this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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This seems like grotesque speculation of a deceased individual.
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.
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
It was an intentional choice of words because I find it to be incredibly disrespecful. Put bluntly, transition is a personal thing. It's a lesson I've learnt is you can't transition someone else for them. You could suggest it, but ultimately it's something they have to do for themselves. When someone passes away, you just have to let them rest.
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.
If someone passes away before they come out, I'm sorry, I know it may seem harsh, but you can't force them to come out in death. A deceased person has no agency. We have no way of knowing what they're thinking, and we can't retrospectively make decisions for them. That sucks. I don't like it when people die. But it's not respectful to theorize about what they might have done had they not passed away.
You've maliciously misrepresented my argument and claimed I called transfeminity grotesque. At no point did I say that, nor anything that could be charitably misinterpreted as that. This shows me you have no intention of engaging in good faith. I'm a trans woman myself, so the topic is personal to me, hence the strong use of language.
Have a good day.
You have something to add or just an emoji?
fuck off
You are deciding this, not the person who passed away.
That's clearly not what they were using that word for.
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…?
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?
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.
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.
fuck off man
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.
sigh