Today’s “completely manufactured anti-trans bullshit” takes us to Dundee, where an anti-trans activist has taken great exception to a Hobbycraft shop assistant’s “no TERFs, no Tories” badge to create predictable media outrage. It’s yet another example of DARVO – the abuser’s creed of “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender”, where members of a movement that demands the oppression and elimination of others claim victimhood – and the fact it’s so predictable is why I’m more annoyed at the badge wearer than the bigot.

The last thing you should be doing when you’re under attack is give ammunition to the people attacking you.

I don’t think people shouldn’t wear political badges. My everyday bag and most of my guitar straps are covered in them. But what’s absolutely fine when you’re on a stage, off duty, or if you run your own business – your bar, your bookshop, your coffee shop – becomes something different if you’re an employee of someone else’s business. Especially a larger business with a fairly high profile and no doubt a detailed uniform policy. I can’t think of any retailer with a uniform policy that allows staff to wear badges telling specific kinds of customers to fuck off.

There’s hypocrisy here, of course. There always is with the genital-obsessed weirdo brigade, who like their Christian Right pals want the freedom to abuse others in public and in the workplace without consequences. But it doesn’t matter, because this is not about anything other than the genital-obsessed weirdos looking for easy PR wins. And that’s exactly what they’ve been given here.

This is going to play out like every other such case. We’ll get crybully op-eds slagging off Hobbycraft for being “woke”; we’ll get Hobbycraft issuing a grovelling apology; we’ll have more articles implying that trans people shouldn’t be hired by anyone; we’ll have increasingly emboldened genital-obsessed weirdos going to various customer-facing businesses looking for trans people to abuse. So things for trans people become just that little bit worse than they already were.