The former tennis star said she found it “pretty pathetic” to discover he had blocked her on X, formerly Twitter, meaning she is unable to view his profile or interact with him on the platform.
Rowling replied: “I’d say it’s unbelievable for a man in his position to say these things at all, let alone block you, and yet, given the shameful state of the BBC’s reporting on the women’s rights/gender issue, it’s utterly predictable.”
She later added in a conversation about Mr Kay-Jelski: “In my experience, media genderists are amazingly fragile when it comes to challenges. They’re used to a very comfortable echo chamber.”
Mr Kay-Jelski was appointed to replace Barbara Slater, who retired after 14 years as the BBC’s director of sport.
She was paid an annual salary of between £230,000 and £234,999, while details of her successor’s remuneration have not yet been published.
Mr Kay-Jelski has also previously been a sports editor of the Daily Mail and was most recently editor-in-chief of The Athletic, a US-based sports website which is owned by the New York Times and in 2019 expanded into the UK, mainly covering English football.
‘Differences in strength, stamina and physique’
In his 2019 article, he suggested trans people seeking to compete in sports in their chosen gender should be allowed to “quietly go about their lives” and told readers they had “gone through hell compared to you”.
He highlighted evidence which found there was “little to no difference” in performance between transgender women and their female peers.
This theory has been widely debunked by the latest evidence.
Sport England published guidance in 2021 which stated there are “retained differences in strength, stamina and physique” between women and men who identify as women, regardless of whether they had suppressed their testosterone levels.