Women’s football is at a critical stage in its evolution. It is breaking records and enjoying increased visibility, viewership, and attendance which has positively influenced participation. In the process, unlike men’s football, it has maintained its political courage, and this has been demonstrated through the various ways footballers have successfully advocated for better pay and working conditions while also tackling larger societal issues.  But the far-right fascist redux that has swept across the Western world jeopardizes the triumphs of women’s football.

In April, the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of woman is based on biological sex assigned at birth. This effectively excludes trans women from being legally recognized as women. Less than a month later, the English Football Association (FA) announced that as of June 1, it would prohibit the participation of trans women in the sport.

The ruling and subsequent decision by the federation is not only exclusionary but sets a horrible precedent for women’s football. It fosters a hostile environment not only for trans women but for cisgender women as well. It also transforms women’s football into a political battleground for other equally insidious far-right agendas.

After a long history of being relegated to the shadows of society, the past two decades saw mainstream conversations of how trans people could have access to public life in meaningful ways. To be clear, the discourse was not always productive, but it was happening and it was shaping policy.

However, the prominence of far-right-wing politics have dramatically reshaped the tone and dialogue completely. As explained by historian Quinn Slobodian in his new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, conservative thinkers deemed socialist movements concerned with civil rights, feminism, affirmative action, environmentalism, or anything that upholds democratic rights as the secret victors in the ideological war against communism. Red threats were replaced with green ones. To counter it, right-wing thought obsessively circles around race science, phrenology, nativism, and biological essentialism.

This framework is most nakedly expressed by economist Murray Rothbard, a central figure of American right-wing libertarian thought, who declared, “Biology stands like a rock in the face of egalitarian fantasies.” The implication is clear: Inequality is natural and not a product of structural failures. If some people are inherently less worthy, then neither the state nor institutions bear responsibility for addressing their needs, and therefore these needs shouldn’t be part of budget or policy consideration.

Slobodian underscores the fact that the far-right is exercising hateful outbursts not just based on ignorance but rather through a carefully crafted and calculated ideological project, made to appear economically rational and therefore can be easily slipped into the mainstream.

That is why, despite accounting for only a small percentage of the population, transgender people become a major flashpoint. Writer and feminist Moira Donegan notes on her podcast In Bed with the Right, the tolerance of transphobia becomes a testing ground of what other regressive policies the far-right can push without resistance.

This permits an expansion of violence beyond the initial subjects of fixation. It places non-white women—particularly Black women—in precarity as they are ostracized from normative womanhood not just socially but structurally, in the very grammar of Western thought. As theorized by Hortense Spillers in her foundational essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” in slavery and its afterlife, the category of “woman” is not simply policed; it is already racialized and fundamentally exclusive. As she puts it, when it comes to Black people, “males become ‘ungendered’ and females are ‘gendered male.’”

This is not a new crisis; it’s a continuation. Across sporting codes, gender policing has disproportionately affected Black women, from Caster Semenya’s high-profile exclusion from athletics to the cases of Christine Mboma, Beatrice Masilingi, Francine Niyonsaba, and Margaret Wambui, amongst many others. Or consider how Serena Williams frequently highlights that she underwent more drug tests than any of her top American peers.

Whether it’s the Olympics, World Athletics, Confederation of Africa (CAF), FA, or FIFA, these governing bodies remain opaque about their gender-verification processes, and their flawed, testosterone-centric logic reinforces a violent colonial legacy.

Far-right fear mongering, and who it singles out, is deeply troubling especially given that women’s football has already proven itself to be ill-equipped to confront the rampant racism within its own chambers. Racism manifests both between players and from fans, while European beauty and desirability politics dictate who receives visibility; often irrespective of performance.

This imbalance is glaringly visible in Europe’s top competitions. The recent Women’s Champions League final between Barcelona Femeni and Arsenal featured starting lineups made up entirely of white players. This is more evocative of apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow America than a global sport in 2025. This was no isolated occurrence; such racial homogeneity remains disturbingly common, both on and off the field, yet it is largely unaddressed, revealing a normalization of dysfunction.  A sport that blatantly pedestals white femininity is one that is vulnerable to exploitation and ideological incursions from the far right.

Zambian striker Barbra Banda, despite her extraordinary skill and track record on the pitch, has been reduced to a site of political agenda in a violent collision between race and gender. In 2022, Banda was ruled ineligible for the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, and it was speculated that it was on the basis that she had elevated testosterone levels. Through this debacle, not only did CAF and the Zambian Federation fail to protect her, they served her up to the dogs and effectively greenlit the public vilification of one of the continent’s brightest stars.

The aftershocks have been brutal. Earlier this year, a fan was removed from the stands at an Orlando Pride game for targeting Banda with slurs. In March, a cluster of protesters stood outside Pride Park (located in Derby, England) before the Women’s League Cup final, not to watch the game, but to demand the exclusion of a player who doesn’t even play in the UK.

When she was named the BBC Women’s Footballer of the Year at the end of 2024, the response was an avalanche of transphobic and racist bile emanating not only from online trolls but from public figures like J. K. Rowling, former Olympian Sharron Davies, and Oliver Brown, chief sports writer at The Telegraph. Brown is particularly pernicious as he blurred the line between journalism, opinion, and orchestrated harassment. What’s more damning is the silence: Several prominent white women in football media failed to push back against Brown publicly after he published an incendiary piece on Banda.

But this is the playbook. Once the far-right and its institutional allies have finished targeting trans athletes and non-white women, they don’t dust their hands and consider the mission complete. Gender becomes a realm to exercise control. And cisgender white women aren’t exempt from harm, especially those that do not conform to ideals of cisheteronormative white femininity.

Just last year, a white marathon runner with alopecia was verbally attacked in an airport women’s restroom. Former United States Women’s National Team captain Megan Rapinoe has been on the receiving end of Donald Trump’s trolling numerous times across the years, and that hostility is no coincidence given her unapologetic queerness. Or rewind to a decade ago, where in the lead-up to the 2015 Women’s World Cup, FIFA required gender-verification tests from the Germany women’s national team. A week later, England’s squad underwent the same ordeal. This came on the heels of similar tests imposed on players from Korea, Iran, and Papua New Guinea. And yet FIFA has no known public record of ever imposing the same requirements on male players.

Finally, the trans alarmist panic sucks up a lot of air in the room, conveniently distracting from the FA and UK government’s long-standing failure to meaningfully grow women’s football. Their decisions make one thing clear: These institutions don’t care about women’s football or women in general, despite their claims. If they did, their primary concern would be the sport’s most persistent threat, which is misogyny. Because it’s misogyny that lays the foundation for the start-stop cycles, the chronic underfunding, the unchecked sexual, physical, and verbal abuse enacted on players, or the gross neglect that endangers the vitality of the game.

It should not be lost on anyone that while laws and bans are being pushed, clubs like Barnsley FC and Blackburn Rovers have faced severe financial insecurity with the former completely  folding while the latter being forced to withdraw from the Women’s Championship and re-enter at least two tiers below because ownership refuses to meet the league’s basic funding requirements. That is three clubs in two years and it’s business as usual. No grand interventions from the FA, just promises to hopefully find alternatives for the affected players and staff.

This is the same federation that was directly responsible for the banishment of women from football in favor of men. That set the women’s game back by half a century. With a legacy like that, you’d think there would be a sense of shame and a commitment to course correction. But over 100 years later, the tradition of unbridled contempt persists. And it’s women who keep paying the ultimate cost.