Warning: the following article deals with topics of suicide and genocide. You have been warned.
Alright folks, let’s unpack the facts on this one. Aaron Bushnell is the name of the 25-year-old U.S. Air Force member who quite pointedly set himself on fire outside of the United States’ Israeli embassy in protest of the U.S.’s complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocidal acts in Palestine.
What we can conclude irrefutably from this is that Bushnell wanted to call this unthinkable humanitarian tragedy to the forefront of the Western conscience. What we can also assume with similar confidence is that he had no interest in glorifying suicide, being called a hero, or giving weight to any other narratives that distract from the actual crisis at hand.
One of those narratives is whether or not Bushnell was a closeted trans woman.
Was Aaron Bushnell trans?
By all appearances, he wasn’t; maybe it’s fun for you to look at his Twitch account name of LillyAnarKitty and theorize about the possibility, but there’s no evidence that Bushnell ever explicitly expressed a desire to be referred to with feminine pronouns in life or in death, and to be complicit in this back-and-forth is to be complicit in distracting from Israel’s heinous operations in Gaza.
If you’re really concerned with honoring Bushnell appropriately, you’ll pay attention to the situation that he gave his life to bring attention to. The fact of the matter is that Bushnell never asked to be questioned this way, and if he was, in fact, a closeted trans woman, he would have made sure to let us know how to address him in death.
Signed, a trans woman who’s sick of having her demographic be used as ammunition for an empty-calorie debate.