It was a bright Friday morning, my partner and I were driving to work. When she stopped at a yellow light. The guy behind her was upset that he couldn’t run a red light and get to work a millisecond earlier than he would now get to work. He was yelling and screaming and shooting us the bird the entire red light (about 2 minutes). Our way of dealing with crazy drivers like that is to smile and wave, and say “have a nice day”. This usually pisses them off more than joining in on the excessive unwarranted angry behavior.
So the light turns green, and we drive threw turning left. He follows us, mere inches from our rear bumper. My Partner slams on the breaks and he has to swerve to avoid hitting our truck (which has a gay rainbow sticker on the back). The first chance he gets he pulls up next to us, and starts screaming at my partner, at this point he can’t see me. He proceeds to tell her “I am going to fucking kill you” “I will cut your fucking car in half”. I lean forward and he instantly recognizes some word usage that he could throw my way. He screams “Fucking dyke bitch” and speed off.
When I get called a dyke simply because of how I look (like a dyke) I see nothing but red. He cut us off at the next light and the red bull can that I had in my hand (only half full) was tossed at his car and landed on the hood with a lob throw and splashed all over his car (a perfect throw I can attribute to playing softball since I was 2 years old). At this point he stops at a green light and gets out of his car, and I promptly followed by getting out of the truck. He says “ oh you’re going to fucking throw a can at my car” I said “Yes I am, you want to call me a fucking dyke bitch that is what you fucking get” He replies with “I can see I was right” to which I become even more enraged and I say, “Yeah your fucking right, and this dyke bitch is going to kick your ass” as I took 3 big steps towards his car. My partner laid on the horn and didn’t stop to draw attention to the situation. He promptly got into his car and speed threw the now red light to get away from a situation that if the police had arrived would have been considered a Hate Crime via verbal assault……
Hate crimes (also known as bias-motivated crimes) occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group, usually defined by racial group, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation.
"Hate crime" generally refers to criminal acts which are seen to have been motivated by hatred of one or more of the listed conditions. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, or offensive graffiti or letters.
Is this incident a hate crime? Would he have been arrested if the police showed up? In my eyes it is, seeing the rainbow flag on the back of our truck enraged him. But My partner doesn’t look like a lesbian, so the slurs did not come out of his mouth until he laid eyes on me. And it escaladed even faster once he did see me. Could I have been charged with a crime? Probably? But one thing is for sure (hopefully) he will think twice next time before he calls someone a dyke in such a way again.
I always feel bad when this sort of instances are over. I think “I shouldn’t have been so aggressive, I should have handled things differently” and then my partner reminds me that without outbursts, and defiance against such hateful behavior people who insist on using such words like dyke as a weapon will not learn that it is a weapon, and there are repercussions for such behavior, weather it being charged with a hate crime or having a Dyke Bitch almost loose her mind on you. I can only hope that for every occurrences I have that it will prevent 1,000 more from happening.
erspectives. You should definitely watch this if you get a chance it was well well well worth it.
