In the essay, published on Wednesday (21 October), Rowling said she was “shocked and disgusted” that “large numbers of women” had “spent the last few years vilifying members of their own sex for fighting to retain their hard-won rights and single-sex spaces”.

Doubling down on her position, she acknowledged that her views hadn’t changed, adding, “but the landscape certainly has, and my own involvement in the issue has become practical as well as theoretical, so I thought it was time for an update.”

“Men as a group pose a risk to women and girls, as a group,” she wrote, adding: “Of course, all men aren’t rapists, voyeurs or flashers, but enough are to make safeguarding necessary.”

Rowling argued that this is why women and girls want single-sex facilities, insisting it is “not because we hate trans people, not because we want them dead, not because we want them somehow eradicated from existence, but because women and girls have specific issues and needs that men do not, even if they’re calling themselves…