Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Today's interview was a reminder to me,

and maybe will be to you, that people who get caught in the middle of internet pylons are real

human people. I remember when Dylan Milvaney, a transgender social media personality,

got all this hate for doing a bit of content featuring Bud Light a few years back.

And all of a sudden, she became a sort of proxy in the greater culture war around trans people.

And I knew it must have been bad for her, but I didn't realize how bad.

She writes about it in her new memoir, Paper Doll notes from a a Late Bloomer. And in this interview with Empires and Warner Summers, they talk about what

happened then, but also how she manages to hold onto a bit of earnestness in spite of it all.

That's ahead. In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods, NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or

wherever you get your podcasts. When Dylan Mulvaney was four years old, she told her mother that

she thought God might have made a mistake, that God had put a girl in a boy's body. Dylan's

mother responded that God doesn't make mistakes. It would be years before Dylan

officially embraced her identity as a transgender woman when she was 25, after coming out as gay at 14

and non-binary at 24, which is why she didn't feel like going the root of the dramatic coming-out

video. I had done those before. This was my third

time coming out and I felt like I needed to find the funny. So Dylan took to TikTok to post her

lighthearted take on the way she was figuring out what it meant to live as a girl.

Day one of being a girl and I have already cried three times. I wrote a scathing email that I

...