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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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??
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.
“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?
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.
Her name was Lilly.
Wow… was unaware of this.
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.
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.
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.
opinion discarded
this sucks
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.”
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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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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.
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.
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??
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
Didn’t know that, thanks for sharing.
It seems to be something that MSM could easily bury whenever they had the leeway to.
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?
Removed by mod
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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