The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund

And some other personal news

May 26, 2025

By far, the biggest news in the land of gender woo from the past week is the establishment of the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, a “legal fighting fund for women protecting their sex-based rights.” According to its website:

The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund (JKRWF) offers legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces. It provides women with the means and confidence to bring to justice cases that make legal precedents, force policy change, and make positive contributions to women’s lives in the future.

You have to love it.

This set off a somewhat hilarious online dispute between Rowling herself and a man named Jolyon Maugham, founder of something called the Good Law Project, which “holds power to account and fights for a fairer, greener, future.” What it really does is fight in court to ensure that people are permitted to lie about their sex. It once supported an effort to get the LGB Alliance stripped of its charitable status on the ground that by fighting for the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people, the LGB Alliance is “transphobic.”

In 2019, Maugham announced that he had clubbed a fox to death while wearing a kimono and nursing a hangover. According to The Guardian:

The prominent remain-supporting lawyer Jolyon Maugham QC has announced on Twitter that he clubbed a fox to death on Boxing Day morning, while wearing his wife’s satin kimono and nursing a hangover.

“Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat,” the barrister tweeted just after 8am. “How’s your Boxing Day going?”

I have never clubbed a fox to death, wearing a kimono or otherwise. I’ve never even worn a kimono (though, thinking about it now, I might like to). If I had clubbed a fox to death, I’m fairly confident I would not be tweeting about it.

Anyway, Maugham got very angry with Rowling for setting up a fund to help women and said a lot of angry (and possibly defamatory) things about her on Bluesky. She noted that her lawyers were following his social media accounts, to which he responded, “Bring it on Joanne. You're a bully and a hypocrite, as well as a bigot, and you don't scare me.”

(I think she does, in fact, scare him, and rightfully so.)

Her response to that is too long to screenshot and post here, but it’s worth a read. It begins, “Jolyon, calm down. You're getting testerical.”

You can read more about the dispute at The Times, if you’d like. Fans of J.K. Rowling are finding the entire episode to be quite amusing. A wealthy champion of women’s sex-based rights sets up a legal fund to help women fighting legal battles to protect their careers, livelihoods, and freedom, and a fox-murdering, kimono-wearing, champion of sex-denialism prepares to fight her in court. You can’t make this stuff up.

Speaking for myself, I have been up to other things for the past couple of days. Read on if you’d like to learn more about what.

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