Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney is celebrating a milestone. She’s starting 2024 with a new passport that lists her gender as female.
“Here’s to ease through tsa and the year ahead,” she wrote in a post on Instagram that included a photo of part of her passport.
Mulvaney also linked to a new essay she penned for Porter Magazine that spoke of her hopes for the future.
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“On an exciting note: I just got my gender marker and photo changed on my passport, so now the airport should be a little less daunting in 2024,” she wrote.
“I hope everything will be less daunting. I hope that love pours over the hate and, most importantly, that the majority of the love comes from within. Because, really, the only person I need to please is myself.”
Mulvaney, a comedic trans influencer, skyrocketed to fame in 2023 via her 365 Days of Girlhood series on TikTok and drew right-wing controversy over her brand partnership with Bud Light. She was named one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30″ under the social media category.
According to Forbes, which also included her in its 2023 Top Creators list earlier this year, Mulvaney has earned an estimated $2 million this year and has landed partnerships with the Nike athletic brand and MAC cosmetics. But it was her partnership with Bud Light that got the most attention.
After the beer brand paid Mulvaney to post a video featuring a custom beer can bearing an image of her face, anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives called for a boycott of Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch. Mulvaney was subjected to a torrent of harassment and transphobia online — online and in person — and Anheuser-Busch’s tepid response to both the attacks on Mulvaney and the boycott led the Human Rights Campaign to remove the company from its Corporate Equality Index.
“For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse, in my opinion, than not hiring a trans person at all,” Mulvaney said in a June post, “because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want. And the hate doesn’t end with me. It has serious and grave consequences for the rest of our community.”
Mulvaney’s essay noted that she’d tried to please people her entire life and her resolution to focus more on herself and less on her critics – and how the new passport would help.
“I have found a surprising peace in the inability to please everyone on the internet. But often, the anxiety around it in public is still alive and well. My fear is most noticeable at the airport. I show up in a sweats set, but add femme accessories and earrings in the hope of not being misgendered. The TSA step-through scan is my worst enemy, and often I have to whisper into the officer’s ear, ‘Um, I’m trans.’ Has this TSA officer seen my videos? Do they believe trans people exist?”
“Moving forward, I’d like to navigate both people-pleasing, and the airport, a little differently – with a plan,” she added. “There’s no way I’ll have the time or energy to complete all the goals I have in this lifetime if I’m wasting it trying to please the critics and the keyboard warriors and the TSA security agent.”
