Dylan Mulvaney Addresses Haters Over the Tampon Issue

If you don’t recognize Dylan Mulvaney by name, congratulations. If you also don’t recognize her by her face, extra congrats and please can I come stay at your remote cabin in the wilderness.

For those six of y’all who have no idea who I’m talking about, Dylan Mulvaney is a transgender woman who has ruffled a lot of feathers lately, mainly because a lot of people find her LARPing as a “girl” (her words) insulting and irritating. I first became aware of this person after she and another XY-chromosomed individual appeared in a podcast sponsored by Ulta, which was titled “The Beauty of Girlhood.” You know, a phenomenon two biologically male individuals are maybe not experts about.

Anyway, Mulvaney recently posted a video in response to some of the backlash she’s received, particularly with regards to her videos involving tampons.

Mulvaney emphasizes that she has no sponsorships with Tampax and has never made any money off of tampons; rather, her purpose in carrying them is to offer to other people in a gesture of goodwill. She laments,

“The bigger problem at hand is that you feel me carrying a tampon around is a threat to you and your womanhood. How is someone doing something nice so repulsive to you? ‘Cause, listen to this, if a man, whether he was your boyfriend or your husband– could even be your gay best friend– kept a tampon for you at his house, just in case you needed it, you’d gush over him. You would run to brunch on Sunday and tell all your gal pals that he’s so thoughtful and he cares and he listens! And then a trans woman does it, and all of a sudden I’m the reason that there’s a tampon shortage. You know, it’s. . . it’s not because I’m misogynistic, it’s because you’re transphobic.”

I have. . . a lot of things to say in response to this.

First of all, yes, carrying spare tampons is a nice thing to do. I used to do it all the time when I actually spent time around other people; I always had one or two in my backpack when I was in high school and college. (Hell, at speech events in high school I carried around a veritable drug store for emergencies, but that’s not the point.)

There’s a key word in there, though: “spare.” I don’t expect my guy friends to have tampons in their back pockets. If they did– if anyone did who didn’t menstruate– I’d actually be pretty uncomfortable. Like, it would literally be weirder for a 70-year-old post-menopausal woman to have a spare tampon than a woman my age. (Less so than a man, because at least that woman has experience menstruating, but whatever. I’m not trying to write a philosophical manifesto of the comfort of tampon availability.) Point is, it’d be like if I carried Viagra around in case my male friends needed it. It’s not in my lane, just like tampons aren’t in men’s lanes.

And no, I wouldn’t “gush over” (terrible word choice) a significant other who had spare tampons. Like I said, men just carrying them around is weird; men having them in their home which is often frequented by women of menstruating age is just being a good host. So sure, have a box at your house for when your “gal pals” come over– although I thought those were, according to Mulvaney, breasts, and not people?

So, anyway, that’s a lot of words to say no one’s mad at you for trying to be nice, Dylan. We just kind of wish you’d stay in your lane. We kind of wish you wouldn’t refer to anatomy that you don’t have as “gal pals” or “barbie pouches.” We kind of wish you would explore literally any other facet of womanhood and femininity than the bubblegum Barbie bimbo stereotype. The female experience isn’t a costume, and we’re sick of seeing it being treated that way.

(Also it’s still weird af that you keep calling it “girlhood” when you’re literally a quarter of a century old. Please. . . stop doing that.)