood, a process she says has brought them closer. “I was previously very protective of them because they didn’t sign up for this life,” she continues.
From his first day in office, Donald Trump made a series of executive orders relating to trans rights, starting with an announcement that the government would recognise only two unchangeable sexes: male and female. Trump then said he would again ban transgender people from enlisting and serving in the military; prevent trans women and girls from competing in women’s sports; and halt the use of federal money in supporting institutions that provide medical transition for those under the age of 19 (though a judge has subsequently ruled that the funding will remain in place — for now). Mulvaney says these developments leave her numb.
In America access to “gender-affirming care” — puberty blockers, hormone therapy and eventually surgery — is largely decided by state. More than half of US states have passed bans on medication and/or surgery for trans children. Nationally, there are guidelines from organisations including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society that largely recommend that potentially irreversible surgeries should not happen before 18, though it is ultimately left up to the doctors, the patient and their family to make a final decision.
“I think that it’s so odd that those conversations are now happening [among politicians] in rooms without doctors and without parents of trans kids,” Mulvaney says on the topic of medical treatment for young people.
So what is “womanhood” to Mulvaney? “I’ve always had a deep connection to womanhood — there’s no group of humans that I love more,” she says. “But I’m often frustrated when people ask me, ‘What is womanhood?’ It’s unfair to try and equate womanhood to just one thing. It feels so often that the folks who so desperately want to do that are the ones who don’t see the value of womanhood past its relationship to biology.”
Mulvaney does not see herself as an activist or a “political person”, and doesn’t want to be specific about trans regulation and legislation. She is obviously concerned about how she is interpreted online. It was her plan to fly towards fame, asking publicists on the red carpet to let her in front of the bank of photographers, pitching ideas to appear on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, imagining mean headlines about herself in her memoir. But it was fame that burnt her too. Does she ever just want to throw her phone away and pack it all in? “Oh my God, I would love that,” she says. “There is a level of privacy that I would like.” And then she is gone, Zoom call ended, off to the rest of her day — as seen online.
“Revenge is best served cold,” she posted on Instagram shortly after we met, with a video of herself in her garden, reading her memoir and sipping a beer poured so terribly that I can’t tell whether it is part of the joke. “And in pink gingham.”
Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer by Dylan Mulvaney (Sphere £22). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
