Internet users may feel like experts on the comings and goings of 27-year-old trans actress Dylan Mulvaney — especially her 9.5 million TikTok followers and 1.6 million Instagram followers. For many millions more, Mulvaney is an enigmatic lightning rod for sociopolitical debates about trans rights thanks to her highly visible daily documentation of her first year as a woman.

Seven months into her “Days of Girlhood,” Mulvaney received an invitation from the White House to meet with President Joe Biden in a forum with NowThisNews. That didn’t cause nearly as much of an uproar as what happened on April 1, 2023, when Mulvaney posted a sponsored video promoting Bud Light’s March Madness campaign and thanked the beer giant for sending her a can with her likeness on it as a gift for her first anniversary as a woman. Far-right conservatives called for a boycott of Bud Light, led by Kid Rock, who posted his own video of himself shooting at beer cans.

What do we really know about Mulvaney now, 16 months later?

She’s broken out of social media to reclaim her real-life role with costume changes and musical numbers galore, debuting her slickly produced one-woman musical. F–HAGat the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland. Mulvaney describes her show as “a kitschy, queer love letter to my younger self and my way of bringing my story from social media to the stage.”

Directed by Tim Jackson, who also directed the Tony-winning new production of We roll along happily Last season on Broadway, Mulvaney’s debut featured original songs and video cameos by Jonathan Van Ness and RuPaul’s Drag Race Judge Ts Madison and a cardboard cutout of JoyChris Colfer represents Mulvaney’s younger colleague in a Lush cosmetics store.

Mulvaney also chose to slightly fictionalize the Bud Light episode, changing the name of the beer to portray it as part of a broader corporate brand — cheekily called “Trans Palatability” — and at one point portraying an unnamed bearded country singer shooting the beer cans with a water gun. This action takes place onscreen offstage, as do other characterizations of television news anchors of opposite genders and a male Costco employee who prescribes the younger Mulvaney a medication called “Twink.”

Marc Brenner

Mulvaney’s musical talent should not be underestimated. Before his transition, Mulvaney played in the ensemble of the nationally touring Broadway production of The Book of Mormon from July 2019 until the plant closures in March 2020.

In Edinburgh, she has performed before such enthusiastic audiences that she received thunderous applause on the evening the author of the story was there.

From the musical’s opening moments – where she doesn’t wait in the wings but leaps through the aisles dressed in angel wings to greet the audience – to the final sing-along in which Mulvaney proclaims that she is a woman born in the body of a gay man and that, while she is not quite a lesbian, she is still a woman, she shines in that spotlight.

In between, she tells how she told her conservative Catholic mother at age four that she was destined to be a girl; how her relationship with God and her best friend changed when she attended Catholic school in San Diego; and how her life turned completely upside down when she became famous and infamous as a social media influencer.

“It turns out that late capitalism and misogyny were responsible for my downfall,” she joked on stage towards the end of the show.

Her father (or her grandfather, James F. Mulvaney Sr., who was president of the Padres baseball team) isn’t mentioned much, but there’s a lot about her emotional and political conflicts with her mother. They became estranged when Dylan went through her gender reassignment surgery. At the end, we hear a phone message from her mother suggesting that Dylan might “settle down” and not be so “much” in the future.

Another suggestion that God has heard but never seen comes in the form of a potion with an even more apt name: Nuance. Mulvaney drinks Nuance and hopes for the best.

She thinks it’s possible that TERFs or conservatives like her mother have become radicalized against the trans community simply because they’re upset about losing their gay friends in the process. But Mulvaney quickly adds a joking caveat that she can’t afford liability insurance to further flesh out this theory.

Nevertheless, she remains persistent and explains: “Nothing will ever be enough for these wankers.”