JK Rowling accuses Sir Keir of 'abandoning women' ahead of General Election

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has accused Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer of "abandoning women" concerned about transgender rights.

The writer, who said she had voted for the Labour Party all her life, said she felt she would struggle to vote for Mr Starmer in the July General Election.

Writing in the Times, she said: “As long as Labour remains dismissive and often offensive towards women fighting to retain the rights their foremothers thought were won for all time, I’ll struggle to support them.

“The women who wouldn’t wheesht (be quiet) didn’t leave Labour. Labour abandoned them.”

Adding she had previously been a member of the party and a donor - but not recently - Ms Rowling said she wants "to want to vote Labour".

In 2021, Mr Starmer said that comments by MP Rosie Duffield that only women have a cervix as “something that shouldn’t be said and were not right”.

On Thursday night, Mr Starmer said he agreed with one of his predecessors Sir Tony Blair, saying “biologically, a woman is with a vagina and a man is with a penis”.

Ms Duffield, who is currently standing for re-election for Labour in Canterbury, has said she is not attending hustings in the constituency due to security concerns - and that she has spent £2,000 on bodyguards while on the campaign trail.

In her piece in the Times, Ms Rowling claimed the Labour leader had offered the candidate literally no support over abuse and threats she had received - some of which Rowling claimed were from within the Labour Party itself.

“The impression given by Starmer at Thursday’s debate was that there had been something unkind, something toxic, something hard line, in Rosie’s words, even though almost identical words had sounded perfectly reasonable when spoken by Tony Blair.”

She continued: “For left-leaning women like us, this isn’t, and never has been, about trans people enjoying the rights of every other citizen, and being free to present and identify however they wish.

“This is about the right of women and girls to assert their boundaries. It’s about freedom of speech and observable truth.

“It’s about waiting, with dwindling hope, for the left to wake up to the fact that its lazy embrace of a quasi-religious ideology is having calamitous consequences.”

Asked about her criticisms while on the campaign trail, Sir Keir told reporters in south London: "I'm really proud of the long history of the Labour Party in making real progress on women's rights, passing landmark legislation that has changed millions of lives.

"Now that battle is never over and we need to make further progress, which we will hope to do if we earn the trust and confidence of the voters at the General Election.

"As we do so, I'm also determined that one of the changes that we will bring about if we win the election is a reset of politics, to make sure that as we make progress, we do it in a context that brings people together, and all dialogue, all debate, is always done with respect for the views of everybody involved in those progress and in that discussion."