(caught this story while going through backlogged issues of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s feminist newswire)

Nashville bus driver Willie Houston was holding his fiance’s purse when a man began harassing him with anti-gay slurs, making references to the purse. The man pulled a gun on Houston and shot him to death as Houston put his hands in the air and pleaded that he just wanted to go home.

A friend of mine once worked in a children’s clothing store. A woman came in one day and bought a bonnet for her baby son. Later that day, the woman came in again with her husband next to her. She was crying. He stared at her and demanded that she say what we agreed to say. She put the bonnet back on the counter, and haltingly said, I’m returning this bonnet so my son won’t grow up to be a faggot.

I’ve heard a lot of people wonder what kind of psychological issues it takes for someone to want to live, either in whole or in part, in a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. But to me, the real question is, what kind of sociological and political and psychological issues does it take for a society in which a man will murder over a purse, intimidate and humiliate his wife over a piece of clothing that’s off-brand for little boys?