Harry Potter author JK Rowling has accused Labor leader Sir Keir Starmer of “abandoning women” concerned about transgender rights.
The writer, who said she had voted for the Labor 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 Labor 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. Labor abandoned them.”
Adding she had previously been a member of the party and a donor – but not recently – Ms Rowling said she wanted “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 Labor 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 Labor leader had offered the candidate literally no support over abuse and threats she had received – some of which Rowling claimed were from within the Labor 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.”