JK Rowling enjoys boozy lunch with women’s rights campaigners fuelling tension with trans equality groups

has fuelled tensions with trans equality groups after enjoying a ‘raucous’ lunch with women’s rights campaigners. 

The author proudly hosted a lunch at The River Cafe in Hammersmith on Monday afternoon. 

She was joined by a large group of guests, including Maya Forstater, co-founder of Sex Matters which supports the Respect My Sex slogan, Professor Kathleen Stock who resigned from the University of Sussex amid a transphobia row, MP Rosie Duffield, and Get The L Out activist Lianne Timmermann. 

Helen Joyce, who penned Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, was also in attendance. 

Rowling, who has come under fire over her shared a series of photos on Instagram from the lunch and revealed she had a blast. 

‘There was a lunch and I’m not saying I’ve only just sobered up enough to type this tweet but at the same time, I’m not not saying that,’ she tweeted. 

‘It was me getting them drunk, to be honest. I do remember being authoritatively told I’m only 66% straight. 

‘Watch this space for further developments.’ 

Forstater also tweeted a photo of herself being hugged by the author, and said: ‘. @jk_rowling has been such a source of strength to me and to so many women standing up for women’s rights.’ 

It’s said that the purpose of the meeting was to ‘eat, drink and be extremely merry’ and that they bonded over their experiences of receiving online abuse for their beliefs. 

Journalist Suzanne Moore defended the get-together and tweeted the morning after the lunch before: ‘Some women had some pasta and wine. World still turns x.’ 

She also penned a , where she described the lunch as ‘glorious’. 

Moore also wrote: ‘As you can see from the pictures, if radical feminists did hen dos, this is how they’d look. 

‘It was fabulous to meet Angela Wild and Liane Timmerman, out and proud butch lesbians. So please don’t talk to me about gender non-conformity. All the prissy little puritans have no idea how physically brave such women are.

‘All of us have been made to feel as if we are pariahs simply because we challenge the idea that womanhood is a feeling in a man’s head.’ 

The lunch was originally scheduled to take place in Christmas but was postponed due to the rising infection rates of Covid. 

Rowling’s lunch came the day after thousands of trans equality groups descended on Downing Street to protest for the

The controversy surrounding Rowling began in 2020, when she criticised an article that used the term ‘people who menstruate’ instead of women. 

She later explained her earlier comments, saying: ‘At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.’ 

The author added that she respects ‘every trans person’s rights to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them’.

Metro.co.uk has reached out to JK Rowling’s reps who declined to comment, and the Get The L Out campaign group.