Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light

I'm probably more sympathetic to the trans issue than are many people to the right of me. A lot of righties today are convinced that being trans is a sign of mental illness, and that settles the issue. Get these people help, those righties say. I don't see this as a simple case of mental illness although, given the horrific suicide rates in the trans community, mental illness is almost certainly an ambient factor to some degree. That said, I've admitted that the trans issue is large enough to have bled over into morally troubling territory. For me, this means problems like how the inclusion of trans women in women's sports is hurting female athletes. More widely, it means I'm open to the idea that certain aspects of the trans "project" are—intentionally or not—aimed at the erasure of women. What started off as a joke seems to have become, over time, a serious idea: men can be better women than women. I'm also troubled by any group's attempts to ask for more than tolerance. There's not much about the trans way of life that I can relate to or even like, but I'm fine with tolerating the phenomenon. The problem is that the more activistic wing of the trans community wants more than tolerance: they want me to bend the knee, to use certain language, and to affirm that the trans lifestyle and point of view are somehow more than merely tolerable—they're angelically beautiful. If I refuse to date a trans woman—by this way of thinking—I must be a bigot, a transphobe. When activists move from promoting tolerance to demanding worship, they've crossed a line as far as I'm concerned. I can be a libertarian about trans people, but when they get in my face to demand that I see the world their way... well, no. I tolerate Muslims in the West, but this doesn't mean I have any desire to convert to Islam.

The trans activists need to recognize who their friends are and stop alienating potential friends. I'm perfectly willing to affirm a trans person's right to live however s/he wants to live. But just as I don't live my life by broadcasting my heterosexuality to everyone around me, I expect the same courtesy in return. Morally judging me when I don't morally judge trans people is no way to keep me a friend of the trans "project." Seriously: when it comes to sexual orientation, I don't see a moral component at all—I see preferences. To beat my old analogy to death, it's like onions or no onions on pizza. The pizza question isn't a moral one: it's only about taste. Same thing for LGBTQ+: not my cup of tea, but I'll never condemn you to hell for being who you are. Trans activists aggressively agitating for more than this are driving away people who might otherwise be sympathetic to their cause.

This brings us to Dylan Mulvaney. I haven't said anything about him/her up to now because the recent controversy surrounding Bud Light doesn't affect me as a teetotaler. From what I gather, the initial flareup was the result of a misunderstanding by the right: the right thought that Bud had picked Mulvaney to be its new "mascot" when, in fact, Bud had merely gifted Mulvaney with a unique set of Bud Light products with Mulvaney's image on them. What muddied the waters was that Mulvaney then went on to social media to show off the products, and in the course of his/her doing this, people began to think that Mulvaney was some sort of shill for Bud Light. Cue the "tranny fluid" jokes.*

The Mulvaney thing brings up a lot of issues, many not having to do with trans topics at all. Tim Pool suggests that Mulvaney in particular (not all trans people) is psychotically narcissistic and thus couldn't help blabbing about the Bud Light products he/she received. By this reckoning, Mulvaney got Mulvaney in trouble. Matt Walsh looks at Mulvaney's shtick and sees behavior he calls "performative."** In Walsh's view, there is nothing even remotely feminine about Dylan Mulvaney's behavior. Mulvaney is aping or even parodying feminine behavior. Walsh and other conservatives extend this logic to the rest of the trans community as well: these people aren't sane, especially if they're convinced that they're actually acting like real women.

I think that, if we focus solely on Mulvaney, both Tim Pool and Matt Walsh might be on to something. Pool's assessment, in particular, struck me as valid: Dylan Mulvaney is a narcissistic attention whore who is currently having his/her media moment. Mulvaney will fade into the background soon enough. And if Matt Walsh thinks Mulvaney is merely parodying feminine behavior, I can see that point, too. Joe Rogan responded to the Mulvaney issue by drinking a Bud Light in his studio. He doesn't see what the big deal is.

So my own read of the controversy is: (1) this isn't much of a controversy from my point of view because I don't drink, and I can't give two shits about Dylan Mulvaney; (2) as controversies go, this one is going to die down soon enough; and (3) if Coke ever decided to put Mulvaney's face on its product (not likely to happen in Korea, but bear with me), I'd probably still drink a Coke. In the linked video above, Rogan used the argument about a hypothetical cheesecake: would you stop eating the cheesecake just because its maker sent some cheesecakes to Antifa? I don't agree with Rogan's analogy because, yes, for sure, I'd stop eating a product that somehow helped Antifa. But whatever intolerance I have toward Antifa just doesn't exist when it comes to trans people.

ADDENDUM: I have to confess, though, that I find Mulvaney's huge mouth annoying.

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*Some are saying Mulvaney was, in fact, chosen by Anheuser-Busch as a "partner" to promote the brand. There are, however, some weak-voiced denials of this coming from inside the company. I'm not quite sure what the truth is. Wikipedia's entry on Dylan Mulvaney doesn't make the matter clear, either, referring to Mulvaney's association with Anheuser-Busch as a "brand sponsorship." So who's sponsoring whom?

**I've talked before about how I dislike this usage of performative, but since so many people are now using the word in the way Walsh is—i.e., referring to something that is an insincere performance—my opinion doesn't really matter. As any linguistic descriptivist will tell you, usage conquers all. In my own studies, the term performative always meant some gesture, action, or locution that makes something else a reality. Most commonly, you hear the phrase performative utterance, in which a word or phrase is uttered, ushering in a new reality that everyone accepts as real. Two classic examples are: "I now pronounce you man and wife" and "You're under arrest." The moment those words are uttered, the words perform the task of making a new reality. Hence performative utterance. So for me, performative in the anthropological sense is the opposite of how regular folks are using it today: there's a sincerity and an earnestness—maybe a truth—that come with the utterance. Performative as used by the Matt Walshes of the world refers to insincerity and lack of earnestness: fakery.