The grotesque hollowing out of womanhood

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.

So this is not a ‘trans’ case. This is not like some bloke called Dave deciding to become Davina and demanding access to the women’s loo. It’s not as egregious as 6”4 Will Thomas renaming himself Lia Thomas and using his massive man hands to outswim women who’d trained their whole lives for sporting glory. It’s not as nuts – no pun intended – as when Caitlyn Jenner was heralded Glamour magazine’s ‘Woman of the Year’ or when that banking executive Philip Bunce, who occasionally dons a dress and calls himself ‘Pippa’, was named one of the Top 100 Women Executives by the Financial Times.

But – and it’s a big but – while the circumstances of Banda’s case might be different from such trans lunacy, the consequences are the same. Which is that women are forced to compete against people who have an unfair advantage. Women are made to go up against individuals who have loads of testosterone, whether gifted to them by male puberty or a disorder of some sort. In both situations – in both the brutish conquering of women’s sports by men who now pose as women and the enforcement of lax rules by sports bodies that permit gender-ambivalent people to compete in the women’s category – the result is sexism. The result is the denial of a level playing field to women who just want to excel on the pitch, on the field, in the pool.

For the BBC to name someone who was once barred from a women’s tournament as its woman footballer of the year is out of order. Banda was shortlisted by a panel of experts and then won most votes from BBC readers. Seriously, they couldn’t go for one of the thousands of female footballers who have never failed a female eligibility test? They couldn’t pick one of the women with normal T levels who kicked back against social expectations to soar in the Beautiful Game? The charitable read on the BBC’s award is that it is trolling us. The truth, of course, is that the Beeb is so far down the rabbit hole of post-reason that it didn’t bat an eyelid when its experts selected Banda. Clearly these woke Westerners know better than African sports officials about who should get to play women’s football and win women’s prizes.

Women are fuming at the Beeb. The heroic former Olympian Sharron Davies says it is ‘actively encouraging the destruction and loss of opportunities for female athletes in sport’. JK Rowling, in her inimitable style, wondered if the BBC gave the award to Banda because it is ‘more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women’s faces’. Doesn’t Ms Rowling know it’s fascism to speak up for women? Out magazine reported last week that HBO is continuing with its revival of the Harry Potter franchise despite its creator’s ‘well-documented downward spiral into far-right transphobia’. Maybe that’s why the BBC was happy to decorate Banda – it didn’t want to be seen doing anything as fascistic as celebrating everyday women.

‘Women’ – what does that even mean? Many in the elites don’t know. The very question ‘What is a woman?’ gets them erming and spluttering. We have now reached the situation where the Supreme Court is being called upon to say, once and for all, what a woman is. In a case brought by the non-wheeshting women of For Women Scotland, the argument will be made that only biological women – ie, women – should be included in the definition of a woman under the Equality Act 2010. Which would mean that blokes in possession of a gender-recognition certificate (GRC) that says they’re a ‘woman’ would not be considered women. Because they’re not women. This is kindergarten levels of knowledge.

The Scottish government is contesting the case and arguing that a ‘person issued with a full GRC in the acquired gender of female’ should be considered a woman. Acquired – that word says it all. Womanhood here is turned from a thing of substance into a flimsy garment anyone can pull on. It is turned from a biological, social and relational experience into garb, costume, pantomime. Womanhood is a commodity now, to be ‘acquired’ as one might acquire a car or a pair of shoes.

The consequences of this grotesque hollowing out of women’s experience, this transformation of womanhood from a real, rooted thing into mere merchandise, are as clear as they are chilling. There is no space, no right, no sport and no prize that can be for women only when any Tom, Dick or Harry – literally – can ‘acquire’ womanhood. The treatment of womanhood as an acquisition, something you can shop for and own, represents a shattering end to women’s rights. Where once women were treated as ‘chattel’, owned by their husbands, now womanhood is treated as an ‘acquirement’, to be owned by any bloke who fancies it. Ignore the PC lingo – the Scottish government is fighting for the restoration of misogyny.

Strikingly, the only time the cultural elites will confidently say ‘That’s a woman!’ is when they’re talking about a man. So Caitlyn Jenner, Paris Lees and Shon Faye are most definitely women, and you’re a bigot if you say otherwise, but when uppity Rosie Duffield says only women have cervixes they go crazy. And now they will say Barbra Banda is a woman and that’s an end to it. Maybe Banda is female. None of us knows the gender problem here. But what about the thousands of known women who deserve fair sport and awards? If it’s far right to ask ‘What about women?’, I guess I’m far right now.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy