Dylan Mulvaney is blossoming.

Two years after the trans influencer and model became the public face of a conservative-led hate campaign against Bud Light, Mulvaney is opening up about the experience and how it devastated her mental health in her new memoir,  Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer.

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On Tuesday, she joined the women of The View to talk about the book and her role in the escalating fight for trans rights.

Co-host Whoopi Goldberg brought up recent comments by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who agreed with conservative influencer Charlie Kirk that trans student athletes have an unfair advantage over their cisgender teammates.

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“I think part of the problem the trans community is facing is similar to what women face. If you don’t know anything about our bodies, you don’t know how it works. You’re assuming that the women can’t do anything,” Goldberg said.

Mulvaney shared that she was “not that girl” when it comes to sports and trans athletes.

“The last time I played a sport, I was six years old, and I was on a soccer team, but I assigned myself as the nurse, so I sat with the Band-Aids.”

Instead, Mulvaney says she looked to Schuyler Bailar, her friend who is a trans man and swimmer, explaining that “he’s someone who I really look to for guidance, and I think that is what’s tricky is, like, now stepping into this identity, I’m still like a ‘baby trans.’ I’m only three years in.”

Goldberg noted that conservatives who say trans student athletes shouldn’t play sports against cisgender women betray their own sexism.

“When you come in and you say, these are men competing against women, you’re assuming that the women are weak and just can’t do anything.”

“God doesn’t make mistakes, and the challenge is not to the trans people, it’s to the people who are not trans. That’s who God is looking to see how you treat people,” Goldberg added.

Mulvaney first made a splash with her social media series “Days of Girlhood,” where she shared her life coming out as a trans woman.

That led to a brand partnership with Bud Light, which consisted of Mulvaney posting a short video of herself in an Aubrey Hepburn-inspired get-up with a can of Bud Light featuring her face.

The video trifle earned extreme backlash from the online right. With Mulavaney in mind, Bud Light was boycotted and Anheuser-Busch, the popular beer’s parent company, received bomb threats.

“Finding any ounce of joy after Beergate has been, well, a struggle,” Mulavaney writes. “My other emotions were getting plenty of exercise: at the forefront was my anger toward conservative media and capitalism, followed by the fear of losing my career, and grief for the privacy I once had. And of course there’s my guilt over any potential setbacks to the trans community or god forbid violence.”

Mulvaney said she leaned on her best friend, Lily, and gender non-conforming artists Jonathan von Ness and Alok Vaid-Menon to help her get through that time. She writes that she even fought suicidal thoughts, which she felt unable to open up about with her loved ones.

“But the one thing I wasn’t sharing with any of them was my desire to no longer exist. To fade into nothingness,” she writes, saying that she considered psychiatric treatment but didn’t want her or other trans people to be labeled “psychos”.

“The days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months. This whole situation started to feel more and more like a video game that I was losing. My suicidal thoughts are kind of like my new game: how long can I go without wanting to die?”

Ultimately, it was her supporters on TikTok, many of whom were trans youth who she inspired, who helped her stay strong. “These positive figures assemble an army against my dark thoughts,” she writes.

Mulvaney says she felt deeply unsafe when meeting one of her favorite authors, Judy Blume, for a hotel interview. Paparazzi broke in and demanded she answer to “women who are being raped by your kind in prison.” A hotel employee had to escort her away, and she spent the rest of her time with Blume dissociating.

Mulvaney shares that when she recently rewatched the video, she “started crying because I can see the moment so clearly when I left my body and became a shell of myself. I made it through the Judy Blume interview despite the frenzy just moments before. Judy said she was proud of me and that I had to keep going. It felt like such a stark representation of good and evil under the same roof. But to be honest, I wasn’t really there.”

Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer is available now.

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