Get back in your box women, you're a right wing animal if you think men should be kept out of sport. "Why have rightwingers made even parkrun a battleground for trans people?"

I was surprised to see the letters in response to the article online, 3 saying not fair to when, all with names provided, 1 calling everyone mean with no name attached.....

I have sent a complaint too. I am genuinely sad as I have been a loyal Guardian reader for years & years but this is the last straw and I have cancelled my subscription. I have been reading the Guardian all these years because I thought it offered a reasonably objective version of the news - of course with a more left-wing bias - but still without the populist nonsense of the right wing papers.
It is really sad that journalist integrity has been sacrificed for identity politics propaganda - isn’t the Guardian now just the left wing’s equivalent of the Daily Mail to some extent?

Maybe if the Guardian is going to serve up inflammatory crap for eyeballs as didthosefeet is suggesting, they should skip the sanctimony.

The people who are interested in well researched journalism and the people who like a misogynist conspiracy theory?

Newspaper output is rigorously controlled by the editor(s) and the backbench (senior journalists on the paper/website etc). Journalists employed by a particular publication can't just go rogue and decide to write contentious things themselves, and then just publish them without anyone else's input, as a PP has pointed out.
The heads of teams and various others meet every day together to decide on content, and will also decide who is writing what and whereabouts it's going, and would be told in advance if something like Liew's article was in the wind, and exactly what it said..
The guardian wants clicks from as many different audiences as possible, so that is why they have both Ingle and Liew on their sports team.

Win-win, then?

accidentally

As the late great Inigo Montoya once said
"I do not think that word means what you think it means"
unless you meant to order two litres...........

You can’t ’compete against yourself’ as you age. You slow. You need to compare yourself to others in your age and sex category then. And actually, to do that well, you need to know where your relative position was when you were younger. To do all this, you do need to know the other women in your age/sex category are female women.

if someone is genuinely not interested in all that stuff, then there are plenty of running clubs that do social runs.

Parkrun has set itself up as an informal race. Lots of people go because of that competitive and comparator edge. Most people who enjoy races know they will never win. They still want to know they are competing fairly and they still care about their position. The only people I know who don’t understand this, don’t race and usually are not runners. And frankly, I think they should not be opining on a sub culture they do not understand. ( I do wonder what these people also do in their spare time, tell Hindus they are doing Diwali wrong?)

It’s nonsense that Parkrun are not doing this because of the fairness to women angle. Parkrun has grown enormously whilst operating as an informal race. That very clearly has not been a deterrant and has attracted an awful lot of runners.

I personally wonder if allowing people to choose to be recorded under either sex or GI is the answer? There are surely enough trans allies that would choose GI to mean not all in this category would be trans, at least in the cities.

(And on a point of accuracy, at its roots, parkrun was run largely by pretty elite male runners, as can be seen by the average finish time of 22mins back then).

I agree about open categories, but women are literally excluded at a competitive level if a man takes their place. Some trans women have already had their chance to compete as men.

Non binary female trans people already take part in the women’s category, and I assume any female can take part in that category, regardless of how they identify, as long as they don’t take performance enhancing drugs. However these trans athletes are not Liew’s concern.

Yes, but he has said that not being able to win in your own category isn't an issue. See his 2019 article where he says that it wouldn't be an issue if women could no longer hold their own titles in a single women's sports category.

So what's the problem?

Oh. It's because male people feel negatively affected.

"What’s mysterious is how we got the place where someone who writes like this is encouraged to"

Excellent @EasternStandard 👏

Same question can be asked of Zoe Williams.

Well, The Boobs want what The Boobs want.

🤣🤣🤣

But the mystifying thing is that it isn’t a complete echo chamber. As I have pointed out Sean Ingle has been writing well researched, fair articles in the Guardian for years.

I'm interested in this too. Sean Ingle is chief sports writer, therefore more senior than Liew. He has managed, as you say to write well-researched and fair articles about the subject for a very long time. I've sometimes wondered how he managed to do this, given the hostile environment at the Guardian. Best guess is that the blue-haired, whey-faced activists on the paper don't tend to read the sports pages so they haven't noticed.

But someone will have commissioned the article from Liew - even though he's a staffer, you don't get to write an opinion article like that without running it past your editor. So someone at the graun - presumably on the sports pages - will have thought it was a good idea, and even when presented with the finished copy, didn't think (as most of us would): "This is a hot mess of poorly-argued, unevidenced, tinfoil-hat wearing, conspiracist, misogynistic nonsense."

I wonder who that person is?

Yeah JL turned up to a battle of wits, unarmed. You see how that worked out for him.

Good that JKR homed in on that earlier piece by Liew, where he imagined the serried ranks of trans podium winners stretching out forever... 🙄He really is a piece of work.

To be fair, even the Mail calls Policy Exchange 'right-wing'. Doesn't make everything they say a lie, though.

But the mystifying thing is that it isn’t a complete echo chamber. As I have pointed out Sean Ingle has been writing well researched, fair articles in the Guardian for years.

On the other hand Liew’s article doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny.

You don’t have to have any opinion on Policy Exchange to see that this is low hanging fruit. It’s obviously unfair, and while Liew is on record saying that’s fine, the law and funders might feel differently.
it’s a bit like antisemitism in the Labour Party. The Daily Mail are politically motivated to make hay out of the recent mess in Rochdale, but that doesn’t mean it’s right wing to say Labour messed up.

Neil McCormick (music writer) waded in to support JL. He too has now protected his tweets 🙄

There are two reasons why I love JKR. (Actually, there are LOADS of reasons I love JKR, but let's just stick with two.)

One is that whenever she intervenes on issues like this, she always demonstrates that she is much cleverer and funnier than the hapless male idiot she's arguing with. You almost feel sorry for them, because it's not a fair fight - but then Jonathan Liew doesn't believe in fair fights, so sympathy is limited.

The other is that her comments always get picked up by the press. If she hadn't said anything, this would have been a massive Twitter spat, and nothing more. But as soon as she said something, you knew it would be reported in the Mail, Telegraph etc. I assume this is because JKR makes good copy, and people will always click on a story that has JKR in it. Probably does wonders for the publication's SEO too.

I love this. Totally nails it.

The main misogyny at the Grun lies in the fact they are commissioning these articles written by men instead of the articles on other subjects written by women.

Every time a man gets paid for something like this, that's money that a female journalist didn't get for coverage on something more pertinent/interesting. That's a recent clip he can use to get NUJ membership that a woman couldn't have.

It becomes a self-referential echo chamber due to selection bias. And I bet the biased selectors (editors) don't like hearing it and just bat away criticism, that's what the Beeb always do, too.

I've finally cancelled my subscription too, and I wrote to tell them why. Have been wresting with this for a while, but being actively insulted in the name of make-believe by a newspaper to which I voluntarily gave money was just a step too far.

Any recommendations for a newspaper where left-wing women aren't derided? Can't give money to Murdoch so the Times is out, despite its good work on this topic.

We've all been there,I accidentally ordered a litre of damson gin.

I was wondering when Silly Billy would pipe up.

Daily Mail on the exchanges between JKR and Jonathan.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13086339/jk-rowling-parkrun-row-Jonathan-Liew-transgender-athletes.html

Please can you be quiet so you don't wake other people up.(please can you compete with your sex do you don't hurt female competitors/expose your penis in the changing rooms/stop females competing fairly)

leads to door slamming and shouting and more waking people up, (claims that they are being literally killed , death and rape threats and officials getting punched)

Very teen behaviour, and entitled abusive male behaviour rolled into one. (I used to live with one of those too)

...from a parent of a teen recovering from a 2am meltdown...where asking them to be quieter led to door slamming and the whole block being woken up.