Curiously, the critics of Barbra Banda’s BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year win were quieter at her inclusion in the FIFPRO Women’s World XI, voted for by 7,000 fellow players.

It was, on the surface, further recognition of Banda’s extraordinary 2024. She was the NWSL’s MVP, whose 17 goals, including one in the Championship final, secured Orlando Pride’s first title. Her four goals at the Paris Olympics, including a first-half hat-trick against Australia, took her to 10 goals across two Games to make her the leading African scorer in Olympic history. All the usual boxes, then, checked in time for awards season. So far, so normal.

More deeply, this sent out another message. For those who want to see Banda chased out of women’s football, being selected in the World XI by so many fellow players was a sign of how few in the game are remotely engaged in their cause. It made it all the more surprising, then, that the NWSL as a league remained silent as Banda became a lightning rod for hate.

As the fixation on eligibility in women’s sports has increased, it has prompted intense reactions to situations people may not fully understand. In Banda’s case, these related to reports from July 2022 that she was ineligible to compete in the 2022 Africa Cup of Nations due to high testosterone levels. The Confederation of African Football later denied any kind of gender verification took place, although a representative from the Zambia Football Association insisted it was the continental body that ruled her out. Banda has continued to play in domestic and international tournaments, as she had previously, without issue.

As with Imane Khelif during the Olympics (she retained the support of the International Olympic Committee following a claim by the International Boxing Association that she had failed a gender verification test during a previous competition), social media users can mistakenly believe they have an intimate knowledge of the biological make-up of an athlete, even without access to any test results. The complicated links between biology, sport and gender categories are regularly assumed to be simple, sometimes with the end result being online attacks on athletes who are thought to be ineligible, regardless of the evidence.

Take the Harry Potter author JK Rowling, now an influential voice in the gender debate, for example, who on November 26 posted about Banda winning the BBC’s Women’s Footballer of the Year award on X to her 14.2million followers: “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women’s faces.”

Banda, though, is not transgender. She is perfectly entitled to win an award voted for by fans in the sport in which she competes. However, the level of outrage from individuals and media outlets who take little day-to-day interest in the women’s game shows the significant disconnect between the realities of women’s football and those who exist outside of it.

While the focus on what it means to be a woman in sport has intensified over the past two decades, questions around how to police the gender binary within sport have existed for almost a century. There were calls for physical examinations to determine gender at the 1936 Olympics, with so-called “nude parades” instituted for track and field events in the 1950s and 1960s to verify the gender of women competing.

Over time, there has been a move away from gynaecological tests that involved examining athletes’ genitalia to chromosomal testing and hormone testing. There has not been a linear process towards one foolproof way of testing gender, mainly because there is no simple answer as to what it means to be a woman. Testosterone levels have come under focus in recent years, partially due to the attention South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya has received.

In her book, The Race to be Myself, Semenya describes how, at 18 years old and at the 2009 World Athletics Championships, she was forced to strip naked, put her legs in stirrups and have a sonogram wand inserted inside her. Her experience and subsequent fight to be able to compete led to new rules around testosterone levels in track and field. In 2011, World Athletics (formally the IAAF) set a testosterone limit of 10nmol/L in order to participate in the women’s category. This was subsequently reduced to 5nmol/L in 2018, for certain events like the 400m and 800m, and reduced again to 2.5nmol/L across all events in 2023.

Those initial World Athletics rules in 2011 and 2018 would have permitted transgender women to compete, provided they underwent the required hormone replacement therapy to lower their testosterone levels.

However, in a separate but related set of regulations, sports began to ban the participation of any woman who had gone through male puberty. In 2018, British Triathlon rules permitted transgender participation subject to hormone levels. By 2022, it had banned any athlete not assigned female at birth from competing in the women’s category. Other sports’ governing bodies followed suit, including World Aquatics in 2022, World Athletics in 2023 and the World Chess Federation in 2023.

Two different scenarios are often conflated: transgender women who wish to participate in sport, and cisgender women (women who were assigned female at birth and identify as women) who have sex characteristics distinct from binary notions of what it means to be a man or a woman. This can be chromosomal irregularities or hormonal imbalances, as well as instances like ambiguous genitalia. An estimated 1.7 per cent of people are thought to have intersex characteristics of some kind.

In comparison to most sports, football has bucked the trend by keeping gender regulations relatively simple. Brought in in 2011, the FIFA policy document says: “For FIFA men’s competitions, only men are eligible to play. For FIFA women’s competitions, only women are eligible to play.”

The way it is worded allows for anyone who identifies as a woman or a man, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender, to participate in the appropriate gender category. This is not the same as self-identification (picking the gender category you feel most comfortable with), but instead requires you to have some form of documentation that recognises you as the gender you say you are. National governing bodies are entitled to use their own rules for the domestic game and at grassroots level.

That does not mean no gender verification has taken place within the sport, though.

In her book, I Didn’t Even Say Half of It, Sweden centre-back Nilla Fischer revealed that at the 2011 Women’s World Cup, all the Swedish squad were forced to show their genitalia to the team doctors to prove they were women. Fischer described the process as “sick and humiliating”. This was to comply with FIFA regulations, which are still in place today, whereby teams sign a declaration that the players in a World Cup squad are of an “appropriate gender”. Countries participating are expected to verify this themselves. On publication of Fischer’s book in 2023, FIFA said it had “taken note” of Fischer’s comments.

Women of colour — Banda, Semenya, Khelif and others, such as India sprinter Dutee Chand, who took World Athletics to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) over its regulations — have found themselves particular targets.

“The response to Banda not only laid out heinous transphobia, but articulated the ever-present way in which Black women have their bodies policed, often for being too muscular or masculine,” says Liz Ward, an equity, diversity and inclusion consultant working across football.

Football, then, has its own history in this arena but has held back from implementing changes.

One sports governing body after another has changed its policies in recent years to exclude trans athletes.

In August 2022, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) announced it would no longer allow transgender women to play in female contact competitions in England (World Rugby’s guidelines also ban transgender women from elite sport). British Rowing previously allowed transgender women to participate in female events subject to testosterone levels, but has since created an ‘open’ category available to transgender and non-binary rowers in competition events after banning transgender women from its competitions. British Cycling has banned transgender women in the female category.

UK Athletics’ position is that it is “fair” that athletes who have gone through male puberty should be excluded from the female category. Its ban on transgender athletes at international level is in line with World Athletics’ guidance.

The English Football Association’s (FA) rules state that “it is the FA’s firm view that gender identity should not be a barrier to participation in football which is governed by the FA”. The stance of the FA, which governs the professional, amateur and grassroots game in England, is that it respects the gender identity of transgender women who want to play where that can be done without sacrificing fair and safe competition.

Its policy for transgender women is based on a testosterone suppression model. Players are required to undergo hormone therapy or a gonadectomy to ensure “results in blood testosterone within natal female range”. Hormone treatment must be reviewed annually and players evaluated on a case-by-case basis by the FA’s equality manager and relevant medical representatives. The player would not be allowed to compete in their affirmed gender if the governing body believed that their registration would result in issues of safety or fair play; if no hormone therapy or gonadectomy has been undertaken, the FA will consider the application based on safety and fair competition.

“We understand that this issue is complex and constantly evolving and our transgender policy for English football will remain under review to ensure it can balance safety, fairness and inclusion across the full breadth of our game,” an FA spokesperson told .

The FA’s policy has enabled a small population of transgender women — around 20 this season — to compete in the grassroots game and the organisation remains confident in its approach given negative feedback at that level has been minimal.

There are currently no high-profile transgender women playing elite football in England and the bigger question is whether guidance would change were that to be the case. Sporting bodies in cycling and cricket both moved to restrict the participation of transgender women only when some competed at the elite level.

“Within the game, people have been largely willing to listen, particularly in the women’s game,” says Natalie Washington, campaign lead for Football v Transphobia. “They understand the benefits of being involved in organised sports teams and want to make sure that other people are able to access it.”

Washington is open in her identity as a transgender woman and throughout her decade playing in women’s leagues has often been met with “curiosity” but not an air of challenge. “People were quite comfortable generally,” Washington said. “But there’s been more hostility off the pitch, certainly on social media. People who are not playing are asking questions or are a little bit uncomfortable — people outside of the game. People come to watch games and they say things. In the past two to three years, I’ve seen more of that.

“Some years ago, we might have talked about trying to make things easier, but at the moment it’s about trying to make sure we keep what we’ve got.”

The participation of trans players in football has become an increasingly fraught topic in recent years. At the end of 2023, a group of 48 members of parliament and 27 peers signed a letter urging the FA to set an “unambiguous” single-sex policy like other sporting bodies such as the RFU, arguing the existing rules “undermine fairness” in the women’s game.

Two protests over the FA’s transgender inclusion policy took place in the space of two weeks at the end of 2024, the first before England men’s Nations League match against the Republic of Ireland in November at Wembley and the second at England women’s friendly against Switzerland in December at Bramall Lane.

The protests, organised by a group called Twelve O Five, were in response to the FA’s decision to ban a 17-year-old girl on grounds of discrimination after she was found by a disciplinary panel to have repeatedly asked her opponent, a transgender woman, “Are you a man?”. The Equality Act 2010 protects people from discrimination based on gender reassignment. Twelve O Five demonstrators waved banners with the messages: “No men in women’s sport” and “Save women’s sport”.

It is impossible to separate women’s football from its history of protest, stretching back to when it was banned by the FA in 1921. That history has shaped its fan communities. In England, values of LGBTQ+ inclusion and safety are baked into the women’s game, notwithstanding its issues around racial diversity, with fans conscious of building accepting spaces and cultures.

“The gender-critical types have always struggled to gain much traction in any communities where there’s a long-standing history of activism and people have had to fight for their space,” says Selina Travis of the fan collective Baller FC, a group of event producers, DJs, musicians and members of the queer community.

“The success of women’s football is built on the backs of queer women and girls who didn’t necessarily adhere to the norms of what a woman should be. We’ve had to overcome so much to get where we are and we’re not about to let things slide backwards by having these people, who have never made any contribution to the game, tell us who shouldn’t be watching or playing.

“We can form our own opinions on who we feel safe with and who the game is for. We don’t need to be told that by other people with their own unrelated agendas.”

Women’s football has proved supportive of alternative gender identities. Canadian midfielder Quinn, who has recently left Seattle Reign, became the first transgender person to win an Olympic medal in 2021. Quinn came out as non-binary in 2020 to an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the women’s football community. Quinn’s they/them pronouns, though, are not always used in commentary, revealing some of the disconnect between the day-to-day cultural realities within women’s football communities and the media.

Similar to the UK, women’s football in the U.S. is built on foundations laid by queer communities pursuing safe spaces. The NWSL currently stipulates in rules issued in 2021 that “people designated female at birth, regardless of their gender identity or gender expression, are eligible to compete in the NWSL, subject to eligibility criteria”. Eligibility for athletes who transition from male to female is based on a testosterone suppression level.

In the U.S, as LGBTQ+ rights became part of mainstream public discourse from 2010 due to ongoing political discussions, women’s football became widely recognised as a sanctuary for queer communities. This perception was facilitated by players such as Megan Rapinoe. In 2019, after the USWNT won a second successive World Cup and fourth overall, Rapinoe said: “You can’t win a championship without gays on your team. It’s never been done before, ever. That’s science, right there.”

Rapinoe’s comments made headlines around the globe. While criticism arose from particular corners of the (mostly) non-sporting world, what she was saying was anything but inflammatory for those in the game. Largely, the USWNT have continued to be a vociferous proponent of LGBTQ+ rights, with the national team working to become a global vehicle for change.

This reputation goes some way to explaining why the transphobic posts liked by USWNT midfielder Korbin Albert in 2023 received such widespread rebuke from fanbases around the world. Former USWNT captain Alex Morgan and current captain Lindsey Horan held a press conference before the 2024 SheBelieves Cup to address Albert’s anti-LGBTQ+ posts on social media.

“We’ve worked extremely hard to uphold the integrity of this national team through all of the generations and we are extremely, extremely sad that this standard was not upheld,” Horan said to open the press conference. “Our fans and our supporters feel like this is a team that they can rally behind and it’s so important that they feel and continue to feel undeniably heard and seen.”

Morgan added: “We stand by maintaining a safe and respectful space, especially as allies and members of the LGBTQ+ community, and this platform has given us an opportunity to highlight causes that matter to us, something we never take for granted.”

The prospect of such sentiments existing within a space built on inclusion, with many of its best-known and most influential players belonging to the LGBTQ+ community, was not only anathema but viewed as threatening to the ecosystem. Albert later apologised for her posts.

Those who have spoken in Banda’s defence include USWNT manager Emma Hayes, who said that it was “ridiculous” Banda “has to endure questions like this”. When it comes to trans players, in 2022, England captain Leah Williamson spoke in favour of inclusion. “Once upon a time, it was foreign for a girl to play football and I know that trans people experience (discrimination) in their day-to-day life, let alone when they want to step into something that they really love,” she told The Independent.

“It’s about normalising what should be normalised.”

Among many followers of women’s football, there is resentment that those outside of the sport, such as Rowling, are so quick to speak over those in it. Publicly, Rowling has expressed little interest in women’s football beyond Banda’s BBC victory. She is far from the only public figure to have stepped into the game just to voice a view, on one issue, that runs contrary to those held by many players and followers of the game. Much of the gender debate — particularly on social media — is waged on false premises, including that there are scores of mediocre male athletes transitioning into the women’s game for a competitive edge.

“On those who commentate on this and only this, I’d like to know where their support has been for the women in football who face misogyny in the workplace,” Ward says, “or the grassroots women’s teams being kicked off their pitches for men’s games, or the period poverty that affects working-class teenage girls. It feels very illuminating that their so-called interest in women’s sport starts and ends with policing women’s bodies.”

These debates take place within a broader cultural battleground over transgender rights, from bathroom access to puberty blockers. Sport has become a useful wedge issue in the political space because the initial premise that people are presented with seems so agreeable: ‘Men should not compete in women’s sports’. It then becomes an access point to further cultural issues. The rise of Riley Gaines from a college swimmer who once came joint-fifth with transgender woman Lia Thomas to political activist who has appeared on stage with Donald Trump highlights this exact pipeline.

“We need to be ready and prepared that, as the game grows, outsiders will seek to turn the game into a battleground and drag us into their culture wars,” continues Travis. “We can’t let that happen.”

The bottom line is that all of this makes for an extraordinarily sensitive discussion in which the key players — often powerful public figures — speculate with too much ease about players’ bodies and biology. For a discussion so delicate, it often takes place without respect, let alone all of the facts.

Ultimately, this is about what it is to be a woman — but as Semenya has often been at pains to point out, who gets to decide that?

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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