“Yep. Your cheek implant is infected. We’re going to have to operate,” my surgeon told me in his Beverly Hills office. “Are you sure? I have some big events coming up that I can’t miss.” I try to plead with him. “We can hold off for a little longer, but it’s only going to get worse,” he said.
I had surgery six months before, and the swelling from one of my cheek implants never went down. One side of my face was visibly puffier than the other, but nothing a little contour can’t solve! It had gotten worse and worse leading up to my big show celebrating a year since my transition, but the event took priority over my health. We spent weeks trying less aggressive ways to heal the infection, but now surgery was the only option. How was I supposed to schedule surgery and recover when I have paparazzi outside my door?! Oh Christ, the religious bigots are going to have a field day with this one. “Trans woman gets infection from botched plastic surgery, further proof that God hates her and Satan lives in her cheek.”
Since Beergate, it’s been a pretty steady stream of shitstorms. While I once woke up to fairy-tale emails and invites to social engagements, my mornings were now filled with dread and more bad news.
It began on February 11, 2023, when my first Instagram ad for — let’s call it “Generic Beer” — Generic Beer dropped. A few transphobic rumblings in the comments at first, but nothing out of the ordinary. Later, while I was staying at the Plaza in New York, Generic Beer sent me a can with my face on it. I had gotten a lot of PR sent to me over the past year, but this was by far my favorite thing I’d received. My dad was particularly obsessed with it, as if this can was what solidified my fame in his eyes.
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Adapted from Paper Doll: Notes From a Late Bloomer, by Dylan Mulvaney, to be published by Abrams on March 11, 2025.
My career was on the upswing, now expanding from social-media campaigns to speaking engagements, major auditions, and public appearances. I spent March bopping from New York to L.A. to Pittsburgh to New Orleans to Copenhagen and back to New York. I brought the custom can with me to New Orleans where I filmed the Generic Beer video in my hotel room before a friend’s wedding, in full Audrey Hepburn glam, playing up my aloofness to sports, which is very, very real. The video was approved, and I posted it when arriving in New York, on April 1.
Forty-eight hours later, I was on the phone with my publicist and agent after Kid Rock posted a video of shooting beer cans with a rifle. I headed back to L.A., and by the time I landed, my ad was the top headline at every conservative-news outlet. I felt a weight pressing on my chest, knowing that this was some of the worst transphobia I’d ever received, especially from proper media and not just dumbass podcast hosts. While I was dropping off packages at UPS, a man ran up to me with a camera and asked, “Dylan, what do you have to say to Kid Rock?!” I had to get a bodyguard stationed in my driveway. For weeks, I went stir-crazy inside my house, not wanting to give the paparazzi outside anything to work with. I became paranoid. I wondered if the people who loved me secretly felt ashamed of their association with me. Did they see me as a woman? Could my mailman be a Judas? Was my smiling Trader Joe’s cashier one of the haters in my comments?
Finding any ounce of joy since then had been, well, a struggle. I was angry at conservative media, afraid of losing my career, and grieving for the privacy I once had. On top of that, I worried that I had potentially set back the trans community, that my actions — God forbid — might actually lead to violence. My life coach, Mory, was working overtime, as I’d call her to extinguish daily fires I needed to put out. My friend Lily was still around but had a husband at home and work to attend to, so she could only babysit me on occasion. But the one thing I wasn’t sharing with any of them was my desire to no longer exist. To fade into nothingness. I’ve always hated asking for help, and even with my loved ones I pride myself on being a light they can come to for entertainment or counsel. I did not want to burden them with my mess.
Looking back on the aftermath of Beergate, I definitely should have gone away somewhere to get proper mental-health treatment. I was so scared that news outlets would take my admission into a mental-health facility as a way to paint me and all trans people as “psychos” who belong in the loony bin. I assumed going away would be the nail in the coffin. I hadn’t gotten a single brand deal since Beergate, and my existing deals were being put on hold or terminated. During that time, I had a few companies say, “You know what? No need to make content for us, girlfriend, we’ll just pay you out and call it a day.” The “It” girl in me was still obsessed with trying to win back brand attention, but I was also afraid that I was no longer hirable for acting gigs, or even Broadway. I feared that all the good progress I made in normalizing trans people in the media was taking a very ugly turn.
I had one brand deal that was still standing behind me proudly, a video with Lionsgate to interview beloved author Judy Blume for the new movie Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. I convinced my doctor to push out the cheek surgery in order to attend. I hadn’t been out of the house in weeks, and I was so looking forward to meeting Judy. When I arrived early in the lobby of the Four Seasons where the press junket was taking place, I decided to freshen up in the women’s restroom. What I was greeted with when I exited took me by complete shock.
“Dylan, what do you say to the women who are being raped by your kind in prison?!” A middle-aged man followed by his camera crew stuck the mic in my face. I didn’t have any of my team members with me, and I ran straight to the front desk, where a young male worker was equally flustered. The journalist, if you could even call him that, continued to berate me with sickening questions, and he had zero shame. The only thing I could muster up to the Four Seasons worker was, “Please help me get to the movie press junket. Please.”
In a daze, he escorted me to the elevator, where the man tried to get in with me, but the employee blocked him. He yelled one last sick question before the door shut. I was pissed. “How did he even get in here?!” I asked the worker, who replied, “I have no idea how they got past security, it’s trespassing for sure.”
This confirmed to me that (a) these people were still on a Dylan witch hunt, and (b) they would do just about anything to get their content. I recently rewatched that video and started crying because I can see the moment so clearly when I left my body and became a shell of myself. I made it through the Judy Blume interview despite the frenzy just moments before. Judy said she was proud of me and that I had to keep going. It felt like such a stark representation of good and evil under the same roof. But to be honest, I wasn’t really there.
The next night, I hosted the red carpet for the film’s premiere. This was a huge career goal of mine, where I could show off my witty banter with major stars. I brought Lily as my date, along with two bodyguards (one of whom got added after the previous night’s antics). I thought everyone was a little on edge, and I wanted a sense of normalcy. Though my team made it clear I didn’t need to stay to watch the film, I was out on the town and ready to make a night of it. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is about a girl who is struggling to connect with a higher spiritual being, looking for answers to her problems and roadblocks in puberty. This hit me hard, because I, too, was looking up at the sky and wondering if there was anyone up there to help guide me through this mess. I feel close to God when the blessings rain down, but when the going gets tough, crickets. Why would God have let me take that beer contract if it was going to ruin me?
On the car ride home, Lily was acting awkward and suspicious, which I had never felt from her in the 16 years of our friendship. “What’s going on?” I asked, as she read her texts. “Nothing,” she responded. She was a terrible liar, so I did something I vowed I wouldn’t do: I Googled myself. I had made it a few weeks without looking up my name, and her weirdness seemed like a good enough reason to break my streak. “Beer factory faces bomb threats over Dylan Mulvaney advertisement, employees evacuated while SWAT team investigates.”
“Bomb threats?!” I screamed. “We didn’t want to worry you while you were hosting the red carpet,” Lily said. I could tell she was genuinely scared and only wanted to protect me, but I also think I deserve to know when something this major happens. Why would someone blow up a beer factory for hiring a trans girl to do an Instagram video? Why wouldn’t they just kill said trans girl instead and call it a day?
The car service and bodyguards dropped us off at my house, and I no longer had security with me overnight. Lily and I were left to our own devices: a kitchen knife and locks on the doors. We took one last best-friend bath in my tub, since Lily was about to move to London with her British husband. “Are you sure you’re gonna be okay?” she asked me from behind a sea of Lush bubbles. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Just FaceTime me sometimes,” I said. Once Lily left, it was just me. My house that once felt like a Miss Honey cottage now felt more like a bunker.
The days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months. The whole situation started to feel more and more like a video game that I was losing. I started to play a new game with myself: How long could I go without wanting to die?
This thought popped into my head multiple times a day. I would fall asleep thinking about not waking up, and how peaceful that sounded to me. I never had any intentions to act on these thoughts, but the peace and comfort I felt from them were deeply unsettling. As sad as some people would be to see me go, I also knew that it would bring joy to others. I would no longer feel the weight of the world or the future of transness on my shoulders.
My mom came to stay with me for a few nights during this time, and she would crawl under the windows so she wouldn’t be seen by the paparazzi. Some outlet published an article called “Who Are Dylan Mulvaney’s Parents?” and they had gotten her confused with another Dana Mulvaney, so they reported that she was dead. This mistake thrilled my mom because that meant people wouldn’t be hounding her the same way my dad was getting calls from strangers threatening him.
The scariest thing to happen during this chapter of my life was not death threats, or bomb squads, or canceled brand deals, but the numbness that took over my whole being. Lying in bed on difficult nights, I tried to think about the trans kids in my DMs who came out to their parents because of me. The Midwest moms in my comments section hyping me up like their own daughter. Lily and our pledge to grow old together. While I was grateful for them, I also wondered what they would think if they found out their favorite trans TikToker wasn’t as happy as she appeared.
I thought often about something my dad said to me during this time. “Maybe your life is different now, and we just have to get used to that,” he said.
“Yeah, maybe,” I responded.
“You know what they say in my AA, right?” I already knew, but I let him say it anyway.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
In all the years my dad had been repeating this prayer, it was the first time it felt like it actually applied to me. It’s not in my nature to accept the things I cannot change. But there was no fixing this.
Adapted excerpt from the new book Paper Doll, by Dylan Mulvaney, published by Abrams Image © 2025 Dylan Mulvaney