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Headshot of Dylan Mulvaney
Headshot of Dylan Mulvaney
David Brandon Geeting“I would have never taken that offer had I known that it would have brought me anything but joy.”
When social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, famous for chronicling her gender transition online in “365 Days of Girlhood,” posted a sponsored video promoting Bud Light, it quickly went viral, but not necessarily in a good way. “I would have never taken that offer had I known it would have brought me anything but joy.” She shares her experience in a new book Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer (March 11). “I felt so supported by the internet and in my life that I wasn’t really weighing the gravity of what working with a brand with that scope and that broader audience really meant.” But when the spotlight from “Beergate” shined on her, “there was this energy of, Do I just not talk about this? Do we pretend it didn’t happen?…No! The way that I navigate life is to share. Unfortunately, I’m addicted to oversharing and so I couldn’t not.” But with the book, a new podcast and other projects in the mix, Mulvaney is ready to focus on her ultimate goal: “This year, every decision I make is coming back to, Does this help me become a Broadway diva?”
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Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.
One of the things I thought was interesting about your book is that you didn’t hold back about anything, from the Bud Light controversy to your rise in fame on social media. You could have done a vanity memoir and avoided a lot of the not-so-nice stuff, but you didn’t do that.
Thank you, that means a lot. Because my instinct was to run away and not be associated with this thing. And I was like, “Nothing good can come from this horrible situation if I don’t confront it head-on, and I won’t be able to move through and heal from it.” And I finally feel like, knock on wood, I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And I really think that, not only through the book and then my one-woman show in Edinburgh [Scotland], but like, sometimes the thing that you don’t want to write about is the thing that you have to write about because that’s what it needed to be. This is one of the first times that I’m asking my followers to pay for something. I’ve been giving so freely online, and so I wanted to make sure that it was juicy enough and worth their efforts. And I did want to be a little bit more adult and I wanted to share sides to myself that I don’t really get to online just because of the nature of social media. [Social media] is just tricky to navigate right now as a trans person, and I think there’s at least a little bit more safety in putting it into a book.
I’ll also say, I fully expected “rules” to the interview from your team, but I never got any. Everything was on the table.
It’s so funny, because I do hear, especially on TikTok, they’ll be like, “This person’s team did it.” And I’m like, “It’s me in my bedroom.” It cracks me up when I’ll hear these conspiracy theories of like, she was generated in a boardroom at some agency to bring down the people of America. I’m like, “Girl, I was doing stand-up in Silverlake for seven people, and I posted a damn video.” That was also a huge thing that happened after “Beergate,” there was this energy of, “Do I just not talk about this? Do we pretend it didn’t happen?” And I was like, “No!” I had this sort of bowling ball sitting on my chest, because the way that I navigate life is to share. Unfortunately, I’m addicted to oversharing, and so I couldn’t not, and I still can’t not. And what I really had to learn from that situation was like, “Oh, I’m now representing a brand, and I’m representing a community of people,” which that pressure is crazy. I’ve tried to really make clear that I am not a poster child for anyone. But I think that is in my nature and in my DNA to just put it out there, and that’s what people will get in the book.
Dylan Mulvaney attends Elton John AIDS Foundation’s 33rd Annual Academy Awards Viewing Party on March 02, 2025 in West Hollywood, California.
Dylan Mulvaney attends Elton John AIDS Foundation’s 33rd Annual Academy Awards Viewing Party on March 02, 2025 in West Hollywood, California.
Robin L Marshall/FilmMagic/Getty
What was the origin of “365 Days of Girlhood”?
I was in San Diego, back with my dad after touring with the Book of Mormon, the musical, and I knew Broadway wasn’t going to open up [during COVID], so I went to L.A., which felt a little bit closer to home, and I started doing stand-up comedy because it gave me that same little bit of sense of the connection with an audience. I found that I could put jokes into videos and I was very much on this gender journey already at the time, going by they/ them pronouns. But then ultimately, I’ve been taking hormones for numerous months, I was like, “Okay, I am a woman. I’m a trans woman. How do I put this out into the world?” And that really was a sort of, “Oh gosh, I have to come out again.” Let me make this off-the-cuff, earnest, but like ironic video that was supposed to be somewhat relatable, and it blew up. I had had two other viral videos on TikTok prior to that, I was doing animal content. But [after posting the first Girlhood video] this was what felt like the beginning of a culture war in my comment section. And it was this—I was going to say happy accident, but it was a really anxious accident. I write about this in the book, not realizing that, as a people pleaser, I’ve now shared this wildly controversial identity with the internet, and now there are women going at each other in my comments, and I didn’t realize that that wasn’t my mess to clean up, as far as what discourse was coming from it. And then every video from then on for a bit was me trying to prove the haters wrong. What I am so grateful for was that I had that bit of comedy background where I could find the relatability in a very serious topic. And I think in the book, I want to make people laugh, too, but I really think that “Days of Girlhood” came at a time when transness really was entering the mainstream. We had Laverne Cox, we’ve had these icons in the community already, like Hunter Schafer in Euphoria, we’ve always been here. But I think it was also a time when hyperfemininity was at its peak, the Barbie movie and “Girl Dinner” [trend on TikTok]. I think culturally we were in a time when we were ready to celebrate transness in a unique way on this app that people still didn’t really understand what the app was, and I didn’t either. I didn’t have a lot of time following it to figure out how to navigate this new lifestyle, let alone to transition. And the fact that it’s about to be three years since I started transitioning, that it is still so early in the grand scheme of things, I had no idea how little I really knew early on. The important part was that I knew myself, and I knew how I felt, and that’s always what I wanted to share, not that I was teaching everyone about a greater aspect to the community, but really, just me.
And then came the Bud Light moment, which you write about in the book. Did you ever think when you initially got that email from the people at Budweiser that it would lead to that kind of a viral response?
I would have never taken that offer had I known that it would have brought me anything but joy, because that really was one I was so excited about it, because I love beer. I felt so supported by the internet and in my life that I felt like I wasn’t really weighing the gravity of what working with a brand with that scope and that broader audience really meant. And there were a lot of brands that I was the first trans person to partner with until that point; those were all going relatively positive. And I thought I was bringing new audiences to products and things that maybe they hadn’t seen before. And I think—I talk about this in the book too—of like flying too close to the sun and again, just getting burned. And that’s where I think I really wanted the trans community to know that I would have never done that actually, to the queer community period, because the aftereffects that it still had, but also on the Pride Month immediately following, there was this eeriness that I couldn’t understand. It was like, “Am I the only one feeling this?” And then I’d have friends or people that I didn’t even know, sharing with me how it affected their lives, and still to this day, are sharing how it affected their life and at first it was very difficult not to take that on as like my own personal guilt, but [I realized] this is part of a much larger conversation in a much larger fight.
So when you’re in the middle of this controversy, on this island of your own, how did you find your way out of it?
Well, I went and did ayahuasca in Peru, which is one of the essays in [the book]. I’ve never been the most conventional healer of sorts, I think I’m always trying to find the quick way to fix the solution, and in many ways, that was like 10 years’ worth of therapy in like three days. But I think that unfortunately, I had to sit with myself and have a lot of big sobs and a lot of uncomfortable conversations with friends that I felt really embarrassed to have, to ask people to sit with me, or to stay with me. It’s never easy to ask for help, especially when you’re known as someone who is the positive friend or the person that people can rely on to stimulate joy, you don’t want to then [be] the one that’s bringing someone down. I write about in the book wanting to go to a mental facility, but not feeling like I was allowed that opportunity because of what the media would have done. Still, I think about that time as a very sad time, but now feeling so glad that I didn’t try to blanket it with drugs or drinking, I didn’t mask any of those feelings. I felt everything to its full extent, and I’m really grateful, because now I’m in such a good headspace, one where I actually feel ready to let people in now that I feel better.
Book jacket of Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer
Book jacket of Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer
Little, Brown Book Group
Did it change your relationship with the internet? How you post now?
I mean, [I] couldn’t have done more of a 180 in how I approach the internet now, because it was my playground for the longest time, I felt like the line leader and the class president. I went on there and I did as I pleased. I put some limitations on myself, just trying to be as classy as possible, but it was fun for me, and it was so crazy too, because it became my job, essentially. I had no idea when I started making content that you could even make money on the internet. And so that did slightly change my relationship to it, because it then became work. I will say what I’m grateful for now is coming back to the internet and trying to find the fun again, versus the brand partnerships of it all. But I now know that, if I have something really special to say, or something that could be taken out of context in a certain way, we’re just not in a time for trans people where there is a lot of room for mistakes. So that is why I want to put it into other art, whether that’s the book or my one-woman show or my podcast.
Considering all you’ve been through online, what sort of advice would you have for someone looking to share their lives online?
I think about Laverne Cox, when I met her at the Grammys, and she was like, “Keep some things for yourself.” It was funny because some people actually pushed back on her for that, I think because they wanted me to keep oversharing, and they wanted me to keep putting myself out there. But I think what she said was so true and actually very loving, because there were things that I was talking about and putting out there before I even knew what they meant or how I felt about them. So I really urge any person, whether it’s you wanting to share your identity or your sexual expression or whatever that might be, I would just say, make sure that you you’ve got a grasp on it before other people can pick it apart, and that you’ve celebrated it, like the way that I have celebrated this book, so that when it does go out into the world, I have already had my precious time with it. And it’s still mine, but it then becomes theirs. But I think you just don’t want to miss out on that precious time. I also like when young humans tell me that they want to be influencers, and I always tell them to, “Please go get good at something else that can be a part of content.” Whether that’s acting or singing or dancing or drawing or just anything that can enhance that. I still had my BFA in musical theater. I still had done the stand-up. I had been in dance lessons my whole life. That was all the foundation of, no matter what happens in social media, I will be okay because of these other things. And I want to make sure that young people also know that they have things that they can fall back on.
I’ve always said that I’m not a political person, but people often want to politicize me for x, y, z reasons. Whatever makes you “different.” With everything you have going on, I’m sure that’s a feeling you have as well? How do you respond to something like that?
I want to be very particular of how I insert—of course they’re probably going to take whatever I say and run with it—but I want to be very thoughtful of how I’m part of the conversation when it comes to politics. I had a great conversation with Erin Reed, she has this great TikTok account, “Erin in the Morning,” that covers a lot of trans legislation and what’s going on in the country for trans people, and I was trying to learn all the facts and figures and I was like, “Okay, if I’m going onto this talk show, what can I say?” And she was like, “That’s not why you’re important for our community right now. You’re there to show empathy or humor or kindness or whatever that might be.” And then there are other people that are really good at the activist thing or the advocacy and so I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t do it all, and I can’t get every single thing right, and I’m still so early on in my transition that I don’t have all the answers. But this year, every decision I make is coming back to “Does this help me become a Broadway diva?” Because I now know that when I’m on stage and I am either in a character or performing as myself, singing a song, that is my favorite version of life. I headlined a gay cruise last week, and I was like, the universe is self-correcting itself. Like from going from a beer advertisement or interviewing the president at the White House, we are now back on track by me singing Sondheim to 1,200 gay men on a cruise ship. So more of that, and less of me trying to be a poster child for anything except Broadway.
Well then I have to ask, if you could do any Broadway musical, which one would it be?
Okay, I was gonna say Glenda and Wicked, but I think that’s maybe a 49 percent. My 51 percent is Elle Woods from Legally Blonde the musical, but it is a trans take in which Paulette and Emmett are also trans people, and the Delta Nu’s are sort of a wild, eclectic group of twinks and non-binary folk and trans femmes. And I just think that is a perfect musical. It does not get the credit that it deserves, but we need more of that in the world right now.
Ultimately what do you hope people take from this book?
I think that we as adults have really lost a sense of earnestness and innocence, and that it feels like the world is so dark and pessimistic, and I would love for us to all tap back into our inner child. And if somebody isn’t in a place right now to see me in my true gender identity, they can at least see me in my humanhood, if not girlhood. Also, when I think about these people making decisions on our community’s behalf, I would love for them to not have their decisions be so easily made and so casually. These are life-altering decisions that they are making on behalf of humans that are not even a part of the conversation. And so I just want people to also find the gravity of what is at stake right now. I just feel so grateful that I feel safe. I’ve got my hormones. I’ve got my book coming now. I’ve got great friends and good people behind me. 2025 really is mayhem; aga was on to something when she named that album that.
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