Back in 2000 JK Rowling was asked why she styled herself "JK" in print rather than Joanne. It wasn't her idea, she replied, her publishers "were wary of me being a woman". Later she revealed that she was also "a little bit paranoid" about using her female name in case her threatening ex-husband tracked her down. Yet post-Harry Potter, when Rowling had the chance to choose another pseudonym for her adult thrillers, she again rejected the chance to present as female and went for the sturdily masculine "Robert Galbraith" instead. Rowling's pseudonym history has been, in the language of today's politics, "gender fluid", as an exercise in increasing her palatability to men and boys, and to hide from them.

"You know, one day," Rowling said of her pen names in 2000, "I'd like to experience life as a woman." In her other life, as what her supporters call one of the modern world's greatest and bravest philanthropists, and her detractors term a dangerous transphobe, that day has finally come.

This week it was revealed — not by Rowling, who kept her part in it private — that she had donated hundreds of thousands of pounds in 2021 to rescue female lawyers from Afghanistan as their lives were endangered by the Taliban, a feminist version of what Lord Alton of Liverpool called "a Schindler's List moment".