JK Rowling sets up ‘women’s fund’

JK Rowling has set up a new organisation, the JK Rowling Women’s Fund, to help support ‘gender-critical’ legal cases. 

The Harry Potter author, 59, who has become notorious for her “gender-critical” views on trans people, announced the creation of a private funding organisation, dubbed the “JK Rowling Women’s Fund” (JKRWF) over the weekend (24 May). 

Its website explains that the fund was created to financially support individuals, organisations, or groups that are “fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights,” including in workplaces, public life, and in “protected female spaces.” 

The funding will come from Rowling’s own pocket. Her net worth, as of 2021, is reported to be at least £820 million ($1.1 billion). 

Individuals or organisations the fund is designed to support include individuals who are “facing tribunals because of their expressed beliefs,” are being “forced to comply with unreasonable inclusion policies regarding single-sex spaces,” have issued legal challenges to legislation which, it says, “takes away the freedoms or protections women are entitled,” or who otherwise cannot afford to “bring actions to court to defend themselves.” 

The JK Rowling Women’s Fund website, which emphasises that the organisation is not a charity, meaning it cannot “accept donations,” urges individuals or groups who feel they are relevant to the fund’s goals to answer an eligibility checklist to apply for funding. 

The establishment of the JK Rowling Women’s Fund comes after Rowling confirmed she had donated to For Women Scotland (FWS), the ‘gender-critical’ group that helped to fund a legal case on the 2010 Equality Act’s definition of a woman and sex, resulting in a Supreme Court ruling that the definitions relate to “biological women” and “biological sex.”

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