Neil Mockford/FilmMagic; Dustin Markland/Getty Images

The Harry Potter author said that Barbra Banda winning BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year is spitting in the face of women.

Barbra Banda is undeniably one of the greatest athletes alive right now, regardless of gender.

The 24-year-old striker from Zambia is an Olympics, World Cup, and NWSL star, and was just named BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year award. But because of how she looks, J.K. Rowling and other TERFs are attacking and misgendering her online.

To be clear, Banda is a cis woman who was born a baby girl, raised as a girl, and has lived as a girl and a woman for all 24 years of her life. She is not transgender.

This year, Banda scored four goals for Zambia at the Olympics, including a hat trick against Australia, and scored 17 goals for the Orlando Pride of the NWSL, leading them to win the NWSL championship, scoring four more goals in the playoffs.

Still, Rowling decided she needed to tweet out hate aimed at the soccer star.

“Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women’s faces,” the Harry Potter author said in a retweet of an article about Banda winning the award.

In the tweet, it seems Rowling is implying that Banda is not a woman and therefore it is an insult to “real women” that she was given the award.

Once again, Banda is a cis woman who has had to endure a lifetime of being told that girls shouldn’t play sports to become one of the greatest athletes in the world.

All this transphobia arises from an incident in 2022 when Zambia withdrew Banda from its team for the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations after a doctor refused to sign off on her sex verification.

While some reports say it was because of high levels of testosterone, that is untrue, and the real reason was “evaluation of her physical conditions,” according to her agent.

“Nothing, no existing regulations that we are aware of prevents Barbra’s participation,” he added.

The Confederation of African Football communications director, Lux September, said that “there is no such decision from the CAF medical committee” when asked if the organization was responsible for Banda’s removal from the team. However, the president of Zambia’s Football Association (FAZ) said, “Whatever happened was purely a CAF requirement.”

Now the FAZ says it is working on improving its gender testing, which it considered to be “a lot more stringent [than FIFA regulations] and they put too much stress on testosterone levels.”

She was then ruled eligible by FIFA, the top soccer organization in the world, for the 2023 Women’s World Cup, with FIFA saying, “The World Cup participants assure that they carry out their own investigations and that they clearly show that their players are female.”

The NWSL, in which Banda plays and was Finals MVP this year, does not conduct mandatory gender testing, and in its policies states that “people designated female at birth [like Banda was] regardless of their gender identity or gender expression, are eligible to compete in the NWSL, subject to the guidelines herein and other eligibility criteria of the NWSL.”

These criteria include being able to demonstrate testosterone levels within “typical limits of women athletes.” Now Meghann Burke, the executive director of the NWSL Players Association has defended Banda in an X post:

“The lowest form of discourse is personal insult cloaked with racism and lies, on X no less. Barbra Banda is a proud member of @nwsl_players. She is the best of us. Just so we’re clear, @jk_rowling: you come for her, you come for all of us. Me first. Let’s go.”

Banda is the second prominent African cis woman athlete attacked by Rowling and others online this year.

During the Paris Olympics, cis female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif was attacked similarly, with Rowling and others, like Elon Musk, claiming she was a man or a trans woman, when in fact, she is a cis woman.

She overcame the hate and won a gold medal, and filed an online harassment complaint against Rowling, Musk, and others who attacked her online.

This kind of transvestigating is often aimed at Black women athletes like Caster Semenya, Serena Williams, and Brittney Griner.

Now Barbra Banda can unfortunately be added to that list.