Dylan Mulvaney Says Thousands Hate Him and He Is Struggling to Sleep in Aftermath of Bud Light Backlash
Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender clout-chaser who’s killed Bud Light sales, would like you to know that he’s losing sleep over the fact he’s gotten the wrong sort of press for once.
In an appearance on the “Dear Schuyler” podcast earlier this week, titled “How do you find joy in the midst of hate?” Mulvaney also said he had “grace” for his critics, hateful wretches though they may be.
The host was Schuyler Bailar, the first transgender athlete to compete on a NCAA Division I men’s team, so you can tell how this is going to skew. In a segment played before the interview, she said she was “really excited about this despite all of the transphobia, hatred, and barrage of negativity that Dylan has had to interface with.”
The conversation, Bailar said, was intended to “help shed some light on what it’s like to deal with these kinds of comments regularly, how we hold on to ourselves, our truths and our joy throughout all the transphobia and hate.”
Now, one doesn’t necessarily wish poor sleep or hatred on Mulvaney, Bailar or any other individual, but if you enter the political arena, you’re going to end up with a few people who are angry with you. It’s worth noting, too, that most people have taken this out on Bud Light, not Dylan; most of us would have never heard of him were it not for a tin-eared DEI-tastic social media ad campaign, which was basically a bunch of marketing execs waving a certain finger in front of the brand’s traditional drinkers. The brand’s drinkers and other Middle Americans waved that finger right back at them and, well, here we are.
But to hear Mulvaney tell it, this is all about him.
“I remember, like, even in college — this was just a few years ago — like, if one person potentially didn’t like me, it would keep me up at night,” Mulvaney said. “I was like, ‘Oh God, how do I fix this?’ And now there are hundreds of thousands of people that do not like me, and I still sometimes can’t sleep.
“But in a weird way, it has been a blessing to sort of break that people-pleasing mentality because … there’s no way I can win those people over.”
After Bailar said later in the interview that Mulvaney’s “rest” is “part of that fight” against transphobia, Mulvaney responded that “there is a guilt sometimes, when like, you know, you’d go to do something fun or you’d go on vacation or you know — but those are part of the rest, and it’s part of the recharge and the privilege because we are very privileged to rest in moments. But again, it’s like, it’s the long game, it’s a long race.”
Later in the podcast, Mulvaney said that “the word that keeps popping into my head throughout this entire time has been grace — and like, giving each other grace, giving ourselves grace, even I — dare I say, this might be, this is controversial — but the people that are targeting us right now, I’m trying to find grace for them because I know that something in them, this was, you know, planted from something else. And I can only hope that they will see the beauty and the humanity and the importance of an identity, and not try to strip that away.”
And to think that most people have taken it out on the beer and not Mulvaney. If he’s not the type that can handle criticism — particularly from those who don’t believe he can just pick his gender and then tell everyone that he is a she and that they should just deal with it — then fine. There are plenty of good jobs in data entry, computer programming, construction, web design, architecture, retail management — literally anything but being an internet personality. There are consequences to putting yourself out there and garnering millions of followers.
Furthermore, he’s not just any internet personality, but one who’s specifically known for his gender dysphoria. If it wasn’t for Mulvaney’s “365 Days of Girlhood” campaign, in which he detailed his attempts to become a she, nobody would know who he is.
This is something Mulvaney doesn’t seem to get. In an interview with Bustle last month, he said this: “A lot of brands will ask, ‘Could you relate a little bit of your struggle growing up into this?’ Like, no! If you want me, you want me because I’m Dylan, not because I’m trans.”
“That’s when you know they were just trying to check a box,” he added.
But that’s the only reason we know you, Dylan. That’s the only reason Bud Light partnered with you. Your fame has to do with the fact you waded into the culture war and finally reached the point where, yes, people pushed back, upset you were making a mockery of womanhood. Calling them “transphobic” doesn’t sound like any sort of “grace” — or even a basic comprehension of why people are upset — to me.
Now, actual hate should be rebarbative to anyone, particularly Christian conservatives, and just like Mulvaney’s rambling comments about grace seemed to indicate, we ought to extend him grace, too. That doesn’t mean abandoning our values, but treating him as a human being. It’s also worth noting that the Bud Light problem isn’t his to own, but rather Anheuser-Busch’s fault; if it wasn’t him, it would have been some other totemic progressive fixture waving the standards of diversity, equity and inclusion in our faces. The point is that they took a stand in the first place.
However, it isn’t anyone’s job to ensure that Dylan Mulvaney doesn’t literally lose sleep over well-remunerated deals with soulless conglomerates trying to check off the DEI boxes. Mulvaney has spent a year prancing around the battlefields of the culture war on both TikTok and Instagram; now, he seems very upset over having stepped in his first landmine.
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