Dylan Mulvaney

But it felt like ants on a screen is kind of how I call it because it's just names and sweet comments.

And a lot of them made me feel so happy.

But then there was a lot of really negative ones.

And I think what affected me the most was I felt like I believed that I could change their opinion about it.

I was like, oh, let me just make this video to show them this other side of myself so that person doesn't hate me as much.

And I truly believed that I had...

the ability to let people in enough, and I just kept giving parts of myself away, and it still was never gonna be enough, because a lot of the people online were never going to keep watching my videos, or they were just gonna assume what they wanted.

But I think,

I had no idea of the magnitude until Beer Gate, as I like to call it, which was in April of 2023, a little bit after a year of my transition, where the far-right media sort of took me and used me as a poster child in a lot of their anti-trans things.

campaigns and in their news stories.

I was, you know, very viral at this point online with probably like 13 million followers.

And I was getting a lot of brand deals at the time.

I was doing a lot of promotional advertisements that were going really well and getting a lot of positive attention.

So I think I became sort of like...

brands way to feel connected to the LGBTQ community in a lot of ways.

I also was using those advertisement dollars to like pay for my gender affirming care and my surgeries, which was like epic way to kind of cheat the system because it's so expensive and difficult to get that care.

And so I really was on such a high and on such a

A great trajectory in my career.

And it was funny because I specifically love drinking beer.

It's one of my favorite drinks still to this day.