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Notes -
Mr Beast’s Trans Debacle
Mr Beast is the Gen Z entertainment celebrity of note. Calling Mr Beast the PewDiePie of Gen Z would be underselling him. His 25-minute Squid Game YouTube video received 400 million views, which to put in perspective is 5x the total viewership of the Seinfeld Finale. His Tik Tok has 80 million followers, his most popular “YouTube short” has 650 million views, etc. He is more popular than what the average millennial or older would think (I fall into this cohort). When he visited a mall in my state to sell his burgers (one of his successful business offshoots), the line extended miles and made the news. Mr Beast has a childhood friend group with whom he makes videos. The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success. They were, like many friend groups containing boys in America[*], all male; the pure boyishness was a major draw for his success.
This year, one of the “cast” members of the Mr Beast enterprise transitioned into a woman. (For brevity, I will just call the member she and a woman.) Chris, who had a child and went through a divorce, has transitioned in full. She is wearing dresses on video and taking HRT. If you were to plug Chris and Mr Beast into Google News, you would have no idea how the viewers have responded to this change. But plugging it into Tik Tok (the premiere Zoomer app) gives a different story.
The response among Gen Z has been overwhelmingly negative. When I checked last night, 8 of the 10 most watched videos for the search “Mr Beast” were a negative reaction to Chris’s transition, the total view count of which was more than 80 million. The comments overwhelmingly negative. A typical comment section looked like this, sometimes with more than 25k comments. The commenters chant “Mr Beast 6000 coming out”, referencing Mr Beast’s oldest YouTube channel known for political incorrect humor. The consensus among the fans is that the transition has ruined the group’s rapport and that Chris has got to go, but that hands are tied because she is transgender. On the latest (secondary channel) video for Mr Beast, the comment section is censored and moderated so that the issue can’t explicitly come up. The commenters instead spam “we want to see more Chandler and Nolan”, cleverly emphasizing their disinterest with Chris by omission. The fans on Tik Tok are trying to find any clip they can to get Chris cancelled, with one finding a video of him saying the N word and another digging up an anti-Islam tweet from 2017.
There are a few things to explore here.
Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.
The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.
Mr Beast is in a pickle. He became popular, partially, because of the authenticity and joy of his friend group. The discomfort involving the transition is palpable in the latest video. Body language, rapport, banter, and general “vibes” have ruined what led children to watch his content. He is the most data driven creator and knows this. He has previously mentioned that he edits out sneezes and coughs because it loses retention, and I believe once mentioned that adding a girl to reaction videos negatively reduces engagement. Alas, he can’t come out and fire the transitioned member without losing corporate sponsorship and reputation. He is stuck between losing popularity among his fans, or losing support among the progressive power structure. He is also losing support from parents who don’t want their 8-year-old watching a transgender. There’s also the moral issue of supporting a friend post-divorce.
I’ve been in MB’s position, and that discomfort is all too relatable.
I was torn. I felt like I should act as if nothing had changed - this was still the same fundamental person; it’d be offensive to treat them differently. On the other hand, I felt like I SHOULD treat them differently. They obviously wanted to be seen as an attractive young woman – shouldn’t I treat them like one?
But there are things I’d say and do around men that I’d never say or do around women. If I kept saying and doing them, I’d be acknowledging that I didn’t see the person as a woman. But if I didn’t say them, I’d be tacitly acknowledging that our relationship had fundamentally and irrevocably changed. And if it had – well, wouldn’t I need to re-evaluate whether I wanted to hang out with the new person?
There was also the appalling mismatch between how the person clearly wanted to be viewed (hot woman), and the fact I couldn’t help but see them as a man in a wig and dress. I wanted to be supportive, but that required me to put on an act I didn’t believe in, that was unnatural and grating to maintain.
I suspect this is the reality for many people, and that Mr.Beast's reaction isn't abnormal. There's a dearth of popular narratives, real or fictional, exploring the messy reality of what it's like to have someone close to you transition. Maybe this will help that narrative get a spotlight, and discussion.
I think this is actually a core worldview difference here. I'm well aware that people act differently in single-gender vs. mixed-gender spaces, and in my teens and early 20s actively avoided being in male-only spaces because there's a subset of men that act like assholes in male-only spaces. I'm not entirely certain if I've stopped encountering that due to selecting friends better, older people just being more mature, or just rarely finding myself in male-only groups, partially because essentially all of my socializing is now in explicitly queer-accepting or queer-normative spaces.
The idea of anyone I know acting differently purely based on the gender distribution of the group they're in, strikes me as strange. Sure there's significant personality differences based on the size of the group and awareness of sensitivities of certain individuals (e.g. not making sexual comments around prudish people). But as I said, I also mostly socialize in queer spaces where gender is naturally going to be treated differently.
Do you act differently to people you find attractive?
If by "find attractive" you mean the extreme of "have a crush on", then yeah. Mostly along the lines of being super-shy if it's someone I'm both very attracted to and don't know very well or if I know them better probably less shy and more just trying too hard to impress them in stupid ways. I don't think anyone enjoys being around people who are acting infatuated, though. And that doesn't exactly come up a lot, especially if hanging out with more or less the same friends group (and as I'm no longer an adolescent with raging hormones, those emotions are probably just less strong when they do happen, although one of those examples of me acting like an infatuated idiot happened in the past month...). Also, I'm not going to claim to be immune to the halo effect, so I probably act differently around people I find attractive in ways that I don't notice.
... but I'm not quite sure what the point you're making is.
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