HE insisted he had every right to protest. Wrapped up in a parka and a coolie hat, the man had come to Glasgow’s George Square to rally against Scotland’s blocked gender self-ID bill.

But the handmade cardboard placard he held aloft had a different message.

“Defy the Gaystapo,” it read. Some campaigners around him were unhappy. So much so they confronted him.

“Go away, you idiot,” heckled one protestor, according to a video of the incident widely shared on social media.

This was Sunday, at the Let Women Speak rally. The next day the man in the coolie was identified in The Herald’s sister paper, The National. He was Max Dunbar, a former Glasgow treasurer first of the far-right British National Party and then of its now defunct splinter group, Britannica.

Mr Dunbar has tried out other campaigns too. The pro-UK Scotland in Union group and the Glasgow Friends of Israel have both disassociated themselves with him over recent years.

It looks like a fair few gender critical feminists now also have his number. Good.

Hardliners like Mr Dunbar are relatively easy to spot and shun.

The problem is that the latest “fourth” wave of far right activists are smarter, both in appearance and tactics.

And they are absolutely looking to hijack “culture war” issues. Just as they disproportionately highlight the crimes of people of colour or migrants, so they smear all trans people with the crimes of just a few.

The far right is hose-piping our politics with hate: they say trans people are not real; that they are perverts or deviants; or part of a plot of groomers, a foreign-inspired ideology which has captured woke elites.

It is nonsense, reminiscent of America’s extremist child abuse conspiracy theory QAnon. Some analysts have started describing the anti-trans rhetoric of fascist-adjacent activists as “TAnon”.

The far-right’s strategy of focusing on the gender wars is not a secret. But the reality of their entryism raises desperately serious challenges for both sides of what passes for discourse on Scotland’s stalled and blocked gender reform (GRR) bill – and for journalists covering the issue.

Have we even begun to think about what those challenges are and how we should address them? I am not sure we have.

Let us start with what I think is problematic rhetoric from pro-GRR campaigners, especially online.

A few trans rights activists are determined to portray all critics of GRR as being hard right. This is spectacularly unfair.

There are opponents of the stalled legislation or parts of wider equality laws or policies who support trans rights but do not see them as absolute. In other words, they accept that people can mostly live in a gender they were not assigned at birth. But they also believe that there are circumstances where this is impossible. Take the controversy over the convicted double rapist who now identifies as a woman. We are already – rightly – depriving Isla Bryson of her liberty. Is it “fascist” to also restrict their ability to access female-only spaces? Of course not.

There is nothing new about negotiating conflicting rights. Women worried about the integrity of female sport or anxious – often out of real, lived experience – about their safety in toilets or changing rooms are not far-right thugs.

But we are in an oh-so-familiar pattern of online politics: rhetoric is dialled up to the max, opponents are demonised; think of that “decapitate Terfs” placard at a recent pro-GRR protest.

This kind of debate is the the perfect hiding place for extremists: if everybody is a fascist, then nobody is.

One result? We have ended up in the absurd situation of some anti-GRR voices deciding that it is a slur – rather than an empirical observation – to say that far-right activists support their cause.

As her own stance unravelled last month, Nicola Sturgeon provoked outrage when she said some but not all GRR opponents were transphobes and racists.

The First Minister was accused of deflection. But she he was also right: some of those rallying against trans laws do hold chauvinistic views, as a cursory scroll through social media would demonstrate.

Ms Sturgeon’s words were then misrepresented. She had smeared, internet activists said, the entire gender critical movement as bigots. I think this falsification gave a free pass to proper fascists.

The radical, populist and far right have had the trans community in their crosshairs for nearly a century. Shortly after coming to power Hitler’s Nazis raided the world’s first sexology research centre, Berlin’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and turned its library in to a bonfire. This was one of the first great book-burnings that warned us about how Nazism was to end, not least for people who did not conform to then rigid norms of sexuality or gender.

But over recent years tacticians from a broad front of hard right figures have openly discussed how to “divide and conquer” the LGBT by targeting that final T.

Right wing extremists are back at their old game of blaming a tiny minority for society’s ills. And as they do so they are trying to erase transgender people altogether.

Researchers – starting with that Berlin Institute – have come some way towards figuring out why some people do not identify with their birth gender. Scientists say being trans is a real thing, not some fad or ideology.

Yet only last week Donald Trump put an assault on trans people’s very existence at the centre of his campaign to retake the White House.

Rightist leaders across Europe are following suit. Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine routinely demonises trans people as symptoms of decadent foreign thinking.

This week former Kremlin TV host Alex Salmond referred to “some daft imported ideology”.

So how do we keep far right talking points like this out of Scotland?

Some GRR critics – such as the women who called out the “Defy the Gaystapo” guy – are already doing so. But until all sides calm down their trans rhetoric, Scotland will face a threat of radicalisation.