Aaron or LillyAnarKitty? The Complicated Identity of Aaron Bushnell
An interview with a transgender writer and researcher who has looked closely into the online life of a U. S. serviceperson who self-immolated to protest the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
screenshot from Contrapoints’ “The Left”
by Evan Urquhart
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.
screenshot from reddit, provided by Isabelle Moreton
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.