Dylan Mulvaney is everywhere - that much we can all hopefully agree on. In just the last year, the TikTok star began her transition, built an immense online following, interviewed the President of the United States, performed at a storied 89-year-old New York venue, and inadvertently ignited an ongoing right-wing hissy fit of historic proportions. But on the day of our interview, Mulvaney shows no signs of such ghoulish scrutiny. The 26-year-old arrives early, in pink, and perches herself on the sunny corner of a sumptuous suede banquette.
“Bougie, right?” she says, arching a neatly plucked brow.
“It’s perfect,” I reply.
It’s a bustling day at West Hollywood’s venerable Tower Bar, and the girls are apparently having a luncheon. Mulvaney and I have met only once before, yet she greets me with the giddiness of an old friend visiting from out of town. Not five minutes into our chat, she’s already regaling me with tales of star-crossed love. When I ask for details, Mulvaney gracefully demurs, though I get the sense she strives to live her life a little like the romantic comedies she dreams of making one day.
Pretty in Pink with a t-girl twist, Mulvaney has her syrupy brown eyes set on her own “leg-up moment.”
There’s a gentle defiance to how she speaks of her cinematic ambitions. “No matter your gender, people will project things onto you about who you’re supposed to be. And I think we equally have to tell people our actual purpose,” she says. “I think so much of my purpose could be elevating others’ voices. I would love to do that through Hollywood, where we still haven’t seen enough exposure.”
She adds: “Right now, the headlines call me ‘TikTok Trans Activist Dylan Mulvaney.’ I want to be ‘Actress Dylan Mulvaney.’ I want to be ‘Comedian Dylan Mulvaney.’” (The creator also mentions entering her “author era.” As she puts it, “I’ve been doing a lot of typing in my backyard, which gives you a little
wink wink.” When asked for further details, Dylan politely declines.)
Performance has been a part of Mulvaney’s true purpose ever since she was a theater-obsessed kid growing up in the conservative town of Alpine, California. If her devout Catholic family restricted her budding femininity, the arts encouraged all the unabashedly girlie things that make her who she is. “Theater got me through,” she shares. “It was where I got to live with other queer kids, even if we didn’t know we were at the time.”
After acting professionally during her childhood and early twenties, Mulvaney started making TikToks at the beginning of 2020. Her initial clips comprise a collection of delightfully cursed segments, including
Gayest Game Show Contestant Ever (Parts I-IV), Interviewing Animals, and
It’s a They Question of the Day. Yet besides a viral encounter with a friendly bison, the 26-year-old creator’s page went largely unnoticed.
That all changed last March, when Dylan launched her “
Days of Girlhood” series. Through a mix of intimate, zany, mundane, and revelatory dispatches, the project has offered millions a front-row seat to the daily realities of Mulvaney’s transition — and so much more. On video, Dylan has come out as a trans woman, shared footage from her facial feminization surgery (FFS), and told her younger self that one day she will no longer feel like a freak. She has also drunk margs at 2:55pm on a Monday, bought a wig with bangs, and mused about changing her name to “Genevieve.” She has gone to Trader Joe’s and worn dresses made entirely from feathers. She has feared “letting people down” and “not getting everything right” and learned her moon is in Virgo. She has attended New York Pride with Motorola, celebrated Cleanse Your Skin Week with Cerave, and protected her chest from the cold with the Eos Shea Butter 24-Hour Body Lotion. She has protested with Qween Jean and raised almost $200,000 for the Trevor Project through her “Girlhood” grand finale,
Day 365 Live! And after some 386 days of chronicling her transition, Dylan Mulvaney finally decided to call it a day.
“When I was living that project, when I was living those days, I mean, it was joy,” she reflects. “And what I saw from viewers was that it was what I think we all need a little bit of right now — something to combat the darkness.”
Since its premiere, the project has amassed more than a billion plays, reaching reaching viewers in dozens of countries around the world. In an era when misinformation is being weaponized against our community, Mulvaney has demystified aspects of transition typically kept to internet backrooms. During a time of vicious public debate, she has offered countless young trans folks an online space grounded in love, softness, and understanding. For those that appreciate her — and they are everywhere — Dylan’s page provides a reliably gentle place to go when the world feels full of hate.
The creator herself could certainly use such a safe space. Throughout our conversation, she seems restless when the subject turns to “Girlhood.” I get the sense she’s eager to move on from the project that positioned her in the Right’s crosshairs. Fair enough, but I still want to know how it feels to look back on such a career-launching achievement.
“There's a level of me that knows I wanted success…but I didn’t know it was going to be for my transness,” she tells me. “And I just kind of wish I could tap myself on the shoulder, right before I made that video, the first one, and just be like, ‘Hey, let’s not…,’” she trails off.
A moment later, Mulvaney finishes the thought: “‘Let's make sure you're in a good place and you are safe and that you've had the conversations with the people that you need to talk to before you talk to everyone.’”
Two comically enormous grilled cheeses have just landed at our table. As I’m assessing how to fit the sandwich into my mouth, I glimpse Dylan using a tine of her fork to flick an innocent green garnish onto a monogrammed napkin. Catching my gaze, she explains, “I have to take the vegetables off.”
The huh?
“I don’t like vegetables. I think if I started eating healthy, something bad would happen.”
“Girl, like
what?”
Mulvaney isn’t sure. After a moment, she offers, “My body’s so used to running on, like, Doritos.”
We laugh, then laugh some more. It feels good. After all, there’s a reason we’re not picnicking in the park, or admiring the famed alligators of the L.A. Zoo. Dylan has to be careful about how she shows up in public these days.
“I’m scared,” she tells me. “I never expected to have people following me, or experience such negative media attention. I walk into a room and I never know if somebody is going to really love me or really hate me.”
You know the story: One adult beverage company’s attempt at LGBTQ+-pandering is another trans girl’s unyielding public relations nightmare. For the lucky unaware, it
all started when Bud Light included Mulvaney in a March Madness-related marketing campaign. In a branded post, the creator promoted something called the
“Easy Carry Contest,” posing with a custom can of Bud Light they'd sent with her face on it. Then all MAGA broke loose — an unholy assemblage of boycotts, bomb threats, and creepy home videos, including one of self-described “frisky grandpa” Kid Rock turning a machine gun on several cases of warm beer.
Sniffing blood in the water, right-wing media turned the hate machine up to ludicrous mode. Besides weekends, the
New York Post has covered Mulvaney, or the fallout from her Bud Light video, every single day since April 6th, totalling more than 110 individual articles. On April 14th alone, the digital rag found 11 unique ways of covering her. Mostly, these pieces have tracked the financial consequences of the association while casting Dylan herself as a symbol of cultural decline. Not to be outdone, conservative talk show hosts have made an almost daily practice of misgendering her, grotesquely commenting on her body, and even arguing that she’s “pretending to be a woman” as a way to milk a hot-topic identity for all its worth. Just from the sheer volume of conservative ink spilled, you’d think the girl had posed with Rupert Murdoch’s severed head, not her favorite All-American light lager.
Nonetheless, Mulvaney remains disciplined in her response. When I ask if she’d like to roast some of the commentators who’ve made a living from categorically disrespecting her, she declines. “I prefer not to name any of those people, because it gives them the satisfaction of believing they’re on my mind,” she explains. “It shows my followers that I’m standing up for myself, but also pushes that their narrative is loud enough to matter.”
Trolls aside, Mulvaney’s most important lessons have come from within our community. At this year’s Grammys, for instance, Dylan made a TikTok with the resplendent
Laverne Cox. In the video, which Mulvaney would share with her nearly 11 million followers, Cox gently implores her to ease up on the sharing. “It’s insane that you’re documenting so much of your life,” she warns. “They love it, but everything cannot be for the public; you must keep things for yourself.”
Dylan took the advice to heart. “When we met, I’d already made a video talking about the physical experience of getting FFS, and I was planning on making another about the mental side,” she says. “But I never did it, because what I took from meeting Laverne was that once I described that euphoria in a video and put it online, a piece of it goes away.”
Of course, the exchange didn’t end there. What could have been a sweet learning moment soured into a second lesson when Dylan spoke over her idol, sharing that she’d just undergone FFS.
“Girl, we know,” Cox replied. “It’s all over TikTok.”
For some, Mulvaney’s interruption of Cox, a Black woman decades her senior, triggered a deep, intra-community cringe. What’s more, despite Mulvaney’s apology, the moment exacerbated long-simmering frustrations with her lionization by liberal media and corporate America. As the television personality Ts Madison said on a
recent episode of her YouTube show, “I’ve been a transgender woman [for] over 30 years. I’ve had to fight hard for that shit. It’s not to say [Dylan] hasn’t worked hard, but she documented her transition…and [she] gets a major push behind [her], because [she’s] white.”
Sis Thee Doll, an actress, activist, and friend of Dylan's, underscores the responsibility that comes from such global attention. “When you have millions of followers here and millions of followers there, there’s a lot of work that has to be done with that,” she tells me. “Because if not, you’re standing on a community, not uplifting it. And the girls…the girls don’t like that.”
Dylan’s privilege comes up repeatedly during our conversation, though nowhere more pointedly than when we discuss her trip to the White House at the end of last year. Not long into her transition, she received an invitation from NowThis News to become one of the first openly trans people to interview a sitting President of the United States. “I said ‘yes,’ because at that point I didn’t realize the difference between existing as a trans person and being an activist,” Mulvaney recalls. “But now I can think of a thousand other trans people who would’ve been even better.”
When I propose that the actual questions she asked — which addressed state-level bans of gender-affirming care, violence against Black and brown trans women, and the dearth of resources for supportive parents of trans kids — were as good as any, she rejects the premise that asking the right questions makes for a good interview: “I am one of — if not the — most privileged trans people in this country right now; I don’t want people to look at me and say, ‘Oh, yep, the community’s alright.’”
Passing on opportunities that are better suited for others isn’t the only way Mulvaney intends to recognize her privilege, she says. She also wants to leverage her visibility into branded gigs for more trans folks. “For a long time, I felt so lucky that these opportunities were coming my way that I thought it was by accident. But now I realize how much power I actually have,” she tells me. “If a brand wants to work with me so bad, then they should work with other trans people, too. It’s not enough to just hire me, this white, skinny trans girl. I want all the dolls getting all the brand deals.”
A week before we meet for lunch, I spend an afternoon shadowing Dylan on the set of our cover shoot. The sun’s out, and the creator is in her element, prancing around the pool, befriending snails, and making everyone laugh. Later, as the light softens, an unexpected visual narrative comes into focus. Dylan feels it, too.
“The first look was quintessential me — bubble gum, a little Lana, very much my first year. The second was a little weirder, more earthy and ethereal,” she tells me. Then the third — the moment: “When I put that suit on, it unlocked something in me.”
The effect is palpable. Anyone who knows Dylan understands a small revolution has begun to take shape: “I was so scared of being perceived as this masculine monster in that first year…I thought there was safety in hyperfemininity. But now that even that’s getting used against me, I was like,
screw it — let’s pick the suit. If people want to equate me with just dresses and makeup, let’s show them this.”
I can already hear the demonic chorus of commenters straining to twist Dylan’s exploration into evidence of an insincere transition.
In truth, Mulvaney’s sense of self seems more grounded than ever: “Honestly, I looked in the mirror, and I was like,
My God, that
is womanhood —” not what she saw, Mulvaney clarifies, but how she felt.
For the past couple of hours, we’ve discussed Dylan the TikTok Star, Dylan the Trans Activist, Dylan the Comedian, Dylan the Actress, and so on. Finally, here we are beginning to discuss Dylan Mulvaney the Woman. I want to exclaim,
Exactly. Instead, I ask her to tell me more about the feeling.
“Bold…sturdy…powerful,” she tells me.
Where Mulvaney spent the last year beautifully, if painstakingly, documenting her womanhood, perhaps the next will see her focus more on simply being one. In fairness, it sounds like she’s already well on her way.
“I don't regret any of the things that I've posted, but I want to make sure that my transition is for me now,” she explains. “It’s kind of like redefining a relationship — when it gets too personal, or too hands-on, it can be hard to scale back. I’m hoping that the people that do love me will be ready when I start doing things that aren’t just me trauma-unloading onto a camera.”
“Trauma-unloading” is perhaps a bit of unfair self-talk. The majority of Mulvaney’s content presents transition with clarity, optimism, and preternatural sweetness. That’s why so many people love her; in an online culture obsessed with irony, her feelings are big and warm, and she’s not afraid to get gooey.
Now, she’s also not afraid to take a step back. About a week after posting the Bud Light video, Mulvaney went dark, disappearing from all platforms for 20 days. In that time, the creator reflected on the toll of overexposure and emerged with a new intention for her next chapter.
“I really do like being me, but you can get to a point where if you read enough things about yourself, you could be like, ‘Screw Dylan Mulvaney. Who is this bitch,’” she says with a laugh. “So, right now, I’m thinking about longevity — how do I hopefully have a career that goes on for the next 40 years? And how do I be happy outside of social media? Because that’s what I think I’m retraining my brain to figure out: All the other aspects of my life have to be just as important as that one.”
And with that, Mulvaney is off, onto whatever is up next for her. As our server clears the table, I notice a sliver of green poking out from the stack of plates and napkins. Though Mulvaney may still recoil at the sight of microgreens, it seems she’s learning to eat her vegetables in other ways.
thank you for confirming my sexuality
