Dylan Mulvaney Speaks Out Against ‘the Need to Dehumanize and Be Cruel’ Amid Bud Light Backlash
After almost two months of conservatives seething over Dylan Mulvaney’s brief partnership with Bud Light, the actress/TikTok personality has addressed the bizarre and vitriolic backlash directly in a video.
In case you’ve forgotten (and if you have, leave now; you don’t want to remember this, I promise), Mulvaney partnered with Bud Light for a March Madness ad on her Instagram. The less than two-minute-long ad managed to make far-right conservatives absolutely lose their minds in increasingly bizarre and embarrassing ways.
They bought cases of Bud Light with their own money (???) and then shot at it, burned it, or dumped it down the sink. They called for a boycott of the beer at events and restaurants. Ted Cruz called for an investigation into Bud Light’s ties with Mulvaney, which is so dumb it makes my head hurt. And one lucky grifter had the bright idea to make his own conservative beer which landed in a bit of hot water when the brewery they’d announced as their partner in the product publicly stated they wanted no part in the project.
Honestly, it’s been two months of utter stupidity and many of Mulvaney’s fans didn’t think she would respond to such intense and ridiculous backlash. But, luckily, she jumped onto TikTok to deliver a beautiful and honest message detailing how she felt about the situation.
Mulvaney calls conservatives out for cruel and unusual behavior
In a TikTok posted at the end of April, Mulvaney says she has been offline for a few weeks and expressed how disconcerting it felt to hear her name attached to narratives that weren’t close to being her truth. In a sweet bit of shade, Mulvaney said the noise around her was so loud that she decided to “take the backseat and let them tucker themselves out,” but wanted to come back to TikTok to talk to the 13 million people who have been following and supporting her journey.
Mulvaney says she decided to “try a new thing called waiting to respond” and that she had been “sitting in [her] emotions” before crafting a response, which is completely valid when right-wing jackals are slinging mud at you. Mulvaney said she was having a lot of deja vu because, when she was growing up, she would be called “too feminine” and “over the top,” and now she was being called the same thing by conservatives. She said that ring-wing people should just call her a theater kid and camp because her personality has always been this way. She didn’t suddenly become a different person just because she’s trans as it doesn’t work that way.
The most powerful part of Mulvaney’s video comes at the halfway point when she explains that, while she thinks “it’s OK to be frustrated with someone or confused,” she’s struggling to understand why people feel “the need to dehumanize and to be cruel” just because they don’t understand something. Mulvaney added that “dehumanization has never fixed anything in history, ever” and she’s absolutely right.
The TikTok star says she was nervous to come back to the platform because she thought her fans would start to believe the nonsense coming from these angry right-wing people because they were so loud and obnoxious, but she’s just “going to go ahead and trust that the people who know me and my heart won’t listen to that noise.”
At the end of the day, Mulvaney is not just a trans woman, she’s a human being. She may have risen to fame by documenting her transition, but there’s so much more to her personality. Mulvaney even said so herself at the end of the video when she expressed that she wants to “share parts of [herself] on here that have nothing to do with [her] identity.” I know it’s easy to forget that famous people have real thoughts and feelings, but they do. And no one should be subjected to the vitriol that Mulvaney had to go through these past few months.
I can only hope people listen to Mulvaney’s message and think about what they say before they dehumanize someone else. Just be kind, it’s not that hard, I promise.
(featured image: Rob Kim/Getty Images)
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