“Few men,” said Robert F. Kennedy in his 1966 anti-apartheid “Ripple of Hope” speech to students in South Africa, “are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society.

“Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence, yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change.”

Of course, if Kennedy were to make that same speech today, he’d be promptly canceled by the woke brigade for only talking about “men” in relation to moral courage, and therefore, in their intransigently narrow, censorious eyes, identifying himself as a sexist pig.

But one of the best modern-day examples of what he was talking about is in fact a woman: Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

And the extraordinary thing about her moral courage is that it involves a simple statement of irrefutable biological fact, which is that women are adult human females.

Three years ago, Rowling publicly supported an English woman named Maya Forstater who lost her job at a UK think tank after posting tweets arguing that “sex is immutable and not to be conflated with gender identity.”

Forstater asserted that “a man’s internal feeling that he is a woman has no basis in material reality” and compared the issue to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white American woman who preposterously claimed to be black.

Rowling agreed, tweeting: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

She added the hashtag #IStandWithMaya.

This truism — an appeal tribunal later agreed with Forstater’s right to her beliefs — prompted a firestorm of rage to rain down on Rowling’s head.

She was branded a “TERF” — trans-exclusionary radical feminist — and horribly abused, vilified and even threatened with physical violence, including rape and death.

Shamefully, some of the young stars of Harry Potter movies like Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe, who’ve made themselves very rich on the back of Rowling’s work, turned on her too.

But she refused to back down.

In fact, she doubled down.

In June 2020, a defiant Rowling responded to a news headline that referred to “People who menstruate” by tweeting: “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud.”

It was funny and entirely justified.

Women used to be called “women” before trans activists made it a verbal hate crime punishable by instant cancellation.

Rowling clarified: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.”

She was right and respectful.

There was nothing “transphobic” about anything she said, but that didn’t stop the abuse and threats from intensifying.

Rowling responded by writing a long article in which she revealed she was a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault and stated, “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman … then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside,” while also stating that most trans people were vulnerable and deserved protection.

But all this searingly honest piece did was unleash a fresh torrent of vitriol.

I wonder how those who led the vicious campaign to cancel JK Rowling are feeling today.

After her article was published, a serial killer in the US named Harvey Marcelin killed and decapitated a woman in Brooklyn.

He’d earlier been accused of the attempted rape of an 8-year-old girl, and then raping and killing a girlfriend.

On his release from prison, he killed a homeless sex worker and was jailed again.

But he was released, again, 33 years later, and because he now identified as a transgender woman, he was shockingly placed in a women’s homeless shelter in accordance with New York City Department of Social Services policy.

And then, predictably, he killed again.

In his trial, Marcelin was described as an “83-year-old woman” and so the case was reported as an 83-year-old woman gruesomely murdering another woman.

It wasn’t.

It was a man pretending to be a woman who murdered a woman.

This week in the UK, a supposed “transgender woman” named Isla Bryson was jailed for raping two women.

In fact, he was a male rapist named Adam Graham who suddenly decided to self-identify as female at his trial to get himself put in a Scottish women’s prison among future potential female targets, like a fox being locked up in a hen coop.

Graham was finally moved back to a male prison last month, but only after an intense media furor forced Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon into making a humiliating U-turn, and then resigning.

Then there’s the scandal of “gender dysphoria” clinics, now so alarmingly prevalent across America and Europe, where thousands of children are irreversibly drugged and mutilated each year at the altar of transgender activism.

In London, the notorious Tavistock Clinic has been forced to close after a report concluded that 97% of all the young patients there suffered from myriad other conditions like autism and depression.

And don’t even get me started on the ongoing war on women’s sports, where transgender women athletes with bigger, stronger, faster, biologically male bodies are destroying the concept of a fair playing field.

Only now are world sporting authorities belatedly waking up to how damaging this is to the integrity of women’s athletics.

The silence from vociferous JK-haters on all these scandals is damning.

I have no reason to speak up in support of Rowling.

I’ve never read a word of Harry Potter or watched any of the movies — Hogwarts and goblins just aren’t my cultural cup of tea.

And we had a furious public spat sparked by my friendship with Donald Trump — whom she detests — during which she called me a “fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologizing celebrity toady” and once tweeted: “Yes, watching Piers Morgan being told to f–k off on live TV is *exactly* as satisfying as I’d always imagined.”

But ironically, it’s her statement of facts about biology that compelled me to defend her.

And I truly admire her guts in refusing to bow to the woke mob that has tried so hard to silence her and ruin her life.

Now, finally, she is being vindicated, not just by her warning of the dangers of limitless gender self-identification coming horribly true, but in the commercial world too.

When the video game Hogwarts Legacy — based on her franchise — was recently released, trans activists called for a boycott to stop Rowling from “profiting from her anti-trans views.”

Instead, it’s become one of the fastest-selling video games in history, raking in nearly $1 billion from 12 million units sold in just two weeks.

Even the New York Times, for years the woke bible, has come out fighting for her — publishing an op-ed two weeks ago headlined “In Defense of JK Rowling.”

Predictably, this ignited a storm of protest from liberal celebrities and its own woke-skewed staffers, but, to its credit, the Times hasn’t backed down — yet.

“I never set out to upset anyone,” Rowling said in a new seven-part podcast titled “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling,” which has also rocketed straight to the top of the charts. “However, I was not uncomfortable with getting off my pedestal.”

No, she wasn’t.

But most people in her position would have been unwilling, as Bobby Kennedy said, “to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society.”

And the beneficiaries of Rowling’s heroic moral courage are the world’s women she set out to defend.