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.
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.
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
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?
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
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?
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
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.
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 took a brief look into this. It looks like Tracy Grammer, Dave’s partner in life and music, had opened a thread opposing the use of “she” for Dave’s wikipedia page:
Page has been altered and undone a few times in relation to Carter’s pronouns. Current edit states that expressed gender overrides assigned gender. I would appreciate clarification as to what Wiki is calling “expressed gender.”
I was partnered with Carter professionally from 1996 until his death by heart attack in 2002, and personally from 1997- early 2002. Carter had not come out at the time of his death. He intended to release one more album of what he called “Lonesome Dave” songs (as male), then send me out on a solo tour while he focused on the transition. When s/he was ready to introduce the new identity, we would shift our musical configuration to an all-girl psychedelic country band.
The transition process was not public knowledge at the time of his death. His immediate family was completely unaware of his intention to transition. Only select friends, his healers/therapists, and our management team were in the loop. He did not have a name chosen.
Carter’s death at the start of the transition process puts him and his transgendered identity in an unusual position – a bardo. It is impossible to say where s/he would’ve landed. Possibly she; possibly non-binary. None of us can know. Up to the date of his death, Dave did not ask us to refer to him as anything other than Dave.
The section on Transgendered Identity on Dave’s page is critical for the incredible depth and light it sheds on the work. Still, if “expressed gender” refers to how a person introduces themselves to the world, then it seems inappropriate to “express” Dave Carter as “she” because Dave did not do that. Had Dave survived, that was still a couple years off, based on my knowledge of his professional and personal goals.
As the surviving partner of this musical and romantic partnership, I believe it is important that we honor the transition in progress, which has been done quite lovingly. But I would like to suggest that since Dave Carter never had the privilege of introducing his transgender identity to the world, we not take it upon ourselves to do it posthumously. He did not arrive, as it were, at his destination. And the feminine was yet without a name. Indeed, she is without a history of any kind, professionally speaking, as Dave presented male for the duration of his career. Let’s let the record stand.
I guess you could argue that there’s no reason that Tracey should have the right to say this on behalf of Dave, but unfortunately there’s nobody else around to speak for them.
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.
Calling a trans person a transvestigator is despicable shit, especially when transvestigation is premised on erasing trans identity, a practice that you are more closely aligned with. Absolutely abysmal thing to do, to try to leverage language developed by the trans community against trans people who have needed to carve a historical narrative of themselves through an oppressive history that refuses their legibility.
So much of our history rests on finding connection beneath the surface layer of the hegemonic “truth,” finding throughlines that transcend linguistic limitations and cultural understandings that are in constant flux as they navigate a status quo that seeks their assimilation. Joan of Arc was executed for wearing men’s clothes, refusing to apologize for it, and saying that she would rather die than dress as a woman. Hatshepsut was often depicted as a masculine figure, with beard, short hair, and without breasts, and used masculine language to describe herself. Ashurbanipal was describes spending a great deal of time wearing women’s clothes. Elagabalus used feminine pronouns, dressed in women’s clothes, and preferred likenesses to be feminine.
Traditional historical accounts would say that Joan simply wanted to fight, so the clothing was armour, not cross-dressing. Hatshepsut fostered a masculine identity to be accepted by the patriarchy. Ashurbanipal and Elagabalus were described as effeminate as a way to attack their characters.
We can’t know for sure, of course, and modern linguistic ideas of transness can’t apply across time and space. But that it is only acceptable to default to cisness, that transness can only ever be established through indisputable evidence, that any evidence of transness is first explained away, is a time-honoured traidition of insecure cis scholars who use language of impartiality and empiricism, logic and rationale, as a way of erasing the possibilities of trans lives and denying trans people the space to find connection through history that cis people are allowed at all times.
And frankly, to compare that desire to allow for a potential trans life to be honoured, preserved, and entered into the tenuous and besieged trans historical record to transvestigation of all things (when, by the way, you could conversely be accused of transvestigating a person who has documented evidence of using a feminine name and feminine pronouns by trying to prove this person wasn’t really trans because there isn’t “enough evidence”) is disgusting. The fact is, whether Aaron/Lilly was a trans woman, the bare minimum of evidence would show someone who used two names, and used two sets of pronouns, which is definitionally trans.
So quite honestly, learn to keep your thoughts to yourself on subjects that you don’t actually know anything about, and stop insulting trans people with your bad faith usage of a term we coined to point out the nasty behaviour of cis people who deny our selves.
If I was a he/him I would simply not argue against trans women when they explain shit rather clearly?! What the hell? Why is it so important to you that she is remembered as a cis man??
Cool cool now we’re equating trans people with transvestigators. Fuck you. Just fuck off, cissie. You do not understand the tiniest bit about any of this.
Either you believe and respect people are the gender they say they are or you don’t. You can’t just decide that a deceased individual must have been a closeted trans women in denial in order to steamroll their own words.
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?
It’s typical, embarrassing cis shit. Many “allies” still see being trans as a downgrade of sorts and the thought of being accused of being trans as a personal insult.
Bushnell did, in fact, call herself Lilly with she/her pronouns on multiple accounts, especially ones that weren’t as easily linked to his public identity, a very common trans practice for someone who isn’t ready to come out (seriously, spend an hour browsing any forum of trans people and you will find half of them are in this exact situation). Why would someone not want to come out? Lots of reasons, including being in the US military a fucking awful place that statistically white transfems in the US are over-represented in. Though the majority of them do not come out while they are enlisted.
Why not come out at the time of death? That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. usually being closeted is a key part of what would make someone feel miserable enough to actual kill themself. It’s not like killing yourself actually saves any lives from the military’s evil, nor does it move the US population to do anything. This was, while a powerful political statement, ultimately just a suicide. There are way more effective interventions an enlisted person who was not afraid of death could undertake, Bushnell chose a suicidal, and only self-harming one. Also, stating your legal name and enlistment status is part of the statement, not evidence of not being trans. In fact, using that moment to “come out” would very likely have the effect of undermining the political statement. It becomes: Bushnell killed herself because she was an unwell trans person, and not because she was horrified at her participation in the genocide of Palestinians.
That being said, no, we do not have any “proof” that Bushnell was a trans woman. What we do have clear evidence of is that Bushnell used the name Lilly, and used she/her pronouns. Bushnell also used the name Aaron and used he/him pronouns. That is definitionally trans. Whatever label Bushnell related to, we can’t know. But we know he used the name Aaron, and we know she used the name Lilly, so Bushnell is, by all evidence, trans.
The thing is, even though there is evidence of both identities, because of cis-centric and transmisogynistic thinking, it is only acceptable to some people to use the cis-coded identity, and is somehow portrayed as a violation of Lilly’s autonomy to use the trans one. But both of them existed, and both of them were used by Bushnell. So why is only he/him and Aaron acceptable? And why would cis men feel comfortable coming online and saying that someone who uses two names, and two sets of pronouns (which is trans even if not a trans woman, because, remember, there are more ways to be trans than one, and using cross-gender pronouns, even if you also use the pronouns you were assigned at birth is still trans) is not trans because there’s no proof. Only your assumptions about Lilly/Aaron are correct, even though they rely on ignoring a bunch of evidence, because you are a cis man that assumes cisness as the default.
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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?
okay you just hate trans people, got it.
Mods, this comment is not available in the modlog, is it “doxxing or extreme images”?
These two other comments have also been removed in this way:
ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.
Check the first link, don’t think it’s right
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?
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
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?
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 took a brief look into this. It looks like Tracy Grammer, Dave’s partner in life and music, had opened a thread opposing the use of “she” for Dave’s wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive_1068#Expressed_gender_vs._assigned_gender
and on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Dave_Carter#Consistency:
I guess you could argue that there’s no reason that Tracey should have the right to say this on behalf of Dave, but unfortunately there’s nobody else around to speak for them.
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.
Calling a trans person a transvestigator is despicable shit, especially when transvestigation is premised on erasing trans identity, a practice that you are more closely aligned with. Absolutely abysmal thing to do, to try to leverage language developed by the trans community against trans people who have needed to carve a historical narrative of themselves through an oppressive history that refuses their legibility.
So much of our history rests on finding connection beneath the surface layer of the hegemonic “truth,” finding throughlines that transcend linguistic limitations and cultural understandings that are in constant flux as they navigate a status quo that seeks their assimilation. Joan of Arc was executed for wearing men’s clothes, refusing to apologize for it, and saying that she would rather die than dress as a woman. Hatshepsut was often depicted as a masculine figure, with beard, short hair, and without breasts, and used masculine language to describe herself. Ashurbanipal was describes spending a great deal of time wearing women’s clothes. Elagabalus used feminine pronouns, dressed in women’s clothes, and preferred likenesses to be feminine.
Traditional historical accounts would say that Joan simply wanted to fight, so the clothing was armour, not cross-dressing. Hatshepsut fostered a masculine identity to be accepted by the patriarchy. Ashurbanipal and Elagabalus were described as effeminate as a way to attack their characters.
We can’t know for sure, of course, and modern linguistic ideas of transness can’t apply across time and space. But that it is only acceptable to default to cisness, that transness can only ever be established through indisputable evidence, that any evidence of transness is first explained away, is a time-honoured traidition of insecure cis scholars who use language of impartiality and empiricism, logic and rationale, as a way of erasing the possibilities of trans lives and denying trans people the space to find connection through history that cis people are allowed at all times.
And frankly, to compare that desire to allow for a potential trans life to be honoured, preserved, and entered into the tenuous and besieged trans historical record to transvestigation of all things (when, by the way, you could conversely be accused of transvestigating a person who has documented evidence of using a feminine name and feminine pronouns by trying to prove this person wasn’t really trans because there isn’t “enough evidence”) is disgusting. The fact is, whether Aaron/Lilly was a trans woman, the bare minimum of evidence would show someone who used two names, and used two sets of pronouns, which is definitionally trans.
So quite honestly, learn to keep your thoughts to yourself on subjects that you don’t actually know anything about, and stop insulting trans people with your bad faith usage of a term we coined to point out the nasty behaviour of cis people who deny our selves.
fuck off man
If I was a he/him I would simply not argue against trans women when they explain shit rather clearly?! What the hell? Why is it so important to you that she is remembered as a cis man??
Cool cool now we’re equating trans people with transvestigators. Fuck you. Just fuck off, cissie. You do not understand the tiniest bit about any of this.
sigh
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
Either you believe and respect people are the gender they say they are or you don’t. You can’t just decide that a deceased individual must have been a closeted trans women in denial in order to steamroll their own words.
but they were talking to us Palestinians ? in their last moments on earth
I don’t claim to understand trans women but I do understand how men think
I have a an account that isn’t male online
I am certainly not trans
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?
It’s typical, embarrassing cis shit. Many “allies” still see being trans as a downgrade of sorts and the thought of being accused of being trans as a personal insult.
you did
not bushnell
I do the same and I’ll tell you right now I am not trans
look I am born and raised and live in the west bank so my upbringing was socially conservative to a degree
but I don’t really see it ? it’s just a twitch account
wouldn’t they have called themselves lilly before what they did? I don’t understand why’d you refer to yourself as Aaron before self immolating
Bushnell did, in fact, call herself Lilly with she/her pronouns on multiple accounts, especially ones that weren’t as easily linked to his public identity, a very common trans practice for someone who isn’t ready to come out (seriously, spend an hour browsing any forum of trans people and you will find half of them are in this exact situation). Why would someone not want to come out? Lots of reasons, including being in the US military a fucking awful place that statistically white transfems in the US are over-represented in. Though the majority of them do not come out while they are enlisted.
Why not come out at the time of death? That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. usually being closeted is a key part of what would make someone feel miserable enough to actual kill themself. It’s not like killing yourself actually saves any lives from the military’s evil, nor does it move the US population to do anything. This was, while a powerful political statement, ultimately just a suicide. There are way more effective interventions an enlisted person who was not afraid of death could undertake, Bushnell chose a suicidal, and only self-harming one. Also, stating your legal name and enlistment status is part of the statement, not evidence of not being trans. In fact, using that moment to “come out” would very likely have the effect of undermining the political statement. It becomes: Bushnell killed herself because she was an unwell trans person, and not because she was horrified at her participation in the genocide of Palestinians.
That being said, no, we do not have any “proof” that Bushnell was a trans woman. What we do have clear evidence of is that Bushnell used the name Lilly, and used she/her pronouns. Bushnell also used the name Aaron and used he/him pronouns. That is definitionally trans. Whatever label Bushnell related to, we can’t know. But we know he used the name Aaron, and we know she used the name Lilly, so Bushnell is, by all evidence, trans.
The thing is, even though there is evidence of both identities, because of cis-centric and transmisogynistic thinking, it is only acceptable to some people to use the cis-coded identity, and is somehow portrayed as a violation of Lilly’s autonomy to use the trans one. But both of them existed, and both of them were used by Bushnell. So why is only he/him and Aaron acceptable? And why would cis men feel comfortable coming online and saying that someone who uses two names, and two sets of pronouns (which is trans even if not a trans woman, because, remember, there are more ways to be trans than one, and using cross-gender pronouns, even if you also use the pronouns you were assigned at birth is still trans) is not trans because there’s no proof. Only your assumptions about Lilly/Aaron are correct, even though they rely on ignoring a bunch of evidence, because you are a cis man that assumes cisness as the default.