Artifact 10 - The Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light Fiasco: Everything You Need to Know - Them Magazine

Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman, was the subject of a massive media hate campaign last year for the crime of... existing as a transgender woman. This was genuinely, as this article describes, the entirety of the spark of the controversy: right-wing influencers hated that a large company dare partner with someone from a marginalized community. Moving beyond the implications of the starkly horrifying display of transphobia at play, we look at this case for a demonstration of the inherent understanding that these influencers have of gendered media, and how they aim to control that media. As Gendered Lives explores on page 221, media regulate and gatekeep the gendered norms that are presented to us, which in turn influence our beliefs about what is acceptable for a given gender role to be. The fundamental push-and-pull of this story comes directly from this fact: right-wing influencers saw the presentation of a trans individual in promotional media as “corrupting,” and so aimed to bring the media cycle around to be reaffirming of their gendered beliefs.

They put on big displays of destroying cans of beer and boycotting the company as a media-focused message: that they alone should be allowed to control the narrative and who is a part of that narrative. They are fundamentally scared of what it means for “seeing a trans person and being normal about it” to be a position taken by large companies and media institutions, and so they effectively forced the hand of media to report regulate the image of gender as immutable, innate, and beyond our control.