Dylan Mulvaney Didn’t Do Anything
Merely existing as a popular trans woman shouldn’t mean sleepless nights and unending harassment.
by Evan Urquhart
Thousands of harassing comments led to sleepless nights for Dylan Mulvaney, according to a conversation she had with Schuyler Bailor for his podcast (an edited version is freely available on Bailor’s YouTube channel). Mulvaney’s Days of Girlhood series documenting the first year of her transition vaulted her to massive fame on TikTok, but she’s faced an ongoing backlash even before a sponsorship deal with Bud Light resulted in weeks of international news coverage. Bud Light has largely bowed to the pressure from far right extremists, some of whom have inundated its bottling facilities with bomb threats.
screenshot from Express UK
Assigned covered Mulvaney way back in our first month as a news site after the right wing media became obsessed with her for asking Joe Biden a question. In her discussion with Bailor Mulvaney talks about being a “baby trans” and says, in retrospect, she shouldn’t have been the trans person chosen to ask a question of Biden when she was so early in her transition, but looking back on that moment the question she chose seems more than prescient. She asked the president, last October, “Do you think states should have a right to ban gender-affirming healthcare?”
The question led to days of outraged stories and anti-trans activists picking through all of Mulvaney’s videos desperate for something to discredit her. The worst they found was a video where Mulvaney made-up a little song about having forgotten to tuck when she went out in tight shorts one day. The song was about not wanting to be stared at in public.
Asking the president a question isn’t doing something wrong. Making up a song about how you don’t deserve to be stared at like a freak isn’t doing something wrong. Partnering with Bud Light for a sponsored Instagram post isn’t doing something wrong. The harrassment Mulvaney has faced is irrational, based solely on her identity as a trans woman and the fact that people hate her for it.
In the American public discourse we’ve spent years talking about “cancel culture” and the dynamics of social media harassment. These conversations typically focus on whether the response is proportionate to the offense, for example if an insensitive comment is serious enough to merit calls to boycott a person’s work or say they should be fired. But, Mulvaney didn’t even make a mildly insensitive comment. She didn’t do… anything. She just existed, as a trans woman. How can a nation which purports to believe that social media harassment for a racist or sexist post is disproportionate be so silent when trans people are harassed ceaselessly for just existing?