it's very surreal to see posts about palestine dwindling down after the ceasefire. israel is still blocking aid to and trying to make life difficult for palestinians in gaza. we still have to continue to speak up about gaza.
in this ceasefire, many palestinians are trying to rebuild in attempts to try and return to what they had before the genocide. despite the heavy and unbearable loss of life that gaza has experienced, her people continue to try to make a better world for their children.
alaa is a mother of two young children. she wants to rebuild her house and get a better future for her children. please have heart and consider helping her out. her fundraiser has been verified.
There is a peculiar trend on here of waxing poetically about the poor trans woman of the day who got harassed into complete social isolation. It's often written with this ingratiating self-pity about how "we failed her" for believing the lies and fabrications of an obvious harassment campaign. All while half of the trans women here were talking about how it was baseless harassment from the start. It reminds me of the way people talk about eg. deaths around them from poverty, suicide, etc.—"if only I helped them"—when they never actually had any intention to. A preemptive attempt to skirt any ex post facto consequences from admitting you had sided, whether publicly or privately, with bigoted harassment not two days ago.
Yes this is about the most recent woman pushed out (Viv), but it's also about every time this happened before. And it's about how it happened to Rita-Avery-Roxy too. Her past presence and harassment here has virtually been reduced to "that poor woman who we failed" and a comforting "love every trans woman [...]" aphorism you can use to cheer yourself up whenever the next trans woman gets socially murdered.
The self-pity is pointless and irritating, and it doesn't garner trust from those paying attention. Its not a problem to talk about the details how yet another person was harassed so horribly they were coerced to leave—just keep the feelings of personal guilt and self-pity to yourself, please.
Do you feel good for rummaging in the internet presence of a man who gave his life so people will look at the genocide on going? Do you feel good for misgendering him? Do you feel good for making a trans head Canon about a real person who died horribly? Do you feel good for continuing to fuel all of this in other people's posts that are also inappropriate as fuck? You and the people misgendering him and taking the attention away from Palestine for the sake of transinvestigating him are despicable
Why do these people think we're unable to draw correct inferences and come to correct conclusions and what are they really angry about when they furiously reject the fact that Lilly was a semi closeted trans woman?
It's truly disturbing how this is one of the things that prompts people to be really disgustingly transmisogynist. Like the very idea that Lilly was a trans woman is simply unbearably horrible to them and somehow tarnishes her legacy and her final actions. Which is simply not true but it's something one could only believe if one thinks there's something shameful and disgusting about being a trans woman.
And the verbal abuse they hurl to try to silence this blatantly obvious truth really gives it away, the language of disgust and revulsion they use. Truly showing their bigoted asses to us.
Any trans woman who expressed revulsion and contempt for @epistemophagy and others seeing who Lilly truly was really should sit with and work through why she went along with this honestly disgusting and blatant display of transmisogyny. Why she agreed that it's disgusting to think someone might be a trans woman. What that says about how she views herself as a trans woman.
Also people who call this "headcanoning" need to put their entire head out of their entire ass and pull their ass out of fandom for five minutes. We're talking about a real person.
I'd really recommend skepticism for anyone reading about what happened with Bushnell's self-immolation coming from social media. The source for the claims that Bushnell was a closeted trans person comes from DJ Muel, a politics streamer, and DJ Muel doesn't provide any evidence to support those claims.
Simply put, you shouldn't trust a politics streamer further than you could throw them, and that's before we get to the question of whether or not it's respectful to widely broadcast the private life of someone who has just died.
DJ Muel states clearly that Bushnell was closeted and trans, which means (if the claim is true) Bushnell did not come out publicly before their passing. If someone doesn't choose to come out of the closet before they die, that doesn't make it appropriate for any of us to out them.
Sure, there will always be scuttlebutt about it, but spreading it around like reporting on news and making it an active part of an ongoing cultural conversation is a violation, not good journalism.
There are two scenarios here:
If DJ Muel is reporting false information, which could mean that he's lying or is just repeating misinformation, then he *is* misgendering Bushnell while also spreading misinformation about them in the wake of their death via political protest.
If DJ Muel is reporting accurate information, he hasn't provided any evidence to support his claims. Even if he had presented such evidence, it wouldn't excuse violation of privacy inherent in broadcasting someone's private life to make your own political point.
It's bad reporting, no matter which way you cut it.
The source for the claims that Bushnell was a closeted trans person comes from DJ Muel, a politics streamer, and DJ Muel doesn't provide any evidence to support those claims.
I consider Muel credible because, while I am not previously familiar with him, prior to the publication of his statement I had verified that the Twitch account LillyAnarKitty, the one Bushnell used to stream her martyrdom, was active in, at minimum, Muel's Twitch chat (it was also active in two others but it was most active in Muel's). Muel's knowledge is firsthand. I do not think pointing out that he's a politics streamer is particularly convincing — streamers are an untrustworthy group of people but the reason why isn't "every single statement they make is individually untrue". I don't see a reason to doubt him on this one.
Further,
For the record, I also have receipts from one other individual to the effect that they were in two Discord servers with Bushnell, who used the name "Lilly" and endorsed "she/her" and "he/him" pronouns in both. The display name "Lilly" is consistent with Bushnell's Mastodon account, @[email protected], which is definitely Bushnell's; the account's last possible username change was in February 2023 due to how username changes work in the Mastodon server software, in its (very) short post history it exhibited a similar pattern of behaviour to Bushnell's Twitch account, and it's already been memorialised by Kolektiva admins.
whether or not it's respectful to widely broadcast the private life of someone who has just died.
Part of my decision here revolves around the fact that this aspect of Bushnell's life was, while not what she chose to publicly foreground at the end of her life, not private. We'll come to that in a sec.
As to whether it is respectful, I am engaged here specifically because I consider it morally necessary to respect the dead.
DJ Muel states clearly that Bushnell was closeted and trans, which means (if the claim is true) Bushnell did not come out publicly before their passing. If someone doesn't choose to come out of the closet before they die, that doesn't make it appropriate for any of us to out them.
First: Coming out is self-disclosure, something which Bushnell had, in some spaces, clearly done. I had a similar period of "partially out and only in some spaces," which in my case lasted about three years. Had I died during that time, I would have wanted to be remembered under my chosen name, even though that would have been clearly impossible.
Second: The only reason we are able to know any of this is because the Twitch account from which Bushnell chose to livestream her martyrdom was prominently named "LillyAnarKitty", the username with which all of the other detail about her identity was associated. It is possible to change your Twitch username and in fact Bushnell had changed it from acebush1 about a year prior, so she knew how to.
Everything else about this operation notably displays extreme thought and precision in its planning; Bushnell worked to sanitise her public profile, her web presence, and her posthumous operational security (OPSEC) attack surface, to the point that CrimethInc reports she deleted Signal from her phone before she died. It is not conceivable to me that she would have allowed the name "LillyAnarKitty" to be prominently associated with this operation had she not intended it to be.
spreading it around like reporting on news and making it an active part of an ongoing cultural conversation
I am not "spreading it around". As you can see, I am responding to an ask. I would rather not be having this conversation at all. I am also committed to the liberation of Palestine and Bushnell is an unequivocal hero and martyr in my books. It would have been far simpler and easier, and honestly maybe less viscerally painful, if she'd just been the cis man she looked like.
Maybe someone — I don't know how, I don't see any gaps in the evidence, but maybe someone she trusted, I don't know who, will come along and tell me that this was all a huge mistake, at which point I'll back down and humbly apologise and hope that Aaron's spirit, which is what it will then be, will be forgiving. But until then, I have to go with the information I have. All the information I have.
he is misgendering Bushnell while also spreading misinformation about them in the wake of their death via political protest.
He shares and approves of her politics and she was part of his fanbase and community. What motive would he have to do this?
If DJ Muel is reporting accurate information, he hasn't provided any evidence to support his claims
Corroborated eyewitness testimony is generally considered evidence.
it wouldn't excuse violation of privacy inherent in broadcasting someone's private life to make your own political point
The personal is political, but "whether or not somebody is a trans woman" is not a political point — and, as previously stated, had Bushnell intended to to conceal this part of her identity forever I don't think she would have put it right there, right next to her final trial by fire, impossible to miss. This is not a violation. This is an attempt at the basic decency too many of us don't receive.
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