Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney shared her “trauma” amid the ongoing Bud Light controversy in a new social media post celebrating her 500th day since coming out as a woman.
“Today would be day 500 of being a girl if I was still keeping up with that series, but I found myself in kind of an interesting position,” she said in a video posted to social media. “Because if I make the content that I want to make and freely share my trans joy, I subject myself to a lot more trauma. So lately, I’ve chosen to scale back in order to protect my overall well being, and it works. I am quite happy, but I’m not doing what I love.”
Mulvaney grew a large following through her TikTok series, “Days of Being a Girl,” where she documented her experiences after coming out as a transgender woman. She further gained national attention after she did a sponsored post with Bud Light that included her posing with a personalized beer can.
The ad immediately drew criticism from conservatives who accused the beer company of pushing a pro-LGBTQ agenda and resulted in boycotts of the beer, which recently fell from its spot as the top-selling beer brand in the U.S. for the first time in more than 20 years. Anheuser-Busch — the parent company of Bud Light — also announced Wednesday it will be laying off almost 2 percent of its U.S. workforce.
The beer company also faced criticism from LGBTQ advocacy groups, which said the company did not do enough to stand by Mulvaney after the backlash. In a separate video posted last month, she said Bud Light not standing by her was worse “than not hiring a trans person at all.”
In her eight-minute video Wednesday, Mulvaney detailed what she has discovered over the past few months, including learning not to trust people so easily, curtailing negative comments on Instagram and being shown who her “true loved ones” are.
“But you know who came through for me these last few months? It was trans people and queer people, a lot of which saw all of this coming because they knew what it was like to be burned and I didn’t,” she said.
“And it’s like when your friend is in a bad relationship and you wait for them to see the light and then they come running back to you,” she continued. “Well, that was the queer community for me. You know, I gave myself and my identity to people who didn’t deserve it. And then the trans and queer community was there to pick me back up without pity.”