They should have a Rachael Corrie Memorial Day since no one in the US seems to give a shit.
I was hit by a car while riding my bike to work without a helmet. It was basically The Thing that made me realize I can’t stay in the closet and I need to transition, the realization I would have been buried and remembered as another man was horrific.
But. I also don’t know if I would have wanted to be outed in my death if I hadn’t ever come out. I know that the very idea that I would be remembered as a man felt like a violation. On the other hand, taking that choice away from me seems like another violation. It counts for something that, in that last and final statement and fully knowing martyrdom was next, Bushnell told us “my name is Aaron.” But, it also counts for something that maybe I would have said “my name is MaleName” if I had a chance to have my final words, especially if I wanted my last words to be a political statement and was worried I’d be a distraction. I know I didn’t think very highly of myself or the importance of my identity before I transitioned, maybe I’d have kept it hidden.
Maybe I’d have wanted people to discover who I really was after I died. Maybe I’d never want anyone to know. I don’t know.
This seems really complicated.
The channel where she livestreamed her self-immolation was called “lillyanarkitty” which feels relevant? Like she might not have been OUT-out but she wasn’t really hiding it either.
I definitely used girl-coded screen names before I even admitted to myself that I was trans, and choosing to post under the name “Lilly” is important. But the final statement seems relevant too. “My name is Aaron” can’t be ignored or forgotten.
But then again, looking at that final statement, there was the use of the phrase “I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force” instead of “airman”. All the reporting says “airman” but, in those final words, that’s not what was actually said.
Then there’s the final post “Many of us like to ask ourselves “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?” What if the answer to that question is “remain closeted so my final political act remains focused on Palestine”? Was this a choice to be remembered as a man made out of worry that anything else would be a distraction from the protest action? It’s possible. Was the video posted under “lillyanarkitty” as a silent scream to not be remembered as just a man? Was it a non-binary choice, to be remembered as both Aaron and Lilly in their last moments?
I don’t think I feel comfortable making any definitive choice. So, I avoid gendering as much as possible.
Wow, that’s incredibly detailed and thoughtful thank you very much.
I don’t think I feel comfortable making any definitive choice. So, I avoid gendering as much as possible.
as shall I then
Her name was Lilly.
Page 28 of the document you linked says that although Bushnell identified Lilly and used she/her pronouns on some suspected accounts. On other accounts, Bushnell identified as Aaron and was comfortable using he/him pronouns. It is possible that Bushnell was comfortable with both gender identities.
If Bushnell was Lilly, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t Aaron; she could have been both.
Very true. As discussed above, Bushnell may have had a sufficiently expansive gendered self-
concept that both the gender she expressed online and the gender she expressed offline were
fully integrated, fully embraced aspects of who she actually was. She might, for example, have
been bigender or pangender. I did not interpret C1’s remark that she was “gender fluid” as
referring to the specific gender identity, but she could indeed have been literally genderfluid
stricto sensu (insofar as any shared subjective experience can have a strict sense).The document also says that Bushnell identified as Aaron in documents posted during the act of self immolation. The document also points out that there were entirely separate but both active internet accounts. The account ‘acebush1’ on reddit was active and used the name Aaron until the time of death. Last activity from acebush was February 24, death on February 25.
The document does not present the case that Bushnell was uncomfortable with using he/him pronouns or the name Aaron. I think it would be fair to say Bushnell used multiple gender expression.
It is extremely typical for trans women in the early stages of their coming out process to publicly go under their old name and pronouns, explore their actual gender identity on entirely seperate online accounts and identify as “bigender” or “genderfluid”. Transmisogyny is brutal and makes it extremely terrifying for us to come out, there were times in my life were i, too would have had an easier time setting myself on fire than declaring who i actually was. And the same goes for most of my friends and the majority of my community.
You are not making a logical statement. You say that the majority of people who are transgender began as a separate online account. That does not mean that the majority of people who have separate online account with different gender presentation go on to become transgender. The entire reason that transgender people start by experimenting with an online identity is because it is not a commitment. Some people try a thing and decide that they don’t want to do it. Some people make fake identities on the internet for no reason at all. Some people make fake identities on the internet for the purpose of deception.
I am not doing erasure. I think it is fine to speculate that Bushnell was experimenting with gender expression. The document says that it is impossible to confirm that Bushnell was committed to being transgender. We do not know. We know that Bushnell used both identities and was seemingly comfortable with both identities.
Bushnell was raised in some kind of weird Christian cult and only came out as an anarchist like a couple years before doing the immolation. I think that Bushnell was probably trying out many new things during the period after leaving the Christian cult.
this sucks
Null hypothecis strikes again. Your dedication to cis-by-default-unless-proven-otherwise-by-overwhelming-evidence is fucked up. To transphobes, no evidence will ever be enough, why carry water for them?
I did not say that Bushnell is cis man. The acebush1 reddit account identified as a cis man in 4 comments and the document mentions this. I said that we do not know. You are presenting a binary, that Bushnell must either be a cis man or a transgender woman. Bushnell could have been gender fluid, nonbinary, or something else. We don’t know.
I respect every person’s gender identity. I don’t think a person’s gender is something that should be investigated by other people. I believe that a person’s gender is whatever that that person tells me their gender is. I respect whatever someone tells me that their name is.
In the self immolation video, Bushnell says “My name is Aaron Bushnell” at the start of the video.
I respect whatever people tell me that their name is. I don’t try to prove that someone is something else.
I can’t speak for others, but I think the push for recognition, from some people, comes from the fact that a lot of us will never be able to fully transition socially and will lead two separate lives, four our entire live. And while Aarons case is not my case and I won’t speak for the dead, it is understandable from my point of view that people would wanna bring up the fat that the person may have been trans, it would be nice if I can at least get my real name on the gravestone if I can’t get it during my life.
But at the same time, a lot of us understand that we are completely irrelevant in the eyes of majority of the world so I won’t split hairs over it. I’m just trying to make sense of why people are stressing the name/gender so much and, at least in my personal opinion, it’s because a part of us would think it’s kind of neat we at least get named by our choosing. Plenty of trans people will never get called by their name anywhere outside of the internet. I haven’t and it’s been a decade.
he / him
opinion discarded
i don’t disagree with you. i do think it is significant that the event was live-streamed on an account called ‘Lilly Anarkitty’. the paper also describes Bushnell using a masculine name and pronouns on LinkedIn and Facebook, and a feminine name and pronouns on Mastodon, YouTube, Discord, and Twitch. to me, one of those groups is more representative of a person’s actual identity. and as the paper says on page 4, “There is a reason it would matter. Trans decedents are often subject to violence even in death; there is a saying that “they call it a deadname … precisely because the people in your life bury you under it”. Given that reality combined with the fact that trans people face a tremendously elevated likelihood of premature death from all causes, death and the treatment of the dead occupy a little-discussed yet central position in the current consciousness and culture of the transgender community. Our perception was that if Bushnell was transfeminine, then we had a communal obligation to take care of her in death.”
Wow… was unaware of this.
Didn’t know that, thanks for sharing.
It seems to be something that MSM could easily bury whenever they had the leeway to.
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Using the term “grotesesque” when you’re discussing something like an individual possibly being an unouted trans woman is a really bad choice of words.
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When someone passes away before she could live as herself outside of her online presence, you find it ok to misgender her forever and to call transfeminity grotesque. Got it. Now please fuck off back to incelgrad.
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You have something to add or just an emoji?
fuck off
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I agree with you about that being a bad choice of words (real bad tbh) but also I kind of feel like people are arguing about something that doesn’t really matter and that we don’t really have knowledge of, like yeah you can speculate that Bushnell was probably trans but like, that’s it, unless there’s some further confirmation from Bushnell. With what Ive seen posted so far, like, yeah, they could have been comfortable with either gender representation. Personally I agree that it’s most likely Bushnell was trans and would have preferred she/her pronouns (based on the comment re: the use of Aaron/He/Him in public social media vs Lilly/She/Her in private social media, which i agree is a big indicator) but like, idk, who the fuck knows, do we need to fight each other over it
and when i say it doesn’t really seem to matter it’s like idk, the gender of a person who martyred themself to stand against genocide matters about as much to me as the gender of whoever is piloting the drones doing the genocide
P.s. i haven’t read the reddit link that claims to support bushnell was not trans and i don’t plan to
P.p.s. sorry if this means i need to self crit but i promise you i am very critical of myself every moment of every day contrary to the arrogance i convey
Well said.
personally, i think there are few things more disrespectful than denying names to the dead. a grave marked wrong is little different from an unmarked one.
How do you square that with this from the last statement: “I want to be identified as Aaron Bushnell”. Are you the one denying the name they chose to be remembered by?
do you have a source? the politico article doesn’t mention that, and neither does the time article and neither does the jacobin article. saying “i am [deadname]” in a prepared statement is a different claim then “i want to be remembered forever by my deadname”.
the self-immolation was live streamed on an account called ‘LillyAnarkitty’, which had been changed from ‘acebush1’ two years before. if you read the paper i linked, you would see that she used he/ him and she/ her pronouns, and that she preferred she/ her in online spaces. this is not a real life space, so i do not feel like “i am denying the name they chose to be remembered by”. this isn’t even getting into speculation about media coverage. A non-service member self-immolated in Atlanta months before, and no one covered it or cared. Do you honestly think a single person would talk about the members of the military being fed up with genocide if they could run the trans angle?
Plenty of reasons why someone would want to stay closeted if they’re doing a drastic political action. Less chance of being minimized/dismissed as someone mentally ill, at the very least
Bigender and genderfluid people exist. I am AMAB, generally comfortable with being labelled a man but sometimes I identify and present myself as a woman, I even go by the name Alice on certain social medias. It is far from a black and white topic.
Also possible she was just conflicted or just scared to make her gender public, given she mainly used the name Lilly and she/her pronouns on less public accounts.
For some reason i feel like I shouldn’t portray myself as femme online but it isn’t really due to lack of comfort with that presentation and more that like, idk, it feels like I’d be stealing trans/genderqueer valor or something? Like i think it might be good for ‘op sec’ to use all them pronouns every now and then but it feels like id be doing something wrong
She was just in denial, have you ever seen how a questioning phase works?
This is absolutely wild to say imo. What is even the motivation to argue over the gender of a dead person who isn’t here to speak for themselves…?
No, what is absolutely wild is that this thread is full of mansplaining fucks like you who think that it’s better to misgender a dead trans woman than to misgender a dead cis man who ran all of his socials besides facebook and linkedin under the name Lilly for several years.
Seriously, this shit makes me wanna vomit.
Trans erasure is unfortunately a real and serious issue. The fact that Dave Carter (who was privately transitioning when she died and had intended to publicly come out) or Quentin Crisp (who flat out SAID right before she died in her autobiography that she was a trans woman and regretted not transitioning) were transgender is just completely ignored.
Wikipedia even acknowledges that Carter had privately come out as a trans woman yet still refers to her with he/him pronouns
I find doing transvestigations on unconsenting people bizarre regardless of the motivation
If you don’t see how absolutely out of pocket it is to post-hoc unilaterally decide that a dead person was in “denial” about their gender identity then I just don’t think we can find agreement on this tbh.
I’m not even saying you’re wrong about what Bushnell’s identity was btw.
ignore them bro
“My name is Aaron Bushnell”. <pretty definitive statement
rip
yes by all means just ignore all the trans women explaining how closely Bushnell’s actions directly mirror the behaviors of trans people online
cis men are the fucking worst goddamn
Wait’ll you find out how many times I introduced myself as my birth name while going by a different name online. The real question isn’t about whether or not this person was trans, it’s why are so many of you guys so invested in dismissing the possibility and painting it as objectively untrue, inappropriate to talk about, and seemingly offensive to consider?
Someone on Reddit who appears to have been close to Bushnell contends that this is not true: https://old.reddit.com/r/trans/comments/1bdj9lm/can_we_talk_about_aaron_bushnell_for_a_minute/
“We know all about the online use of other names/pronouns (and so much more you have not discovered), and more importantly, we know why. It is not what anyone thinks,” communicates actually zero information. vague-posting champion. like if the anonymous redditor actually made a claim, it might be worth considering. how can you even say they “appear to have been close to Bushnell”? based on what? the paper i linked also has statements from people that knew Bushnell. for what it’s worth, i’ve been seeing girls talk about knowing Lilly on tumblr and discord since 2024.
there’s dozens of people i knew in high school or who know my family who would say “without a scintilla of doubt, [junebug] was not gay or trans,” and they would be wrong. like who cares?
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disengage + a barb doesn’t count, you don’t get to call it quits and then sneak in a last word.
are you talking about the parts of the conclusion that say “on the balance of probabilities, Bushnell most likely used the name Lilly, used she/ her pronouns, did so for the purpose of gender expression, [and] did so up to the point of her death”? i’m joking, of course, you skipped that part and only want to talk about “it is most likely not appropriate to correct people referring to her as Aaron (he/him), and it will not become appropriate unless additional information emerges which is not expected at this time.” if you can believe it, i don’t thoughtlessly take up every sentence i’ve ever read. i personally think there’s enough evidence to correct people, even if Ms. Moreton didn’t think so two years ago. i’ve also heard persistent discussion of the topic on transfem parts of tumblr and discord, but that isn’t really linkable evidence.
ITT cissies use disengage incorrectly to avoid self reflection
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LILLY!?!
I had no idea. Far out. :(
ITT: further evidence that all cis men on this side need to do serious self crit, no exceptions.
agreed. Hexbear needs more transfeminism.
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it’s a good thing she didn’t do that then, the issue you and others seem to have is unexamined transmisogyny. it is legitimately vile that you think ‘transvestigating’, the word for trying to strip a woman of dignity and respect for being trans, is applicable to discussing whether someone is trans. why is it disrespectful to the dead to call them a woman, but not disrespectful to call them a man? are we really doing tokenism about “trans voices” when the tone of the thread is split almost perfectly by pronoun tags?
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disengage plus an argument doesn’t count, but i’m sure it would eat at you to not be able to get your last word. i also asked several questions, not just one, but i guess it’s easier to change the subject, right?
your words, for the record: “I find doing transvestigations on unconsenting people bizarre regardless of the motivation
If you don’t see how absolutely out of pocket it is to post-hoc unilaterally decide that a dead person was in “denial” about their gender identity then I just don’t think we can find agreement on this tbh.
I’m not even saying you’re wrong about what Bushnell’s identity was btw.”
the actual, direct phenomenon you claim to be bothered by is some of us calling the dead a woman, because you are so blinded by cisheteronormativity that you think it’s offensive. the fancy words are cute, but talking about the words and actions of a person when they were alive isn’t post hoc, and multiple people presenting different arguments for something actually isn’t unilateral. i have already described why calling this ‘transvestigation’ is inappropriate. i have no doubt whatsoever that you find evidence of transfem lives to be ‘out of pocket’, but you could at least have the decency to own your position.
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I’m disengaging
Trans people are very capable of being transmisogynistic - it’s not like internalized misogyny is very uncommon, so why would internalized transmisogyny be?
This point means nothing and is frankly over aggro and comes off as telling on yourself. She didn’t say everyone was transphobic, she said they need to do self crit, which is not in any way the same thing.
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How about you fuck off back to Stupidpolgrad, jackass? Thanks for even further showing your ass, as if the ‘grotesque’ statement didn’t. Also, I said transmisogyny, not transphobia, do you even know what transmisogyny is?
Internalized transmisogyny led me to undergo decades of being unable to accept my self and it wasn’t till I spent many years around yall, and to give credit where due, seeing both contrapoints and Abigail Thorne transition to get where I am today and that is still mostly in the closet to all but like 5 people irl.
Living in the closet is stifling. I hope one day you can live freely as yourself.
thanks
If you read the interactions in this thread it’s heavily implied that comrades who think speculating about the gender identity of a dead person is disrespectful are engaging in transphobia. I didn’t mean to come across “aggro”.
“I’m just calmly reinforcing cisnormativity here, why are all these women getting so upset at me?”
One can engage in transphobic behavior without being transphobic as a person. As I said, internalized transmisogyny is not uncommon.
For the record, every single trans woman I’ve ever told about Lilly’s accounts and situation immediately identified her as a trans woman that was partially in the closet, as is very common for us especially when we’re in situations where we cannot feasibly transition.
I am bigender, not a transgender woman, but only using a certain name and pronouns on certain websites is something I do.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I go by Alice on some websites (e.g. Tumblr, BlueSky) but not all (my Instagram, WhatsApp etc are still under my legal name)
I think it’s fairly obvious that Bushnell was genderqueer if not a transgender woman. I don’t see what other evidence one could need other than her explicitly listing her pronouns as she/her on multiple platforms.
Yes, at bare minimum I agree with you - I am bigender myself, by the way, though definitely a trans woman first - but overall when picturing the whole situation it really seems to me like she was partially in the closet, the fact that she was in the military and was raised in a weird christian cult makes that idea, at least to all the trans women I’ve personally told about this, even more clear and obvious.
Obviously there’s no smoking gun, but I think there is more than enough reason to come to that conclusion on her. Some of the strong pushback here is probably because, even if she was just genderqueer or non-physically-transitioning bigender or whatever, it seems very clear to me that most of the people (not you) arguing strongly against this in this thread are never calling to call her a her or call her Lilly and are arguing this point as an excuse to continue using he/him and ‘Aaron’ exclusively. Whether they know that or not, as internalized transmisogyny is quite rampant.
Definitely. I wasn’t arguing she was more likely to be bigender, I think I probably could have worded my post better (I’m running on fuck all sleep today). Was just saying that she was almost certainly not cis either way.
The fact that she only used her legal name on LinkedIn and Facebook (which are much less anonymous platforms than say Tumblr) would suggest she was closeted in her personal life, it is not an argument to suggest that she had changed her mind or, as that one Reddit thread seemed to be suggesting, was just taking the piss for whatever reason.
Your line of argument here is “saying somebody may have been a trans woman is disrespectful”. At the same time, you seriously claim to not be transphobic. And no, you do not come across as aggro, you come off as somebody engaging in transmisogyny with all the calm, self-confidence and absolute belief to be in the right that is typical for transmisogynists in a society hell-bent on exterminating us.
Damn.Something is fake here, it’s the same drone from this image, but I haven’t yet found sources for either, so both are pinging my bullshit detector
its the same kind of drone but the angle is different, blurred landscape a bit greener on the bushnell one. i’m inclined to buy both cause they’re pretty scuffed and it’s cool.
heap of ‘graphic design is my passion’ work for a low-stakes fake
If you find a source for the originals of either, please let me know. I’m trying to shake the habit of believing things are real because they’re cool
This one was also sick but no idea where it came from
Just double posting to say you know a comment section is spicy when two threads make up the majority of comments
Iran has a long memory with this kind of thing. They’ve also honored an American that fought during one of their revolutions in the 20’s.
Is this image actually real?
I have only seen it from untrustworthy sources
I know these were real, but older
I can’t speak for this image, but I recall Iran, Hamas and Lebanese people paid their respects to Bushnell; using google’s AI I found these articles:
Hamas: https://www.workers.org/2024/02/77176/
Iran: The Tehran times website seems to be down, but there’s this jpost article condemning it as exploitation: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-789129
A Lebanese article about when the West bank also renamed a street in his honor: https://en.al-akhbar.com/news/the-limit-of-what-a-soul-can-bear--remembering-aaron-bushnel
Also an article from a Hezbollah website (Al-Manar TV) about him: https://en-archive.almanar.com.lb/tag/aaron-bushnell
Bushnell gave their life to oppose genocide so this isn’t surprising, people in the global South have a lot of solidarity with anyone who’s against oppressors (it’s the reason why Iran back in the 70’s freed black hostages (except for one from the military) and kept the white ones).
The West bank also renamed a street in his honor: https://en.al-akhbar.com/news/the-limit-of-what-a-soul-can-bear--remembering-aaron-bushnel
Lebanese article about him: https://en.al-akhbar.com/news/the-limit-of-what-a-soul-can-bear--remembering-aaron-bushnel
these two are the same link btw in case that was unintentional.
Ah, yeah it was in between searches and I didn’t catch that I’d repeated the link, thanks
im not crying u are.
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