Not even JK Rowling can take glory away from Barbra Banda

The Orlando Pride and Zambia goalscorer has been rightly crowned BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year, writes Kat Brown – much to the dismay of the Harry Potter author and her toxic friends

Gah! You escape one toxic billionaire on social media only for another one to pop up. JK Rowling – the author who divides her time between writing as a man under the guise of Robert Galbraith and being vocal about anyone who doesn’t fit her definition of “woman” – is no more the spokesperson for all women than Elon Musk is an arbiter of useful ways to spend your time and money. Yet you wouldn’t know that if you listened to her.

According to Rowling, who I’ve largely managed to escape by joining Bluesky, the fast-growing social media platform where the block function works and undue prominence is not given to anger (I am a liberal from a long line of Conservatives; I don’t need to “experience different views” online with people who can’t even fill out their bios truthfully when I can do so face-to-face at literally any family gathering); women should be up in arms about the choice of Zambia’s Barbra Banda winning the BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year award. Why? Because, Rowling seems to suggest, she’s not quite feminine enough.

This kind of slur is, sadly, par for the course for the Harry Potter author and her brigade of shouty gender-criticals. But that doesn’t make it any less offensive – or dangerous. Unfortunately, the GC brigade has plenty of male acolytes who find anything non-traditional to be quite icky – and so take delight in writing supportive pieces about their latest insane declarations about bathrooms, or women’s sport, largely because it means they don’t have to write anything self-examining about domestic violence, murder or rape among their gender.

Gender criticals charmingly refer to trans-inclusive women as “Handmaidens”, so perhaps we should refer to these anti-trans male acolytes as “Andy-maidens”? And, true to form, these Andy-maidens have been gleefully reporting Rowling’s fury over Zambian footballer and philanthropist Banda’s new title.

Banda, like so many female athletes at the top of their game – and specifically, Black female athletes – before her, has been subject to allegations about her physique. These allegations have never been substantiated and she has passed every requirement for her to compete in the 2023 World Cup and the last two Olympic Games.

Barbra Banda celebrates with the NWSL championship and MVP trophies (USA TODAY Sports via Reuters Con)

Let’s not repeat exactly what Rowling said on X (Twitter), nor Sharron Davies, the former Gladiator now fond of fierce anti-trans soundbites. X is – was? – a popular platform, but it isn’t the real world, no matter how many angry posts make the headlines. The real world is Banda, her fans and the work she does to broaden the field of football to women and girls in need.

The real world is also the four Kenyan runners killed by jealous men in the last three years. In addition, it is Laken Riley, who was killed in February while out for a run, despite ticking off every box a woman has to tick off for her safety. This week, her killer was sentenced to life imprisonment. Killing women runners is so common it has its own Wikipedia page. This is a serious and actual threat to women in sport – and to their lives – yet Rowling and co only seem to care about the idea of trans women (never trans men!) as some monster under the bed when, as women know only too well that the real monster doesn’t need to hide.

Rowling and co might rail at the BBC, but, unfortunately for them: this isn’t even about the BBC. The award was voted for by the BBC’s readers from a shortlist drawn up by experts in women’s football – Banda’s peers, journalists, former professionals, and coaches. In this instance, “the BBC” is the general public who, time and again, polling has shown are widely supportive of the trans community and fairly bemused about what the Harry Potter woman is going on about.

That would all be well and good if Barbra Banda were trans, but she isn’t – and, to be clear, even if she were trans or intersex, she shouldn’t be dissected or discriminated against. Instead, Banda is yet another sportswoman to be judged as “unfeminine”.

In 1928, when women were first allowed to compete in Olympic athletics, the Japanese runner Kinue Hitomi was reportedly taken aside and examined to confirm that she was a woman after she won a silver medal. In the 1980s, when Martina Navratilova (now also anti-trans) was mocked for not looking “typically” female.

So too with Serena Williams, Brittney Griner, and the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who was subject to horrendous attacks from Rowling, Musk and others during the Paris Olympics this summer who refused to “believe” that she was female, preferring to believe a supposed testosterone test by the International Boxing Association, an organisation so corrupt that it was no longer allowed to organise Olympic boxing.

And this is the thing about people talking online. There is no discussion to be had because people like this have no interest in facts or objective truth. They will clutch to whatever sustains their worldview, no matter how discredited a source they get their facts from. They are the modern incarnation of your early 2000s relative who forwarded every chain email they got about poisonous perfume being used at petrol stations.

Like Imane Khelif – who is currently gracing the cover of Vogue Arabia, by the way – I hope that Barbra Banda is far, far away from X and its bot-filled rage and living her best life – real life – knowing that she is the Goat of women’s football.

There will always be people wanting to tear down sportswomen. But as Rowling has found, there will always be people wanting to raise them up, too.