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I forget whether I already posted this, but it occurred to me recently that it may be more accurate to say that J.K. Rowling, and perhaps TERFs in general, are sexist than to say that they're transphobic. Rowling supports the right of people to dress however they like and receive whatever medical intervention they desire. She uses preferred pronouns in polite company. But she wants spaces to exist that discriminate based on biological sex, without taking someone's gender identity or expression into account. The term for sex-based discrimination is sexism.
The openly intentional result of what you're calling her sexism is that biological men are excluded from using the services of the rape crisis centre that she funds despite those men calling themselves women, ie trans, and so is plainly Trans Exclusionary. More accurate would be to say that she doesn't believe a biological man can be a woman, which is to say that she is a trans denialist. She doesn't hate transwomen (the transphobia charge), she simply doesn't recognise "transwoman" as a meaningful category.
Calling it sexism is similarly trans denialist as it casts the question solely in terms of objective biological sex, which trans ideology takes great efforts to escape from by introducing the subjective frame of gender.
One major reason radical feminists and other trans denialists deny transgenderism is because it requires not only that women identify with and express their gender but that doing so is what makes them women, and by extension not doing so diminishes their womanhood. A woman who becomes a radical feminist because she's been treated like shit by men, often in part for not being very feminine, while also being vulnerable to all the disadvantages that women suffer will rightly bristle at the implication that she's less of a woman, particularly when it's coming from men.
I do think the limits of this debate have been badly drawn.
It is completely possible to believe that "transwomen are women" and also believe that some spaces should be for cis women and trans men only. Similarly, it is completely possible to believe that "transwomen aren't women" and also believe that no spaces should be segregated based on sex, but only on legal "gender."
In this sense, I think "trans exclusionary" is a better term than "trans denialist." I agree that both terms are good summaries of JKR's position, but I don't think there's actually any necessary connection between the two of them.
I think our culture, and how different sides choose to debate, is much more clever than you seem to think. Generally if lines seem poorly drawn it's because one side or the other thinks they can eke out an advantage by framing things that way. In this case, "transwomen are women" only matters as a statement because it inherently includes other things like "and thus we should treat them like women." Ceding the implications--compromising and saying that trans women are "women" but that the important category is "female"--is for those who want transgenderism to be accepted to entirely admit defeat.
This is just pretty common throughout the culture war on many different fronts.
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