Oliver Brown points out that women are entitled to think we’re 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.

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.

That’s because the rest are more spiritual. What sex you are is in the mind, not the body.

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.

You can raise a dog as a giraffe, if you like, but that dog won’t be a giraffe. “Raised as” is just hand-waving, the way talk of the soul is just hand-waving.

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.

Whatever it takes to cheat women.