Being A Woman Requires More Than Makeup, Dresses, And TikTok Theatrics

When President Biden decided to sit down for an interview with Dylan Mulvaney, the left’s most recent transgender “it girl,” it was reminiscent of President Obama’s many fluff interviews with social media icons. This interview was different, however, because it could have an actual influence on national policy. As Biden nodded along and praised Mulvaney for his “222nd day as a girl,” it occurred to me how absurd the entire scene was. The whole ordeal presents serious problems about the legitimacy of our political system, but also how women find themselves represented in 2022.

Mulvaney, most known for his TikTok “Days of Girlhood” series, represents one of the best examples of the absurdity of the modern transgender movement. As Amber Athey boldly pointed out in an article titled, “My womanhood is not your costume,” “Womanhood is now routinely publicly mocked and degraded by a group of men playing dress-up…” But “[t]he most offensive part of Mulvaney’s act is not that it debases women to the lowest stereotypes. It’s that women are being told to look truth dead in the eyes and then spit in its face.”

Mulvaney began “transitioning” less than a year ago and decided to document his daily experience through what is indistinguishable from right-wing satire. Taking on the common attitude that he is doing society a kindness by taking time to properly educate the ignorant masses, Mulvaney’s style is condescending, aggressive, and entitled. Yet to the casual observer, he appears frantic, hostile, and frankly, creepy, often with an exaggerated smile and manic eyes that tell a story of desperation, not confidence.

As Athey details, Mulvaney’s idea of “girlhood” seems limited to a Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie from the early 2000s. He dresses and behaves like a stereotype of a young teenage girl, with literal bows in his hair, and appears to have made a mental checklist of all the things girls like and don’t like, which he ticks off in his videos. Girls don’t like bugs, check. Girls wear “shopping shorts,” check. 

Along with his persona of an overly excitable teenager, Mulvaney, who is 25, exhibits moments of activist hostility. On day 74 of his series, he bounces onto the screen wearing tight black leather or latex shorts, which he refers to as his “shopping shorts,” with an overt confirmation of his biological sex on full display. He begins his story by noting that when out on a recent shopping trip, he noticed people kept staring at his crotch. He exclaims, “I forgot that my crotch doesn’t look like other women’s crotches sometimes because mine doesn’t look like a little Barbie pocket.”

For a moment, he appears to slip into adult lucidity and recognize that he could simply wear clothing that doesn’t draw such attention but snaps right back into his wide-eyed, exaggerated persona, demanding that perhaps everyone else should merely “normalize” the idea that women sometimes have bulges. To emphasize this, he begins to sing, “Women can have bulges, and that’s OK,” before getting to

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