Dylan Mulvaney on 40 days of being a girl

“I wanna show the world that I can be a woman at any stage.”

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.🧩

Dylan literally gained one million more followers between us doing this interview and it being published. A flex! —Kate

---

Photo: Instagram

Day in the life videos are common on TikTok, but Dylan Mulvaney is doing something different. After coming out as a girl back in early March, she’s been documenting her transition in daily videos on the app. Today is day 40. 

After growing up in San Diego and then attending college at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music for musical theater, Dylan went straight onto a Broadway national tour of The Book Of Mormon. But then the pandemic hit.  

“I went home and it was the first time in my life I had ever asked myself, ‘Dylan, who are you without your career? And who are you without the roles that you can play?’” she tells me over Zoom. “And that's when I started asking myself those hard gender questions.”

First, Dylan used the label “non-binary.”

“And I think being non-binary was a gift because it gave me the chance to sort of try on femininity in a way that I never had before,” she says. “The idea of being non-binary was a lot less scary to me than what it meant to be a trans woman.” But later, she realized who she really was: A woman.

“So I had to come out all these different times, each one very different, but each time I've gotten so much more confident and I'm realizing it's less of me asking permission of other people and it's more of me saying, this is who I am.”

In her girlhood series on TikTok—Dylan uses the term “girl” because she feels it aligns more with the beginning of her journey towards womanhood—she shares the day-to-day realities of transitioning that often aren’t seen, such as what to do about unwanted facial hair, figuring out her new “woman voice,” and embracing femininity without perpetuating stereotypes. In this interview for paid subscribers, Dylan and I chat about her decision to be so open about those aspects of her transition and how people are reacting in good, bad, and complicated ways.