The grotesque hollowing out of womanhood
It is unfair, sexist and outright crazy to treat womanhood as an identity anyone can ‘acquire’
First they came for women’s bathrooms. Then their rape shelters. Then their sports. Now they’re coming for their prizes. The BBC has announced the winner of its Women’s Footballer of the Year Award and you won’t believe who it is. Actually you will. It’s someone who once failed to meet gender-eligibility rules for the women’s game. It’s someone who was excluded from a major tournament after failing ‘gender-verification tests’. It’s someone with such elevated levels of testosterone that they were told to take hormone suppressants if they wanted to kick a ball again. Yes, the BBC’s female footballer of 2024 is someone whose femaleness has been called into question by some experts. They’re taking the piss now, aren’t they?
It’s Barbra Banda of Zambia. Banda is a dazzling footballer. At both the Paris 2024 and Tokyo 2020 Olympics, Banda, captain of the Zambian team, tore up the pitch. But as the Australian sports broadcaster Lucy Zelic said, Banda’s presence in Paris was the ‘elephant in the room’. For there are other tournaments, with stricter rules than those that hold at the Olympics, in which Banda could not play due to a huge, dangling question mark over their gender. Just two years before Paris, Banda was excluded from the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations after failing to meet ‘the criteria put forward in the gender verification tests laid down by the Confederation of African Football’. So Banda was seen as possibly ‘not female enough’ to compete in Africa’s top clash but was given the green light to tackle and barge women in Paris.
Banda’s is a strange case. In 2022, the New York Times called it ‘The sad, confusing case of Barbra Banda’. Little is publicly known about Banda’s condition, but it seems possible that some kind of disorder of sexual development (DSD) is at play. Strikingly, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) test that Banda failed to meet does not only search for heightened testosterone among ‘women footballers’ – which Banda has – but for other gender-related quirks, too. However, the CAF will not confirm what the other criteria are. From what we know, it seems possible that Banda is not dissimilar to Imane Khelif, the Algerian boxer who was allowed to pound women in the ring in Paris despite being thought by some experts to have XY chromosomes – that is, to be fundamentally male.
