Dylan Mulvaney has had a hard year.
Since she started her popular TikTok series, Days of Girlhood, a year ago, she has made hundreds of thousands of dollars, made friends in the White House, and is now trying to get into the world of Hollywood stars.
Still, being a social media star is hard work, and it’s starting to show. The 26-year-old had painful surgery on her face and was doxxed when a fan put her personal phone number online.
Now, the transgender poster girl has talked about how her personal relationships have broken down and how hard it is for her to get a date. She has also said that she has yet to be kissed “as a girl.”
The online series about Dylan Mulvaney’s transition, which has 10.8 million followers, has always been strange. But her recent impersonations of a made-up six-year-old girl named Eloise, who lives in a fancy hotel, and her disguise as a child’s doll have made her even stranger.
Let dolls be dolls, please,
In a recent clip, Dylan Mulvaney said this while wearing a bright dress with a pattern, braided hair, bows, and colored circles on her cheeks. She then spun for the camera.
Let dolls be dolls, please.
The sequence makes little sense. It’s just another chance for Dylan Mulvaney to dress up and say that people can identify as anything they want and that people who disagree are disgusting haters.
But the series makes perfect sense from a business point of view. Dylan Mulvaney lost her job when the COVID-19 virus spread and The Book of Mormon, the musical she was in, closed.
Since then, her main source of income has been Days of Girlhood.
Assil Dayri, founder of AMD Consulting Group and a social media expert, said that when Dylan Mulvaney promotes a cosmetics, credit card, or fashion brand, she makes about $75,000, and maybe even more if she posts about it on Instagram.
According to estimates from people in the business, Dylan Mulvaney, who is represented by the Los Angeles-based Creative Artists Agency (CAA), could make as much as $1 million a year.
The campus newspaper says that the University of Pittsburgh paid Dylan Mulvaney $26,250 to give a speech this month. She also makes a lot of money by selling $54 pink sweaters that are part of a line of girlhood-themed items she sells.
Dayri praised Dylan Mulvaney for keeping fans “extremely engaged” with her “journey and its evolution” and for gaining millions of followers as she changed into a “public figure, rather than a content creator.”
It paid off to work hard. Dylan Mulvaney has bought a house in Los Angeles, made videos from a high-end resort in French Polynesia, and spent a week at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, which costs $800 per night.
This month, when Vice President Kamala Harris sent Dylan Mulvaney a letter to mark her “365th day of living authentically,” it was clear that Mulvaney was becoming more popular on social media.
President Joe Biden had already met her at the White House in October.
She has also worked with stars like Paris Hilton, Drew Barrymore, and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel star Rachel Brosnahan.
But not every time this works out. People didn’t like that Barrymore kneeled at Dylan Mulvaney’s feet on her talk show. Even more embarrassing was when Mulvaney talked Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox into doing a TikTok skit with him.
It was clear that the two women didn’t get along. Mulvaney kept interrupting Cox at the Annual Grammy Awards last month when the star was giving some sharp advice.
It’s insane that you’re documenting so much of your life,
Cox said.
Make sure you keep things for yourself, everything cannot be for the public.
There might be something important going on here beneath the surface.
Mulvaney has friends in the White House and Hollywood, but it’s been hard for her to gain respect in the trans community, where she’s often called a drag queen, a pantomime performer, or a con artist.
People often question whether or not she is real. A well-known de-transitioner named Chloe Cole famously said that Mulvaney was not a “real trans kid.”
She had “facial feminization surgery” in December. She said that the changes to her hairline, chin, jaw, cheeks, nose, lips, and trachea caused “insane swelling.”
Even though it hurt, the surgery was just for looks, and it’s not the first gender-affirming treatment most men who want to become women choose. Even though Mulvaney can pay for cross-sex hormones, it doesn’t look like she is taking them.
Mulvaney’s clips are often lively and full of drama. They rarely last more than a couple of minutes, but they give a quick look into her daily life.
She includes hairdressers, stylists, singing teachers, and the performers she paid to come to her anniversary party at the fancy Rainbow Room in New York City earlier this month.
She doesn’t have many real friends, though.
In one scene, she talks about feeling “burned out” and wanting to “reconnect with my loved ones” because her relationships have gotten worse over the past year.
She complains that her love life isn’t going anywhere and that all of her matches on the exclusive dating app Raya seem to change their minds and back out before they even go on a date.
I still haven’t been kissed as a girl. And I assumed that I would have had that happen before day 365,
Mulvaney lamented.
Every day, I’m realizing that probably won’t happen.
She also complains about a fan who “completely broke” her trust by posting her phone number online. This, she says, led to nasty attacks from Mulvaney’s trolls, who include both feminists and conservatives.
Right-wingers are worried about Mulvaney’s huge popularity among young people who use TikTok and are easy to influence.
Matt Walsh, an author and commentator, recently said some very mean things about her. He called her a sick groomer and “some kind of human deep-fake.”
On the other hand, many women don’t like how loudly Mulvaney tries to be feminine.
Others don’t like it when a biological man steps into their shoes and gets paid to promote cosmetics and other products for women.
The criticisms must hurt Mulvaney because, after a year on the job, her usually upbeat appearances have turned into times of sadness and hopelessness.
I’m not enjoying my womanhood as much as I was,’ she said in a recent post directed at her feminist critics.
And my pain … is very real.
