Everything You Need to Know About the Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney Fiasco

All this drama over Dylan Mulvaney and an American lager.

Over the past several months, right-wingers in the U.S. have worked themselves into a veritable tizzy over a new Anheuser-Busch marketing campaign featuring transgender TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney, who promoted the company’s “Easy Carry Contest” on social media. To reiterate, a company put a trans woman in a marketing campaign, and things immediately escalated to the point of Kid Rock destroying cases of watery beer with an AR-15. What a time to be alive!

While we’re not bending over backwards to praise a multinational conglomerate responsible for massive pollution, the whole situation is sadly reflective of where trans visibility and acceptance stands in the U.S. today — so if you’re behind on the whole saga, here’s everything you need to know to catch up.

If you’re not a regular TikTok user, you may not even know who Dylan Mulvaney is (we get it, there are too many influencers to remember at this point). Since March 2022, Mulvaney, an actor who theater gays may have seen previously in the touring production of The Book of Mormon, has been documenting her transition in a video diary series titled “Days of Girlhood.” It’s a necessarily messy project, as Mulvaney, now 26 years old, frankly discusses the frustrations and surprises of her “second puberty” to an audience of millions.

As Mulvaney’s social media star rose, the brand endorsements began rolling in; she has since worked with brands including Ulta Beauty, Instacart, and Kate Spade. But wherever Mulvaney goes, right-wingers follow to harass her, mock her transition, and yell at whoever offers her support or sponsorships. In October last year, after Mulvaney interviewed President Biden for the online news publication NowThis, Congressional Republicans including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (of course) and Sen. Marsha Blackburn singled Mulvaney out for transphobic harassment on a national scale, calling her a “fake woman” and labeling her gender expression as “absurdity.” Conservatives even jumped down her throat for carrying tampons in her purse in case someone else needed them.

Put simply, Dylan Mulvaney is almost everything the far right loves to hate about trans people in one convenient, outspoken package.

Anheuser-Busch partnered with Mulvaney to boost their “Easy Carry Contest,” offering customers a chance at $15,000 for uploading videos of them carrying as many cans of beer as possible. To promote the contest, Mulvaney uploaded a sponsored video in April 2023 in which she appears in an Audrey Hepburn getup and goofs on March Madness; meanwhile, the company released a special line of Pride-themed cans with various pronouns.

To sweeten the pot and celebrate the one-year anniversary of Mulvaney’s transition, Anheuser-Busch also sent Mulvaney a special can of Bud Light featuring her face and a message on the top of the can reading “Cheers to 365 Days of Being a Woman,” referencing Mulvaney’s preamble in her “Days of Girlhood” series.

Conservatives, enraged to a level not seen since the “progressive” commercials of Gillette and Nike, took to social media in a froth to protest Mulvaney’s partnership with Budweiser and to call for a boycott. At the core of the outrage was the right’s now-typical antipathy for anything deemed “woke,” be that the existence of Black people in history or pronouns they don’t understand. Conservative pundit John Cardillo misgendered and demeaned Mulvaney in a Tweet labeling her “a grown man who dresses like little girls,” and others intimated that she was a sexual predator.

Some went so far as to spread a rumor online that Anheuser-Busch had laid off their entire marketing team in response to the online backlash. This was demonstrably untrue, as swiftly confirmed by the Associated Press. In a statement to FOX News, Anheuser-Busch squashed any rumors that they were perturbed, characterizing their partnership with Mulvaney as just one of many influencers who allow the brand to “authentically connect with audiences across various demographics and passion points.” The company also clarified that Mulvaney’s can “was a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public.”

This is where things go from eye-rolling to a little macabre. Conservatives love to loudly announce a boycott by destroying every branded item they own, whether that’s smashing a perfectly usable coffee machine or burning brand-new sneakers. This time, though, country music star Kid Rock took a page out of the “rando running for Republican office” playbook and brought out his biggest rifle (we…hope?) to signal his displeasure.

“Let me say something to all of you and be as clear and concise as possible,” the MAGA cap-sporting singer said in an April 3 Instagram video before hefting the gun and firing a clip into four cases of Bud Light arranged on a table nearby. “Fuck Bud Light, and fuck Anheuser-Busch,” he concluded.

Frankly, Kid Rock’s mas macho temper tantrum would be camp if violent rhetoric against transgender people wasn’t inspiring actual mass shootings and firebombings across the U.S. As it stands, the video came on the heels of another mass shooting in Nashville late last month, which conservatives have also used as fodder in their political war on trans people.

Kid Rock’s response received its own share of backlash, including from the father of a child who was killed in the 2018 Parkland school shooting. “Hey @KidRock, this dad is ‘feeling a little frisky today,’” wrote Fred Guttenberg on Twitter, referencing the start of Kid Rock’s video. “This is my daughter Jaime (under the black oval) and these are the students running over her for safety to avoid getting shot by the AR 15 that killed her. FUCK YOU!!!” The tweet was accompanied by a still from security camera footage the day of the shooting.

Fellow musician Jason Isbell also took a shot at Kid Rock, sharing a meme about Coors’ LGBTQ+ nondiscrimination policies with the comment “This is finally how we get him. Leave no bigoted beers to drink.”

As if that weren't enough, Marjorie Taylor Greene had to get in on the action. “I would have bought the king of beers, but it changed it’s [sic] gender to the queen of beers,” the Congresswoman tweeted on April 8. “So it’s made to chill from here on out.” The missive was accompanied by a photo of the trunk of a car loaded up with groceries and a case of Coors Light. It didn't take long for many to point out that Molson Coors, the Canadian-American company that owns Coors Light, also has a long history of support for the LGBTQ+ community, including 20 years of partnership with Denver Pride and a campaign to promote inclusivity in bars.

In Mulvaney, right-wing pundits and politicians found a perfect excuse to keep whipping up hatred toward transgender people. On April 15, the National Republican Congressional Committee posted and quickly deleted a tweet directly attacking Mulvaney and Bud Light, whose parent company happens to be one of their biggest donors, according to The Daily Beast. The NRCC even briefly attempted to use the fiasco to fundraise, with since-shelved “limited edition” drink koozies that read “This Beer Identifies as a Water.”

Individual GOP members also wasted precious time on Earth going after Mulvaney for the partnership. On April 17, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched yet another attack against trans women athletes, through a spoof of Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” commercials. That same day, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly went on a rant in her eponymous podcast, accusing Mulvaney of “[making] a mockery of womanhood and girlhood” and criticizing Budweiser’s “embrace of wokeness.”

And no, ordinary right-wingers aren’t holding up much better. Just take the guy who decided to protest Mulvaney’s involvement with Bud Light by covering cases of the brand’s beer in Tampax boxes — potentially a reference to transphobes’ anger at Mulvaney carrying tampons with her in public in case anyone needs them.

Yes, but the response has see-sawed significantly as the controversy has unfolded. On April 14, Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth released a lackluster statement that doesn’t directly address the controversy or show support for Mulvaney. Instead, Whitworth offered the hollow promise that he’s “focused on building and protecting our remarkable history and heritage.”

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” the statement continued. “We are in the business of bringing people together over beer.”

Then, as the company faced declining Bud Light sales and continuing right-wing uproar, it appeared to begin buckling under the pressure. In late April, the Wall Street Journal reported that two Anheuser-Busch marketing executives had been placed on leave, sparking criticism from LGBTQ+ advocates and allies that the company was not standing by its marketing division amid the controversy.

In late May, the Human Rights Campaign notified Anheuser-Busch in a letter that they were at risk of losing their perfect Corporate Equality Index score if the company did not take more substantive steps. Shortly afterward, Anheuser-Busch announced that it would be donating $200,000 to the Communities of Color Initiative under the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC). The initiative supports QTPOC-owned businesses “through certification, scholarships and business development in an effort to create equal opportunities for the economic advancement of small businesses in the LGBTQ+ community,” per a press release. How conveniently timed to the beginning of Pride Month!

On April 28, Mulvaney addressed the uproar over her Bud Light partnership for the first time in a front-facing social media video. After what must have been a truly surreal month of watching transphobes shoot cans of Bud Light over a simple ad, Mulvaney said that she felt “very dissociative” during the preceding weeks.

“It was so loud that I didn’t feel part of the conversation, so I decided to take the back seat and just let them tucker themselves out,” Mulvaney said, by way of explaining her silence.

Calling out the right wing’s seeming “need to dehumanize and to be cruel,” Mulvaney addressed her fans directly, telling them that she wants to get back to “making people laugh.”

“Going forward, I want to share parts of myself on here that have nothing to do with my identity, and I’m hoping those parts will still be exciting to you and will be enough,” she said.

Ted Cruz Is Now Demanding a Senate Probe Into Bud Light Over Dylan Mulvaney Ad

Somehow, the Republican tantrum over the trans influencer's beer ad endures.

Alas, America’s least favorite Senator has decided to get involved in — checks notes — a controversy over the marketing of a diet beer. On May 17, Cruz and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wrote a letter to the Beer Institute, a national trade association that represents major American brewers in governmental matters, asking them to “open an investigation” to review Anheuser-Busch’s “marketing partnership” with Dylan Mulvaney.

The letter, which repeatedly uses incorrect pronouns for Mulvaney, was written under the pretense that the influencer’s audience “skews significantly younger than the legal drinking age” and therefore should not be marketing alcohol. However, it mostly seems to be an excuse for Cruz and Blackburn to insult and degrade Mulvaney, accusing her of presenting “a faux, pre-pubescent girl persona” and analyzing her TikTok feed like it’s the Zapruder film.

Cruz and Blackburn are asking that documents about the marketing partnership be sent to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, on which they both serve. Now feels like a good time to remind the world that literally no one likes Ted Cruz. In 2016, his Republican colleague Lindsey Graham famously joked, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

Nope. The influencer revealed in a video shared on Instagram and TikTok toward the end of Pride Month that she had heard nothing from the brand. “For months now I've been scared to leave my house,” Mulvaney said. “I have been ridiculed in public. I've been followed. And I have felt a loneliness that I wouldn't wish on anyone.” Mulvaney said that she had held back on speaking out for fear of more backlash. She waited for Bud Light to reach out to her, but the brand never did.

Mulvaney added that hiring a trans person only to abandon them in the face of hate “is worse in my opinion than not hiring a trans person at all.”

“Because it gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want,” she said. “And the hate doesn't end with me; it has serious and grave consequences for the rest of our community.”

Yes, but it hasn’t exactly worked out so far. The corporation launched multiple sports-themed marketing campaigns for the July 4th holiday, including a short TV ad featuring NFL star Travis Kelce and a collection of Ken Griffey, Jr. merchandise ahead of this year’s MLB All-Star Game. But both were received with jeers from the brand’s conservative audience, who promised even more boycotts of the beer and even the athletes themselves.

Neither athlete has publicly commented on the boycotts, but Budweiser's CEO (who is a former CIA officer) has, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. In a nine-minute interview on CBS Mornings last month, Whitworth pleaded with boycotters not to punish his company’s 65,000 employees and emphasized the company’s political neutrality while failing to even mention Mulvaney’s name. “It's the impact honestly on the employees that weighs the most on me,” he said.

Whether folks are boycotting Bud Light for hiring Mulvaney or for abandoning her, it’s clear that the brand’s sales are in a major slump, falling 28% in June, according a report by CNN (which disappointingly saw one reporter misgender Mulvaney multiple times). Modelo Especial knocked off Bud Light as the top-selling beer in the U.S. among retailers for the second month running in June, although Bud Light still maintained an edge in sales by volume.

Still, that’s not to say all the people who say they’re boycotting Bud Light are actually following through, including one of our least favorite players in this whole saga, Mr. Kid Rock himself. When CNN investigated the musician’s Nashville bar this week, they found that Bud Light was still very much for sale at his “Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N' Roll Steakhouse.” So much for that high-caliber moral grandstanding on TikTok.

Dylan Mulvaney Is Ready for Life After “Girlhood”

After a year spent sharing her transition with the world, the TikTok sensation talks to Them about what's next.

In the wake of the Bud Light incident, Dylan Mulvaney is thinking about what’s next for her career now that her “Days of Girlhood” video series has ended. In a cover story for Them’s Now Awards, Mulvaney reflected on the massively viral social media diary. She expressed a wish to “tap myself on the shoulder, right before I made that video, the first one, and just be like… ‘Let's make sure you’re in a good place and you are safe and that you’ve had the conversations with the people that you need to talk to before you talk to everyone.’”

While the video series has opened up plenty of opportunities for Mulvaney, making her one of the most visible trans women on the internet, she emphasized that she wants to use her privilege to pay it forward. “If a brand wants to work with me so bad, then they should work with other trans people, too. It’s not enough to just hire me, this white, skinny trans girl. I want all the dolls getting all the brand deals,” she said.

It’s unclear what exactly Mulvaney will be up to next. “So, right now, I’m thinking about longevity — how do I hopefully have a career that goes on for the next 40 years?” she told Them. “And how do I be happy outside of social media? Because that’s what I think I’m retraining my brain to figure out: All the other aspects of my life have to be just as important as that one.”

As of August, it's been six months since Mulvaney posted the TikTok that landed Anheuser-Busch in conservatives' crosshairs — and unfortunately, the Bud Light boycott still won't die.

The brand is still receiving boycott related replies under most of its Twitter posts, and sales of the beer are still down. In July, Anheuser-Busch announced it would be laying off some corporate employees, and in August, the company announced a sale of eight of its beer and beverage companies to a cannabis brand. The boycott against Bud Light has proven to be uniquely enduring, even as backlash to other brands for LGBTQ+ inclusive marketing campaigns, like Target and the North Face, has quieted down.

Tamara Littleton, CEO and founder of social media agency The Social Element, explains that the boycott's unique strength is due both to the divisive cultural climate in the U.S. and U.K. and the way Bud Light handled their response. “I think the focus on Dylan’s TikTok – which would have been seen as inclusive advertising a few years ago – has created a platform for everyone to share their hate,” Littleton told Them in a piece about why conservatives are still boycotting Bud Light. “It was almost the perfect storm, and this is why it's not going away. Society doesn't want it to go away. And it’s a society issue, but also, it wasn’t handled well, and this is also a crisis of [Bud Light’s] making.”

Littleton cites major missteps by Anheuser-Busch — including not sticking to their values and failing to support Mulvaney during the backlash — as contributing to the boycott. “It would have been better if they'd done nothing. You have to stand by your values and stand by your strategy. Be prepared for a backlash or don't just don't do it. And there was no duty of care,” Littleton said.

Mulvaney isn’t the only person who’s expressed disappointment in how Anheuser-Busch handled this whole mess. In interviews with the Guardian published September 19, several former employees described executives as incompetent and accused them of making decisions based on fear and “panic” rather than integrity or data. Some even accused leadership of having lied to them outright about the support they were — or weren’t — offering Mulvaney.

“Are we doing everything we can as a company to support this person?” one former employee says they asked their boss. They said they were told not to worry about it, as the company was “constantly talking to [Mulvaney].” However, this contradicts what Mulvaney herself has said. Another employee said they were told “there was more communication than perhaps what she was saying,” but couldn’t confirm one way or another. (The only executive who workers spoke positively of in the Guardian interviews was recently-hired vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid, who workers described as a workplace “mother” but bore the brunt of conservatives’ ire over the campaign and is now said to be on a “leave of absence.”)

The internal situation at Anheuser-Busch seems to have deteriorated even faster than the brand’s market share, with some workers who spoke to the Guardian criticizing patterns of “canned” responses and “a lot of trickled-down lies from leadership.” Seems like something that just might get mentioned as the Teamsters union renegotiates Anheuser-Busch workers’ contracts, which began September 18.

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