Barbra Banda’s BBC award is proof women are being trolled

Barbra Banda
Barbra Banda has just been anointed BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year - Getty Images/Fiona Goodall

It has reached the stage where women are perfectly entitled to feel they are being trolled. The failure of Barbra Banda to meet sex eligibility rules is not in question: indeed, Andrew Kamanga, president of the Zambian football association, confirmed in 2022 the striker had not met the “gender verification criteria” and so could not compete in the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations. He gave this statement to the BBC. And so it is doubly extraordinary to discover that in 2024, Banda has just been anointed BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year.

Within women’s football, there is fierce resistance to any scrutiny of Banda’s credentials to be honoured in this fashion. To criticise is to be bombarded with the predictable responses: Do you not realise how many goals she has scored? Or how hard she trains? Or how quickly she has risen in the game? I do not doubt either Banda’s work ethic or success, given how the 24-year-old’s 22 goals propelled Orlando Pride to a first National Women’s Soccer League title only last Sunday. But I also know that by far the greater priority in analysing the merit of Banda’s award is to establish whether the immutable advantage of male biology is being carried into female sport.

Barbra Banda celebrates Orlando Pride winning a first National Women's Soccer League title
Banda (right) scored 22 goals to propel Orlando Pride to a first National Women’s Soccer League title - USA Today/Jay Biggerstaff

Banda’s supporters are upset by the backlash. But the emotion in this debate needs to be set aside. Women do not enter the sporting arena with their feelings, or with their “assigned-at-birth” status, or with the “F” in their passports, but with their bodies. And there are enough legitimate questions in the Banda case for red lights to start flashing. Why was Banda withdrawn as a pre-emptive measure from the Africa Cup of Nations, where all players would have had to undergo sex testing? Why was the same action taken with two other members of the Zambian squad, Racheal Kundananji and Racheal Nachula? Why have these players refused – as confirmed by their national federation – to take testosterone suppressants, and with what consequences?

The Confederation of African Football is one of the few major sporting bodies in recent years to have mandated sex testing. Fifa and the International Olympic Committee, by contrast, adopt the fundamentally wrong-headed stance that you are whatever your legal documents say you are. So does the NWSL. Its policy states: “People designated female at birth, regardless of their gender identity or gender expression, are eligible to compete.” That is why Banda has been able to tear it up in the United States for Orlando, and at the World Cup for Zambia, and at two successive Olympic Games – and yet been deemed ineligible for Africa’s major continental showpiece. One organisation takes biological sex seriously, while the rest apparently could not care less.

Barbra Banda represents Zambia at the Paris 2024 Olympics
Banda (right) represented Zambia at the Paris 2024 Olympics - Reuters/Raquel Cunha

The irony is that a controversy smouldering for two years could be resolved in roughly 20 seconds. That is the length of time it would take to undertake the simple cheek swab to establish beyond doubt whether Banda is genetically XX or XY. This is a vital determination when you study the Caster Semenya precedent. For a decade the South African athlete, the world and Olympic champion over 800 metres, was widely depicted, without a hint of curiosity, as female. “Wow, look at Caster now!” screamed the cover of South Africa’s You magazine in 2009. “We turn SA’s glamour girl into a power girl – and she loves it!”

Caster Semenya on the front cover of South Africa's You magazine in 2009
Caster Semenya on the front cover of South Africa’s You magazine in 2009 - You magazine

But then, 10 years later, came the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruling that changed everything: Semenya, it said, had a difference of sexual development known as 46 XY 5-alpha reductase deficiency. Note the two crucial letters, XY: in other words, biologically male. The same situation has unfolded, in nearly every detail, with Imane Khelif. First the International Boxing Association bans Khelif from the World Championships on the basis of test results declaring that the athlete’s DNA is “that of a male, consisting of XY chromosomes”. Then the IOC allows Khelif to batter four consecutive opponents en route to Olympic gold, and before you know it the boxer is on the cover of Vogue Arabia.

With Banda, as with Khelif and Semenya, there is a stubborn refusal by the apologists to engage with the crux of the matter: namely, that if you are female, as you say you are, take a test. That is the one measure that would put all the uncertainty to rest. Without it, the wagon-circling around Banda is pure posturing. “Barbra Banda is a woman”: that was the opening line of an article about the case in 2022. The evidence? That Banda was registered and raised as one. But so was Semenya. I know this, because unlike so many of the bleeding hearts now rallying to Banda’s defence to advertise their worthiness, I travelled 15 years ago to Semenya’s home village near the Zimbabwe border, where her mother Dorcus declared: “My child is a girl.” And then a decade later, we discovered that the opposite was true.

This is why sex testing is so fundamental to protect fair sport for women. This is why so many female athletes are in favour of the return of quick, non-invasive swabs to remove the ambiguity. The intellectual substance in acclaiming Banda’s womanhood is rooted in nothing more than one person’s self-declared identity. But we cannot know that Banda is definitively a woman – for the simple reason that the player has been kept away from the one test that would prove it.