DIY retailer Wickes is facing a boycott campaign after its chief operating officer said shoppers with trans-critical views are ‘bigots’ who ‘are not welcome in our stores anyway’.
According to The Mail Online:
Wickes, one of Britain’s largest suppliers of home improvement products, controversially carried a float at Brighton Pride last year with the slogan ‘No LGB without the T’.
Yesterday, Fraser Longden, the firm’s chief operating officer, took part in an online trans summit hosted by Pink News and sponsored by EY.
Mr Longden said: ‘I don’t think I’m ever going to change some of the bigots minds, I’m never going to win that argument with them, so we were doing [the Pride float] to show support to the community’.
His comment provoked a furious backlash online and Wickes’ share price is currently down five points – 4.25 per cent.
Mr Longden said most of the population is in a ‘sort of slightly ignorant but mostly kind position’.
Responding to threats of a boycott, he added: ‘The other 10 per cent you know, they’re just hot air and they will go and buy a tin of paint in the nearest place to them.
‘That might have been us before, it might not be us afterwards – and equally, if they do come in and buy a tin of paint and behave that way, they’re not welcome in our stores anyway.’
Mr Longden started his career as an assistant store manager at Wilkinsons, before moving on to Staples and then B&Q – where he spent 14 years, rising to become head of HR with a seat on the executive committee.
He joined Wickes in 2014.
Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, who has campaigned for the rights of women and girls in sport, criticised Mr Longden’s comments.
She tweeted: ‘So Wickes thinks anyone in the UK that thinks biological females deserve fair and safe sport is a bigot! That’s an lawful lot of mums, dads, grandparents, brothers and of course females who’ll be taking their bigoted business elsewhere.’
James Esses, an ex-trainee child therapist who was thrown off his university degree for holding gender critical views, said: ‘These offensive, divisive and discriminatory remarks are an absolute outrage.
‘I wonder how the majority of Wickes’ customers would feel, knowing its senior management holds them in such disdain?’
Twitter owner Elon Musk reacted to Mr Esses’ tweet with a simple ‘!!’
Campaigner Gary Powell wrote: ‘Let’s hope that Wickes now gets the Bud Light moment it so richly deserves. This is arrogant, irresponsible, authoritarian, cynical capitalism at its worst.’
Mr Powell’s comment follows news that beer chain Bud Light’s sales had dropped 25.7 per cent after it hired trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney – who had no previous links with the product – in an ad campaign.
