I’ve known Isabelle Moreton, of Australia, as a consistent presence in the online trans community from her posts under the handle Moby Dickgirl. Recently, Moreton has been among the most vocal members of that community to raise questions about the life and identity of Aaron Bushnell, poking into, and drawing inferences from, Bushnell’s online presence. Moreton graciously agreed to be interviewed about her research, and what it would mean to see Bushnell as a closeted trans woman.
Assigned Media: Everyone by now has heard the story of Aaron Bushnell, an active duty member of the U. S. Military who self-immolated as an extreme act of protest against what Bushnell saw as an ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. But, today, you’re going to talk about this person differently than the mainstream has done.
Isabelle Moreton: In most situations where I have to discuss the political act I am just saying Bushnell and avoiding pronouns. But, in situations where I feel that it is safe enough to do so I have been referring to Bushnell as Lilly, and using she/her pronouns. After everything I’ve seen, I feel morally obliged to do that.
Assigned: I want to talk about what led to that feeling of moral obligation. So, when did you start hearing that Bushnell might not have been cisgender, and what did you do with that information?
IM: Well, we were glued to our screens as the news was breaking, and a friend mentioned that the Twitch account that the self-immolation was streamed through had the name “LillyAnarKitty.”
And that raised a few eyebrows. It’s the most transfeminine-coded username in existence. I think there’s a Contrapoints character that has a similar name.
Assigned: So you started looking into this. Describe a little bit about that process, both how you started looking, and what you started finding?
IM: Initially I had to think: Am I disturbing her grave? And… I really don’t think that question has been resolved. But we came at this from a feeling of Did we just lose one of our own? We weren’t digging into someone’s life for the fun of it.
Initially, there were two accounts that had been described as Bushnell’s by legacy media, the Twitch account and a Facebook account that posted a link to the Twitch account. And, using those, we… well, I say we, but it was mostly me, but I had people checking my work, so that’s been a collective effort.
We used external moderating tools to, for example, grab the username history of the Twitch account and match its previous usernames with usernames on other sites. We cross referenced those with Bushnell’s life story as it’s been reported in legacy media, and other information that was public about Bushnell. For example, we managed to match a Mastodon account to Bushnell because the profile picture was Bushnell’s cat, and the cat appears in one of her Facebook profile pictures.
Assigned: And this started to give you a picture, one which I think is not quite at the level of 100 percent certainty. What kind of picture did it start to give you?
IM: I started from the assumption that we didn’t know what was going on with Bushnell. But it became pretty clear, pretty quickly, that in some spaces Bushnell was using the name Lilly.
[There have been public comments from Twitch streamers who say that Bushnell viewed their videos and participated in Discord communities as Lilly, using he/him and she/her pronouns. Creator DJ Muel has been particularly vocal about remembering Bushnell as Lilly.]
IM: We also looked at alternate hypotheses for that. Like, is this a situation similar to Willem Van Spronsen, where Willem had a pen name of Emma Durutti, but was a cis man. Or was this a persona that was intended to preserve Bushnell’s privacy?
But those explanations make no sense, because of the way that Bushnell used the LillyAnarKitty persona and the name Lilly. It makes no sense from a privacy point of view [because her identity was easily traceable]. And she was also voicing her radical views through her reddit account, which was linked to her real name.
So we’ve got this person who’s using a feminine personal name to represent herself, and I can’t come up with a reason for that other than that she’s trans.
Assigned: You feel like you concluded that Bushnell wanted to be represented with a feminine name. That “Lilly” was not concealing something, it was expressing something?
IM: Yeah, it’s not that Lilly represents a separation from Bushnell, it’s that Lilly identifies Bushnell. Lilly is Bushnell.
Assigned: And another piece was that the Twitch account wasn’t always called LillyAnarKitty?
IM: Up to February 25th of 2023 the Twitch account was acebush1, which is the same username as Bushnell’s reddit account.
Assigned: So, we know that when Bushnell died, in using that Twitch account, Bushnell wasn’t exactly trying to hide that Lilly persona, right?
IM: Yes. In her final communique, during what a friend of mine called revolutionary suicide, she told the world “I want to be identified as Aaron Bushnell” but from the LillyAnarKitty Twitch account.
I think it’s still ambiguous what those motives were. A few of us thought, you know, maybe this is strategic. She wanted to leave making Aaron the martyr and the icon, while also leaving breadcrumbs to Lilly for those of us in the know.
A friend of mine said maybe she just couldn’t bear to erase herself completely.
Whatever the truth is, Bushnell was meticulous, highly detail oriented. She knew how to change her Twitch username. She could have created a new Twitch account, could have created new Discord accounts. She didn’t. For whatever reason, she didn’t. If she had we wouldn’t have found this. She left that information up there. I don’t know why.
Assigned: So, we’ve been discussing straightforward things such as the name and pronouns Bushnell used on Discord, but I know there’s some more circumstantial stuff that I think you referred to as “egg shit.” Tell me a little bit about this “egg shit,” meaning things that don’t prove anything, but just feel so familiar to members of the trans community?
IM: Probably the biggest reference for who Bushnell was was her reddit account. She was a pretty consistent reddit poster for a month in 2014, then again consistently from 2020 onwards.
And, for one thing, Bushnell was furtively hanging out in some trans reddit communities, just sticking her toe in. Like r/transclones [a reddit devoted to trans Star Wars memes] and r/unixsocks [a programming reddit where the overwhelming majority of users are trans women].
You see someone wander into the trans girl playhouse and you do… you make some assumptions. It was nothing definitive, but this would be the eggiest cis person alive, if nothing else.
The other thing I noticed was just that she was incredibly passionate about trans rights. When Bushnell described the situation on the ground for trans people in the U. S. I could feel in it my own desperation. If you’ve read Zinnia Jones’ coverage of it, if you’ve read Erin Reed’s coverage of it, or if you’ve read, well, your own coverage at Assigned Media, there was a sense of that fear, that anger, reflected back at me.
If Bushnell was a cis man, this was a cis man that got it in a way cis people rarely do.
Assigned: And this is part of why you’re not quite as worried about being wrong, right?
IM: If somehow I fucked this up completely and this person was not what they appear to me to be, if Aaron Bushnell, he/him was the only version that ever existed, I can only conclude that he would understand how the misunderstanding came about. And I think, I hope, this is someone who would understand that what is happening is in good faith and from a sense of love and obligation.
Assigned: I know that many cis people are so negative about the trans community that they almost can’t imagine talking about Bushnell as perhaps having been a closeted trans person without that being an attack on the memory.
IM: Yeah, and trans women’s lives are considered less worthwhile. If you think about Chloe Sagal’s death by self-immolation a couple of years ago and look at the way media covered that, it was almost as if it was supposed to happen. There’s a sense that Sagal, and all trans women by extension, are always headed towards suicide.
I think that was unfair to Chloe Sagal, and to apply that to Bushnell would be equally wrong. Because even egg trans people have moral agency.
Bushnell was someone who gave a very clear reason for her self-immolation, and set out to leverage the empathy that some cis audiences felt towards her as the white, cis-male, American trooper in the most effective fashion possible.
If she was trans, if she was dysphoric, the only difference is that the protagonist was a trans woman. But I don’t think it would be right to erase her, to allow her to be forgotten.
This was a powerful interview. Linking it to Chloe Sagal’s news coverage was a great choice.
One little factual correction though, unixsocks is a FOSS/Linux/Unix sub, not a crypto (-currency or -graphy) sub. Which probably seems pretty inconsequential to the story, but Open Source was always pretty trans friendly. The title of the subreddit is a play on “programming socks”, itself a play on how common trans women/femboys programmers wear those thigh-high socks. It’s a deep cut but it’s very trans girl culture.
And I spotted a couple autocorrect errors — “from what we know” was rendered as “from that we know”; and “overwhelming majority” was rendered as “overwhelmingly majority”.
Thank you for writing this piece, Evan!
Got the errors, thank you so much!
Thank you.
Just… thank you.
Thank you for writing this.
It is a difficult thing to navigate and process, but even before I came out as trans to my partner, and before I bridged my online life and my digital, I was living in a thriving community and touching many lives as my true self. Had something caused my life to end before I had the courage to come out I definitely think Id want to be remembered as me.
But the exact problem of trans misogyny leaves a complicated thing when you are using your death for political purposes like Lilly did.
I now understand why this news has been so slow to pass around but I also agree that using Lilly is appropriate to anyone in our community. She deserves to be remembered. I’m glad there are discord communities that knew her and she impacted.
maybe Lilly was concerned that being Lilly in that moment of revolutionary suicide would be twisted and focused on instead of what Lilly was doing; calling attention to and denouncing the Palestinian genocide.
makes a lot of sense to me
i can just imagine the 41% jokes if mainstream media reported "trans woman self immolates"
yeah that’s specifically why we should not be digging in the internet history of people and bringing up information that could be hazardous and that goes against their wishes about the way they want to be remembered
then why didn’t she post it as AaronAnarKitty?
how do you know her wishes? Maybe they’re your wishes.
Could it be the name of the cat?
his cat was named Pumpkin as seen on @souzaerinn ‘s tiktok!
this is an oddly difficult read for me. not only the public and present circumstances of the genocide in palestine and the potential of losing one of our own (also coupled with the pride and inspiration in a trans sibling’s anarchist spirit) but also because it speaks to an internal personal dilemma i’ve been struggling with for the past year. about a year ago, my cousin committed suicide. we had had a really tumultuous relationship and hadn’t spoken in years. but, posthumously, things started to pop up here and there that suggested my cousin had just recently been coming to terms with being trans and embracing that identity. so i’ve been in this odd space of wanting to know so i can mourn properly but also not knowing how to find out without troubling things within the family (catholic and not super accepting). not super relevant to this story and the general moment but it felt particular that the writing of and my reading of this article coincide with right around a year since my thing happened and it moved me to share ¯_(ツ)_/¯ thank you for this piece and for bringing bushnell’s story out into the light so we can mourn more deeply and thoroughly.
This question has been answered by a friend of Aaron’s Perhaps we should listen to someone who actually knew the man.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LillyAnarKitty/comments/1b9sddf/comment/ku0v3vn/
this… doesn’t really disprove anything at all. it’s literally what this article is about: bushnell was PUBLICLY Aaron Bushnell and used he/him pronouns, but was involved in this community and literally is in a screenshot saying "i hope to be like you one day" to a trans person coming out in the military. it’s super likely that bushnell would not have told anybody that they knew in real life about this, because you usually don’t. that’s WHY is on niche subreddits. that’s WHY people did not publicly call her lilly. she was hiding herself from the world and presumably those around her as well. we are never actually going to be able to prove or disprove their gender identity until we find a personal account from bushnell talking about their experience.
not being out to people in your life doesnt mean you arent trans. that post doesnt address Bushnell going by Lilly and she/her pronouns on discord.
It is a shame she wasn’t able to transition and blossom as a woman. I find the celebration of her act by many in the trans community to be deeply regressive. Human sacrifice is not an effective way to end war. The idea we should kill ourselves instead of becoming who we are is deeply transphobic. I am aware this view angers a lot of people but I don’t care.
Thank you for this reporting.
This is a digusting invasion of privacy. Bushnell could have been expirimenting, going by a different name for fun, or a million other things. Who are you to assume the idenity of a deceased martyr? In all honesty, I don’t care if Bushnell is trans or cis. I care about their sacrifice and their message. I care about the Palestinian people being blown to bits in Gaza. Bushnell did the ulitmate sacrifice just to have their final bits of privacy ripped away from them and plastered all over the internet for everyone to see and speculate on. This is disgusting and disturbing.
In the final communique on their Twitch account Bushnell says, “I want to be identified as Aaron Bushnell”. Oh. My. God.
What right do we have as a community to publically out someone who VERY CLEARLY has stated how they want to be remembered both online and in a video before they publically light themself on fire for political reasons?
I dunno… maybe Bushnell kept up the same user name because someone would actually see it that way instead of changing it or making a new one? Maybe there was more going on at the time?!
This article is gross and irresponsible.
Even in the event that Aaron was a closest trans woman, Aaron Bushnell, in A Very Sane Mind, made a very big and clear decision and very PERSONAL decision about how Aaron Bushnell wanted to be perceived and remembered. Aaron Bushnell then communicated that in multiple ways leading up to their death – and here people are disrespecting that.
Pre-Covid, I used to put on women only / trans inclusive events where women were out at the events, but not out publicly.
If a regular in our community passed away while living as their assigned gender, I would have zero moral or ethical standing to publically out them in ANY manner after they had stated in every way they could that they wanted to be remembered as their dead name. I would be allowed to hold whatever memories I had of that person while also holding the reality that gender is complicated and not linear and that I don’t get to make decisions about anyone’s life or death or gender or how they want to be named or gendered or remembered. The only thing I would be morally or ethically obligated to do would be to respect their goddamn wishes. This person died as Aaron Bushnell. Let them choose how they want to be publically remembered and close it off.
In Aaron Bushnells’ will, they ask that their ashes be scattered in a Free Palestine.
That is one of Aaron Bushnell’s final wishes after martyring themselves in an excruciating way for Palestine. We all know that would not likely happen if Aaron was trans. Would Palestinians take down the street name they have already put up for Aaron Bushnell if transness was a bigger part of the conversation? I have no idea. But you really wanna mess up the deathbed wishes for this person who has literally sacrificed their life for this cause? Honestly, how dare you?
I’m sorry, but I fundamentally do not think that being transgender is negative, I don’t think it’s a dark secret that must be hidden, and therefore I don’t think talking about whether someone might have been transgender is any more disrespectful than wondering if they liked pizza better than pasta.
There is a record of who Bushnell was that includes how he presented online, which included using the name Lilly and she/her pronouns. You’re equating talking about that to outing someone who goes to an event that is premised on keeping their presence confidential, but I never promised anyone to keep this secret, nor did Bushnell ask anyone else to do so to my knowledge.
Agreed. It is so f*cking out of pocket to publish an article like this when Aaron consistently identified publicly and privately as a cis man. You don’t get to pick and choose which identities and pronouns to assign to someone after they very clearly state their preferences for the world to acknowledge. This article could have been written in a way that respected his right to decide how he wanted to be identified and ran in the opposite direction for no justifiable reason.
A comment about this article from someone who claims (imo convincingly based on some of their other posts/comments) to be a friend of Aaron. https://www.reddit.com/r/LillyAnarKitty/comments/1baba8f/hopes_for_transition/ku4cyg5/?context=9
copy pasted here:
> I am aware of a lot about him and this specific issue that is not public, will not become public, nor is it even remotely my place to make that information public. It involves more people than just Aaron.
> Yes, I am certain about this. Aaron was not trans.
> The article you cite is basically no better than the reading of tea leaves. They started with an agenda and read the publicly available evidence to fit that, while ignoring evidence to the contrary, such as posts in trans supportive spaces where he openly identified himself as a cis man.
Thank you for posting this.
This article/interview was entirely tea-leaf reading. Neither Isabelle nor I have claimed more than that.
What this comment leaves out is that a lot of trans people who were once closeted recognize how they acted in how Bushnell did. But, that’s not definitive and we’re not claiming it’s definitive. I wanted to do this story to share why some people in our community think Bushnell might have been a closeted trans woman, not to make an argument that Bushnell was or was not. I don’t personally think it’s possible to know.
That person was a comrade of Aaron’s and knew him personally for a long time and claims authority on the matter. Personally i was hoping you’d talk to them (or someone else who was close to Aaron), maybe add in a statement from them about the story. It might help settle the matter, since Aaron seemed to be pretty close with his friends and comrades and was already using an alternate presentation online. At the very least you could say ‘x declined to comment’, that’s information too.
Sorry but imo as a journalist that’s kinda your job- finding (and perhaps interviewing) sources that are closer to the subject than social media usernames and deleted reddit comments.
why are yall digging into this dead person’s life?? sincerely from a trans man lmao yall go too far
Thank you for this. It was important to me. There are a lot of people who would want to know this.
Friend of Aaron’s here. Just here to say he was categorically one of the straightest white men I ever knew.