He Enjoys Being a Girl
Of course you know who Dylan Mulvaney is, but in case the name has floated free in your mind from the image, let me remind you: this is the young man whom Anheuser-Busch used just under a year ago to destroy the Bud Light brand. It began when a bright young woman named Alissa Heinerscheid, whom the company had just hired as its vice president of marketing, decided that America’s best-selling beer, long associated with working guys and frat boys, needed a dramatic image overhaul. So Heinerscheid decided to do a 180, tapping Dylan to be the new face of the iconic beverage.
Dylan, who is now 28 years old, and whom I am referring to here by his given name because Mulvaney sounds like the name of a tough-talking Boston cop, already had something of a public profile. Since early 2022, he’d been an online “influencer,” using videos on TikTok to recount in detail (medical and psychological) his “transition” from man to woman — correction, from man to girl.
He also used videos to celebrate every day of his newfound girlhood. In one of his videos, the scrawny, bewigged lad could be seen frolicking in the woods in what looked like a two-piece black swimsuit. Taking in this exceedingly odd spectacle, one found oneself pondering the question of whether this bizarre individual could best be classified as (a) a lunatic, (b) a cretin, or (c) a relentlessly self-promoting narcissist.
In October 2022, Dylan went to the White House to interview President Biden about “trans rights.” Biden said all the right things. In February 2023, Dylan walked the red carpet at the Grammys. In March, Dylan was a guest on the Drew Barrymore Show, on which Drew and Dylan ended up having a cozy tête-à-tête on the floor of the stage.
Then came April 1 and the Bud Light controversy. It started small. In a brief Instagram video commemorating the NCAA’s “March Madness” tournament, Dylan pitched the product. He was dressed for the occasion like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s — little black dress, black opera gloves, a drawerful of necklaces, and plenty of makeup — because, naturally, that’s what one does on such occasions. The backlash from the beer-drinking public was intense and instantaneous. Bud Light sales dropped through the floor. Heinerscheid got the heave-ho. (RELATED: Anheuser-Busch Lays Off Hundreds of Corporate Employees Following Dylan Mulvaney Fallout)
And Dylan? Well, Dylan was just getting started. After the Bud Light affair, he released a debut single and music video, performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and won the “Woman of the Year” award from the British magazine Attitude, following in the footsteps of Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner, who was named Glamour‘s “Woman of the Year” in 2015. Now, Dylan is out with a memoir, Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer. Kristin Chenoweth calls it “required reading for anyone looking to expand their relationship to the LGBTQ+ community.” Jonathan Van Ness, the grooming expert on Queer Eye, calls Dylan “the voice of a generation.” Paris Hilton calls him “a total icon” and “a huge inspiration.”
I’ve read it, too. No, not really read it. Skimmed it. Which was, take my word for it, painful enough.
The memoir, which is illustrated with the kind of drawings you might see in a children’s book, takes us through Dylan’s first year as a “girl.” On Day 1, he writes: “I’m coming out for the third time in my life today. The first time, I was fourteen and I came out as a gay boy, next was age twenty-four as nonbinary, and now, here I am at twenty-five, finally ready to tell the world that I am a trans woman. AH!”
What else does Dylan want to tell us? Well, he was in the cast of the national tour of the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, and is “a musical theater girl through and through.” He got it on with guys when he was a gay dude, but now that he’s a “girl,” he has yet to have his first hookup. (For the record, he’s still into guys.) The women who most inspire him are “Frida Kahlo, Oprah, Miss Piggy, Marilyn Monroe, Marsha P. Johnson, Dolly Parton, Princess Diana, Michelle Obama, the casts of The Golden Girls and Sex and the City, Joni Mitchell, and, of course, Audrey Hepburn.”
He recounts a visit to London and a stay at the Plaza Hotel in New York and a trip to Peru to do ayahuasca (because Chelsea Handler had done so), as a result of which, he claims, he “lactated out of my nipples.” We learn that after his interview with Biden, he spent three hours (!) with the President, who took him to see the White House movie theater (where Dylan broke into a dance) and showed him the Oval Office (where Dylan played with Biden’s dog). And he reveals that after the Biden interview, his mother told him that she disapproved of his enthusiasm for the transitioning of children, a comment that led Dylan to cut her off for several months.
What else? He shares a list of 100 things he’s learned as a “trans girl,” among them:
7. Yellow and orange are not really my colors.
9. I might want to dye my hair blonde?
39. Your dress size varies from store to store. Don’t pay too much attention.
40. A wedged heel will always be more comfortable than a stiletto.
49. My moon is in Virgo and my ascendant is in Pisces.
Dylan tells us what it’s like going to the ladies room; getting laser hair removal; getting cheek implants (that’s the cheeks on his face, not his rump); and getting Facial Feminization Surgery (FFS for short). I knew before I read this book that trans people refer to hysterectomies as “bottom surgery” and mastectomies as “top surgery,” but I learned from Dylan that castration is known by the adorable name “Cassie.” I also learned from Dylan that he still has his junk, but wears special underwear (size XS) that keeps it from showing too much.
There’s a lot more medical stuff. (If you’re trans, you’re a patient for life.) Dylan recounts a recent appointment with a surgeon who, when asked what kind of work Dylan needed, said he really didn’t require all that much. The doctor only wanted to “shave the brow bone off, lift the eyebrows, take down the hairline a few inches, do a rhinoplasty to bring down the width of the nose, lift the lip, possibly small cheek implants, I would take the chin in and shave the jaw, and shave the trachea off.”
Why did I spend so much as a moment on this book, given that it made me feel as if my IQ was plunging like Joe Biden on a flight of airport stairs? Part of the reason is that we can’t ignore this stuff away. Yes, we may — pray God — be transitioning out of the trans moment, but it’s not entirely over yet. The legacy news media and Hollywood are still hopelessly hooked on this nonsense. It’s a key part of the Zeitgeist. Tens of millions of Americans think it’s the civil rights movement of our day. They believe, with Drew Barrymore, that people like Dylan are courageous.
Is it necessary for me to say that Dylan is not courageous? On the contrary, he’s one deeply disturbed young man. The trans fad has given new meaning to the term “desperate for attention,” but no trans person I’ve ever seen or read about has been more desperate for attention than Dylan. A while back, a video surfaced showing Dylan, in his gay-boy days, as a contestant on The Price Is Right. As Matt Walsh observed after viewing the video, Dylan the boy was exactly the same flamboyant character as Dylan the “girl,” only without the dresses and makeup and so on.
Dylan is a lot like Paris Hilton — totally untalented, but desperate for fame. Skimming his book, I felt I was being reminded of yet another airheaded female. But who? Then I remembered that a year or so ago, I reviewed Pageboy, the memoir of the actress Ellen Page, who is now a “trans male” named Elliot. The two books — and the two people — are very similar. Elliot, now 38, and Dylan both come off as self-absorbed teenagers, certain that everything they’ve experienced and everything they have to say, however trite or trivial, should be of riveting interest to the whole world. (RELATED: When Virtue Signalers Become Virtue Flaunters)
Reviewing Elliot’s book, I wrote: “Emotionally, Page seems always to be dialed up to 10 …. Pageboy is a riot of self-absorption, self-dramatization, and often (as Page puts it herself) ‘self-disdain.’ But although she professes to have undergone a remarkable journey of self-discovery and to have attained profound self-knowledge, there’s really very little here in the way of actual self-understanding.” The same is true of Dylan — in spades.
The styles of Elliot’s and Dylan’s books are so similar that I wondered briefly whether they shared a ghostwriter. But there’s no mention of a ghostwriter in Elliot’s book, whereas Dylan writes in his acknowledgments: “Marina Shifrin, thank you for holding my hand through the writing of this book. I would dive into the creative deep end with you a million more times.” I looked up Marina Shifrin. Yep, she’s a ghostwriter. And I’ve got to admit, she’s done a terrific job of making a guy who’s pushing thirty sound like an unusually immature 13-year-old girl who hasn’t yet learned what it means to have self-control or to stop looking in the mirror.
In a promotional interview for his book, Dylan told ABC that he just wants “to live authentically.” It’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in years. Nobody could be less real. Seeing that clip of Dylan as a self-identified gay man on The Price Is Right, I was angry in the way that I’m always angry at gay men who behave in a buffoonishly stereotypical manner. It’s the gay version of a shanda fur die goyim — the Yiddish way of describing Jews who make Jews look bad in front of gentiles.
But to witness Dylan’s hijinks as a self-identified girl, and to read — okay, skim — his ridiculous book, makes me even angrier. Because absolutely everything he does these days is a mockery of real women, whom he reduces to couture and coiffeur and cosmetics, and an existential danger to effeminate boys who, unwilling to accept yet that they’re gay, may well be convinced by Dylan that they’re really girls and hop on to the trans assembly line.
Then again, at least Dylan has an excuse for being such a menace to the young: the poor thing is severely screwed up. What’s the excuse of his publishing house, which is presenting him as a role model? Everybody at Harry N. Abrams should be deeply, deeply ashamed.
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