#im losing my mind that the twitch name changed the 25th

[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