#lillyanarkitty

[houseofpurplestars]

Americans: "self-immolation is pointless, it's tragic, it doesnt matter, no one cares, its mental illness..."

The rest of the world:

[Image id: a billboard in Sanaa, Yemen in memory of Aaron Bushnell. /end id]

The text reads:

Top: "I will no longer be complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Free Palestine".

Bottom: "The martyr of rejection to the American Genocide / the American soldier Aaron Bushnell"

@Aldanmarki

#free palestine #free gaza #i stand with palestine #palestine #gaza #solidarity #resistance #aaron bushnell #lillyanarkitty #free yemen

[magnusthepuppet]

rest in power, Lilly Bushnell. i hope that one day the world becomes a place where your sacrifice was not in vain.

#palestine #free palestine #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #gaza #free gaza #israel genocide #palestinian genocide #gaza genocide #israel #isnotreal #fuck isntreal #fuck israel #aaron bushnell #rest in piece #<- edits in light of recent information: #lilly bushnell #lillyanarkitty

[alihartwrites]

Lilly did explore her gender identity & sexuality.

View on X/Twitter

#lilly bushnell #aaron bushnell #Bushnell #gender #gender identity #sexuality #discussion #queer #trans #free palestine #palestine #free gaza #lillyanarkitty #alihartwrites #twitter #oc

[rybberdyst]

that article talking about aaron bushnells other identity, lilly, is such an important conversation.

she had gone by she/her and he/him, living in dual with themselves, and i think part of her knew of she had died her trueself, she knew how the media would treat it.

#aaron bushnell #lillyanarkitty

[lilly-anarkitty]

Bushnell thought Dune was based

With the recent release of Dune 2, I thought I’d share some previous comments of Bushnell’s about Dune and one of the memes that they had interacted with.

Archived Comments

#Bushnell #Dune #dune part two #dune movie #dune books #dune memes #aaron bushnell #lillyanarkitty #lilly bushnell #Reddit #comments

[marxism-leninism-meowism]

I think people should read this. However, I will still be respecting the name/pronouns that Aaron used in his final words before his death, because I feel this is the most appropriate thing to do. We don’t know for sure what pronouns he went by or what he identified as, and I want to honor the decision Aaron made before his self-immolation.

#aaron bushnell #lilly bushnell #lillyanarkitty

[cosmileech]

I hate to be that guy, but speculation on Aaron’s gender identity is disrespectful, especially since he’s passed and can’t confirm. He signed off his letters with his pronouns (he/him). We don’t know the story of his twitch name, but his Reddit and other social media wasn’t anything close to what his twitch was. He identified as male, and used he/him.

Either way, Aaron had made the world look at what’s happening in Palestine. Idk about you, but after his passing, there was a very noticeable shift in support for Israel. More and more people have voiced their support for Palestine. More and more people are standing up against Zionism.

He didn’t take his life.

He gave it, just so the world would finally see.

no worries on " being that guy, " trust me, I appreciate it :) I dont mean to be disrespectful at all, and of course I agree that they are definitely someone to look up to and have truly caused a political shift especially here in North America. I had just found in my own research interesting information about their life and felt it was worth sharing. Also, Im not awesome at reading comprehension, so feel free to correct me if this isn't what you were saying, but their twitch was indeed LilyAnarKitty!

There's also been multiple people who came forward and said that Bushnell did indeed use she/her and he/him pronouns.

For the bit on speculation about her identity, I don't believe that's a bad thing at all. Im of the opinion that researching people like this, activists who are changing the world, is important. That we can't reduce them to a name in a history textbook but rather know they were human, just like us.

I feel like it was intentional, for them to leave those bits of their identity on the internet, instead of wiping it all completely. Like a subtle nod to our community to tell us that they were one of us.

Furthermore, they were also in a lot of trans communities on reddit and whatnot. If this was a cisgender man, then they understood trans identity in a way most cis people don't. And that's worth preserving, holding onto, and remembering.

And, as I said before, this just speaks to how much of a sacrifice it was to protest.

#lillyanarkitty #lilyanarkitty #aaron bushnell #gaza #free gaza #free rafah #all eyes on rafah #free palestine #palestine

[flaskoflethe]

I am fucking devistated, entirely unsurprised, and heartbroken that someone so incredible sacrificed themselves. I don't follow Muel myself, and wasn't active in any of these discords/twitches and cannot independently verify this - but, it kinda fucking figures at this point

#Fuck #Lillyanarkitty deserved a better world - as does EVERYONE - and chose to sacrifice that to bring attention to an atrocity #And uh. Choosing to voluntarily give up a part of yourself for a cause? That's kinda a definition of heroism (or an element thereof) #So called it fuck everyone harassing people who saw a tiny piece of themselves #I can't even say rest in peace - there can be none until Palestine is free #If you want to argue/be upset that a transwoman calls out the clarity of purpose demonstrated at every. Fucking. Step. #By someone who felt this strongly? Kinda dgaf at this point :( #I didn't need this to start my day... Literally saw this right after the flour massacre #End genocide and imperialism

[houseofpurplestars]

The text following is an archived reddit post from Aaron Bushnell. Begin quote:

I've realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I've imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.

What I'm trying to say is, it's so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with idealistic dreams of what the world should look like, and let the pain and anger at how it's not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine. It's not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.

#free palestine #free gaza #i stand with palestine #palestine #gaza #solidarity #resistance #aaron bushnell #lillyanarkitty

[strawberry-crocodile]

obviously transmisogyny manifests itself in, like, specific ways like the assumption we're a bunch of sexual predators, but to some extent there's a clear trend among people even in the queer community to just... still be uncomfortable witb Trans Women, as an identity?

Consider the recent backlash against the idea that Twitch user LillyAnarKitty might be transfem; people were call it "disgusting" and "disrespectful" and like... please stop and think about that reaction. You see it in "egg discourse" where people are CLEARLY uncomfortable with the label trans woman being even offered to anyone who isn't already openly using it. Or the persistant idea that being a gnc man is somehow more "radical" and "challenging" than the trans woman, even thoigh there's an entire subset of conservatives who fetoshize the former and want to kill the latter. Or even something as small and minor as the propensity to discuss transmisogynistic caricatures in media as just generally genderqueer.

IDK, just... recognize that "trans woman" is something you yourself might have discomfort with, and just practice getting comfortable with someone assigned male and gone through t being a proud she/her woman, no caveats.

#dalucaray #tme ppl #no disrespect to amab nb people and nonbinary transfems to be clear

[alihartwrites]

Sacrifice or Suicide?

I don’t see Lilly’s self-immolation as an act of suicide but moreso as sacrificial and symbolic.

Bushnell didn’t show any signs of suicidality - if so she would’ve been discharged out of the military held in a VA psych ward. Especially with a security clearance as high as hers.

Lilly was incredibly methodical about her self-immolation it was to symbolize and force the globe to see what’s happening in Palestine.

Bushnell wouldn’t have wanted copycats and I do not condone anyone to self-immolate whatsoever.

Yet, I still think it is important to understand and remember these people for who they were based on their own accounts rather than mainstream media accounts which already hate anarchists like us.

PSA: If you or anyone you know are feeling suicidal, please reach out for help!

Call 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline

Text HOME to 741741 for the Crisis Text Line

Call, text, or chat with The Trevor Project https://www.thetrevorproject.org/get-help/

Link to full list of posts about Lilly (Aaron) Bushnell > https://www.tumblr.com/alihartwrites/745361994322984960/list-of-posts-about-aaronlilly-bushnell

#sacrifice #self immolation #suicide #suicide or sacrifice #cw suicide #tw suicide #lilly bushnell #remember lilly #lillyanarkitty #the sacred feminine #free palestine #palestine #free gaza #bushnell #aaron bushnell #alihartwrites #oc

[sophie-frm-mars]

I'm not sure how much people are talking about Aaron Bushnell having engaged with online leftist media, but the records show that they were a viewer of a bunch of different twitch streams, including mine, and subscribed to a bunch of patreons, including mine. I'm not going to inflate my importance here, the livestream link was sent directly to Talia Jane and Anark, so those are probably the voices Bushnell felt the most connected to and followed the most directly, like idk if they also subscribed to someone's patreon after watching a video abt Cars 2 or whatever, I'm not trying to examine whether social media drove the self immolation because I think that's disrespectful to the memory of someone who literally died screaming Free Palestine. I don't personally know of any leftist creators who directly advocate political suicide, and I know that we all share in the political understanding that underscored Bushnell's decision.

I've already made a point of telling my patreon server that my politics are about growing into each other and supporting one another and that if anyone asked me if I thought they should do what Bushnell did I would say no absolutely not.

I'm ruminating a bit on the nature and meaning of the protest, because a lot of people are engaging with the image of a man in fatigues on fire, standing proud and declaring "FREE PALESTINE", while I've seen others talking about the fact Bushnell's username on several platforms was LillyAnarKitty, mourning the loss of a potential trans sister, talking in depressive terms about the act of suicide, to which I think the people who are engaging in the more macho interpretation of the protest are saying "no it was cool and masculine, it wasn't suicide in the conventional sense it was about principle!" I think there's room for plenty of both. For the record LillyAnarKitty used he and she pronouns in discord servers.

Andreas Malm's approach to self-sacrifice and self-endangerment is that we as subjects of the imperial core are in a sense, precious. Valuable. We are supposedly what it is all for. The imperialist project must be doing it for the citizens of the imperialist nations because if it isn't, then it has to nakedly admit that it is doing it all for the intense power and wealth consolidation of a tiny tiny number of soulless ghouls. Therefore when we put ourselves in harm's way in a way that says you would have to destroy me to get to the thing I care about, we leverage the implicit value of ourselves for our principles. A planned protest by Palestine Action against the London Stock Exchange was allegedly going to involve locking the actionists' necks onto the mechanism of the door into the LSE making it impossible to enter or leave without probably killing them, for example. I think that Bushnell's self immolation sits on a sort of dissonance, my life is precious and my life is worthless. My life is precious and so you should care about the obvious tragedy that I am enacting and my life is worthless if thousands upon thousands of Palestinians are killed as part of the project that enables the life that I lead.

There is also the way that people have debated the meaning of "complicit in genocide" - Bushnell worked in USAF Intelligence and the US has active troops in Palestine, it's possible that they were already culpable in an unknowable number of deaths without having set foot there.

In one sense it's a little pointless to debate the fine details of the meaning of Bushnell's protest in the same way that it's pointless to pick over any feelings of responsibility that I and I know other people that we know they watched are feeling. When I first saw the video I was struck by the language, by their concise and astute analysis and I knew, without knowing just how closely that they were plugged into the same intellectual and political milieu as us. In that same sense I think that they already described what they did the best that any of us are going to be able to:

“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide.”

“I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

"Free Palestine."

[txttletale]

I'm only saying that because when people made jokes and badgered me about being trans, it made me not wanna even come out :/ like people speculating if I was a girl or not

Hey I'm newly Transfem and have a lot to learn so I wanted to follow up on the previous ask about Aaron and his gender identity. Is it disrespectful to speculate on his gender because it could be misgendering? I don't think transfem is insulting, but I fear that a projection of transfemininity on aaron could be misgendering and disrespecting the identity he chose in death for whatever reasons he chose. Thank you for your thoughts and words.

i mean, i'm sympathetic to your personal account and i've heard many like it! but on the other hand i've equally heard people telling stories about how they felt unable to broach the subject but kept hoping one of their trans friends would say something or give them a push they felt they couldn't take themselves. i've gone back and forth on this kind of thing and i do think ultimately it is something where you cannot make a single proclamation that covers every circumstance. every person is unique and has a unique social circumstance--the only real answer when it comes to asking or joking about someone's gender is that 'it depends on the person and who you are to them and their stated comforts and discomforts and how well you know them and a thousand other things'

however that is all to do with interpersonal interactions -- i don't think any of this applies to bushnell, who is not going to be discouraged from coming out because he martyred himself for palestine and who is not here to read posts and be affected by them because he martyred himself for palestine. i don't think it's "misgendering" -- i don't think you can meaningfully 'misgender' cis people, because what misgendering is when done to a trans person is an implicit threat of transphobic/transmisogynistic violence, an implicit denial of the social reality of trans people's own self-understanding and an implicit voicing of support for the politics of depriving and subjugating trans people into the grave or the closet.

i think that is all aside from the question of whether it's wrong to speculate about bushnell's gender. obviously i don't think anyone should be making super bold definitive claims about his identity, or digging into his private life for information, or talking about his identity in exclusion to talking about the cause at hand. but i haven't seen anyone do that, is the thing. i've just seen a handful of trans women have what i think is a natural and obvious reaction to hearing that someone with the name aaron had a twitch account called lillyanarkitty and then being treated like they're spitting on his grave for doing so, which leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth.

#ask

[lilly-anarkitty]

Thank you for this blog, and for existing. 💖

Absolutely! I’m so glad I can offer a welcoming space for the queer community to collectively discuss, grieve, share, and celebrate Lilly’s life and sacrifice.

I am nonbinary transmasc myself, so when I heard the news I immediately felt like I had lost a sister.

Thank you for seeing Lilly, our beloved sister and comrade. 🏳️‍⚧️❤️

I’d also like to leave you with this inspiring quote from Lilly. (16 March 2023)

“It’s not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.” - Lilly Bushnell

#ask about lilly #ask #ask me anything #lillyanarkitty #lilly bushnell #bushnell #dreams #free palestine #solidarity #comrades #alihartwrites #alihartwrites response #aaron bushnell

[decolonize-the-left]

IM: 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.

[...]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.

#im losing my mind that the twitch name changed the 25th #....my logic at that point would be I Might As Well Live My Truth Somewhere First #god #and i bet on some level they Knew their death would only matter if they were identified as Aaron Bushnell

[catgirlforeskin]

honestly talking about LillyAnarKitty/Lilly Bushnell AS Lilly is a really good metric to see if a TME person you know is normal or if they abandon all stated "progressivism" if it means the incredible horror of associating with a tr*nny, especially since it backs them into a corner where their options are "acknowledge trans women for their role in one of the ten million political movements they have been important figures in" or "admit that they think trans women are incapable of political activism/think that a trans woman being a figure for any social or political belief instantly devalues it."

Yeah it’s kinda wild how vicious the backlash to it has been, even for a site that already loves being vicious to trans women

#asks