Nice thread! My first thought was, "who among us hasn't been there at some point?" But then I realized I live in Texas, and maybe there are places that this is uncommon.
Just days out of the closet, I was having breakfast with a new butch friend at a popular busy diner in Austin which is pretty gay-friendly. As we were eating, I noticed a guy giving us the hate stare. He just stared, looking entirely pissed, twisted around in his seat and away from his food.
I was the person facing him, and I was kinda shocked. I didn't mention it to my friend at the time, because I didn't want to hurt his feelings or alarm him. Nothing bad came of it, but when I got home, I had this kind of freak out, wondering if this was the rest of my life now and wondering if I was strong enough to deal with it.
The next time I saw my friend, I told him about it. He laughed, shrugged it off, said it happened all the time, and that I should have told him about it.
After that, ill-advised or not, we made a kind of game of it. If one of us spotted a hate-starer, we would both turn and stare back and act like we were watching a tv show and basically mock and joke about them until they averted their eyes. That's probably not advisable, but I lost my fear of just the stare. And I began to feel more protective than anything - of any butch, not just that one friend.
I have found butches are usually more skilled at handling hate of that sort that I am (through direct experience), and that its best to learn their particular philosophy on how to handle things and follow their lead.
Not that I'm great at that, because my natural inclination is often to protect, to push back, to stand between, to call out, to physically intervene if necessary. But it's likely the best call in non-threatening cases of bigotry to just show respect and love to the person you are with and make bigots look like jerks all on their own.
I do have a friend who is male-identified, female-assigned-at-birth who was severely beaten a few years ago by some drunk guys, and the only thing that stopped the beating was his femme date's jumping on top of him and covering him with her body. She may have saved his life.
He told his story recently on a podcast. I've known him for over a decade and didn't know he went through this - it's a good podcast though and he goes on to talk about how he himself works to counteract bullies in his own unique way:
http://static1.squarespace.com/stati...?download=true
I think there are times when our femininity and willingness to protect/intervene is very helpful, but especially in less threatening situations, it's best not to escalate. Escalation may be more likely to bring harm to the butch than to you.