this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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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