Wow.

#1, it's a f$cking bookstore, not the damn IRS, for crissakes. I half-expect to see kilts, dreads, dashikis, flip flops, grass skirts, multiple piercings, black berets, Che Guevara t-shirts, and good lord only knows what else, in a book store...including the employees...who I generally identify by the name tag, not the khakis and polo shirt. Everybody and their 3rd cousin wears khakis and a polo shirt, to abhor that stamp of commonality is an obvious sign of independent thought and a stylistic breath of fresh air, to say the least. Is this a specialty bookstore of some sort? Perhaps, a religiously conservative bookstore (no offense intended to religious bookstores, just trying to understand if there's a pre-existing mindset or bias)? Bookstores are places of learning...storehouses of knowledge...not fonts of idiocy. 'Irish Day'? Really? Sounds to me like you were professionally dressed, and conservatively kilted.

#2, the new guy is hassling the veteran model employee. There's simply something wrong with that situation.

#3, if I'd been in the same store, kilted, and heard the guy call you a 'transy' for being in a kilt, I'd have been in his f&cking face. Them's fighting words, one jackass calling one guy in a kilt a 'transy' is calling all of us 'transies' (I assume that is the correct pluralization of an incorrectly jargonized pejorative term), I don't look kindly on it, and frankly I dare the guy to let the 1B Scots Guards know he thinks they're a bunch of 'transies'.

#4...Riverkilt's suggestion, Rocky's way.

You outdressed the guy, and you went over his head. BFD. In the modern professional world, we all work as a team, and we are generally not our brothers' keepers. Is his job description to hassle the other employees, or to organize and delegate?...in other words, is he a foreman, or a manager?

Does this bookstore have a harassment policy? (they should, IIRC it is required.)

I might also suggest you schedule a meeting with the boss and the new guy, wearing the same clothing, carrying your ring-on-the-backhand apology letter. That way the boss knows what happened, you can call out transy-boy in a professional setting (as opposed to getting your buddies together and dragging him out back in the alley like he deserves, which is frowned upon these days), and since you'll be dressed the part, the FNG can't claim you were a 'transy' swishing around in a skirt.

I personally wouldn't wear a kilt to work...not really appropriate in my setting, and I'd be sitting on my pleats all day (yep, I am a "mushroom"). But a bookstore? Like a library, church, campus, coffee shop, etc...that's fair game. I cannot think of a single bookstore, even the Christian ones, where I would think of a kilted gentleman as being out of place.

'Transies' indeed. He crossed the line, I give a rat's backside what branch he was in, or for how long.

-Sean