Man Set On Fire For Wearing a Skirt

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Yeah, I really need to stop being surprised by how evil and stupid some people are...

So, 18-year-old Luke (aka Sasha) Fleischman was apparently set on fire by a 16-year-old male because he was wearing a skirt:

Fleischman was apparently asleep on the bus, heading home to East Oakland, when the suspect set fire to a skirt the victim was wearing, his mother said. The victim, a senior at Maybeck High School in Berkeley, does not identify as male or female but rather as nonbinary gender, an umbrella term covering any gender identity that does not fit within the gender binary.

"My son considers himself agender," Debbie Fleischman said. "He likes to wear a skirt. It's his statement. That's how he feels comfortable dressing."

So, basically, he didn't look like some 16-year-old jackass thought he should look...so said jackass set him on fire.

Look, I do understand the power of tradition. It has a hard grip on people's minds. The natural, incidental behavioral differences between males and females have been exaggerated by the culture and turned into categories of dress and behavior so ubiquitous and in some respects involable that they almost seem natural. For all my contempt for this sort of thing, even I find it rather off-putting when males dress in the way normally associated with females.

However...imagine what your mental life has to be like to think that it's ok to basically try to burn someone to death for not looking like you expect them to look. That's just flat-out psychotic.