Parkrun comments giving me the rage

Men are not in the same position.

If I accidentally “get my sex wrong” (how????) and claim to be male, I am not going to come near the performance of the leading men. It will not affect male rankings at all, except perhaps at the very very lowest end of very old men. Or under 10 boys or similar.

Whereas unfit men can still beat very fit women. And so can affect the rankings if they claim to be female.

Right, and in the case of trans people with a gender recognition certificate, this would change nothing. You can't force people to disclose their sex at birth.

Agree with all of that. But parkrun is different and uniquely I think gender, as a meaningless term, works well for parkrun for all the reasons I've described in this thread. (Not least that since it's not enforced a meaningless term totally avoids any demand for enforcement.)

In practice it works fine, and if Parkrun decide to change it they will simply remove it because removing it keeps both sides happy. And I will miss it.

A case where perfect is the enemy of good.

Why can’t they ask people what sex they are? And be clear it means actual sex, or sex at birth.

And leave the “prefer not to say” option first those who don’t want their sex known or their data stored.

But the Supreme Court judgement was clear that words that are an obvious proxy for sex are not a way to get around the meaning of the law.

Yes partly because I'm better at 5k, and partly because the personal parkrun results page persists, so you log in again and again, and see your best time and position for your local courses. (And in my case i like to daydream about if only those X number of people ahead of me had all had a hangover that day and not turned up).

Whereas I'm never going to bother to log in to some 2023 half marathon results page to bask in my mediocre time.

So, male people simply cannot be expected to acknowledge their sex category. Therefore everyone else has to change to suit them rather than those male people being expected to be truthful.

But sex data is the meaningful category in sport. Not gender ID. We only differentiate sport on age and sex because they both have a strong material influence on sporting performance.

If males and females were not so physically different, we wouldn’t need to separate them.

If children and older people didn’t perform so far below healthy young adults, we wouldn’t bother separating age either. But we do.

We separate by sex so women (females) can have a sense of achievement in their own right. In a mixed sex sporting field, men win hands down. Women can never win. You do know that teenage boys can run faster than female world record holders, don’t you?

Separating using gender identity is meaningless in this context, so there’s no point doing it at all.

So it's illegal to use the terms male and female in relation to gender? Fine, change it to ducks and drakes like they do on pub loos.

Problem solved. Nobody can grumble and we keep the feature.

Make it quite clear that female and male refer to material, actual sex. (Because male and female really do have quite specific meanings in all contexts, from animals to plants to humans.)

Not whatever sex you identify with.

You know your parkrun PB but not your 10k or your HM PB?

But we're not talking about times we're talking about positions.

I sense that if they take this feature out you will have less names to count up than me. 🤦‍♂️

I care way more about my parkrun time than whatever paid & chip timed runs I've done. I know my parkrun PB to the exact second, unlike the various 10Ks and HMs.

Explain?

Yup, if you do parkrun & care about your result then you certainly can't rely on your position for many many different reasons. But it's usually pretty good, I don't want it removed.

You are assuming that men and women will complete in the same times.

Right, except that only 0.5% of the UK were identified as trans in 2021. Even if we assume they are all trans women (which isn't true, many are trans men) out of 100 women, you would predict less than one to be trans.

Of course the men have exactly the same uncertainty.

If they remove the feature it will increase that uncertainty not decrease it, becaise people will be manually counting names if they want to know their position.

If the swap gender to sex people still won't know if someone above them lied or got it wrong.

See also age ranges. It's the same problem.

People who can't handle that level of uncertainty won't be doing parkrun or at least they won't be looking at results.

Because I'm very sure that I'm not being beaten by 9 trans women.

The woman coming in 100th cannot be so confident.

She could be 98th or 50th.

How do you know? For all you know you could be the only female running. If female means nothing, then you’re not the fastest female are you? Youre just someone who might or might not be in the top 10

Yes, if you're doing parkrun you have to be happy that all the information other people record might be untrue. You have to be happy that people will finish a lap early. You have to be happy that people will be towed round by their dogs. You have to be happy that people will walk 4 abreast and you'll have to run round them. You have to be happy that you might get caught in so much traffic that it takes 20 seconds to cross the start line. You have to be happy that nobody is checking if the person running is the person who is on the bar code.

Parkrun is just a fun run. The positions are mildly interesting and most people look. Nobody regards them as gospel.

Do the people at the very front regard winning as a meaningful achievement? I strongly suspect they do but they never show it and it would be deeply uncool to admit you cared, nobody ever does.

There are plenty of contexts where sex overwhelmingly trumps gender, Parkrun isn't one of them. If anything parkrun is the perfect place to use gender because it totally exposes the silliness of it. I can't think of a better way of exposing of the emperor's new clothes nature of 'gender' than using it and saying "Use whatever you like, we don't care."

Worth revisiting what an actual trans woman said: "athletic wear made it difficult for him to "signal his gender"." Exactly. He runs for 30 minites with an obviously male body type. Then 2 hours after everyone has gone home he ends up on a long list next to his made up "gender". That isn't a blow for Trans people, quite the opposite.

I'm in the top 10 women (and females) despite the fact that we don't have sex information available. Because I'm very sure that I'm not being beaten by 9 trans women. It's just not what's happening. I totally agree that sex is important, and I don't deign to know how to untangle professional sports and issues around intersex people. But for parkrun, it's a system that's good enough.

It's been an activist line for a very long time.

I still have fond memories of the utter twit who tried to explain that any woman resisting masochistic self sacrifice of themself for men with genders was in fact trans identified and hadn't yet realised that their inner self gender was actually 'man'. Because women love being subordinated and mummying everybody and having no boundaries or wants or inner lives or ambitions of their own, its all a lovely cissing type thingy, so rejecting that meant you were obvs a man.

<wanders off singing 'sit down you're rocking the boat'>

It has the infrastructure but not the will. They just contact everyone and ask them to reconfirm their sex (at birth). They can couch it a ‘boohoo the nasty terfs are making us do it ‘ if they want. They can phrase it as if you don’t confirm by date xx you will be listed as prefer not to say.

Parkrun, in its current iteration, does not have the infrastructure nor the will to begin collecting sex data. Nor will existing parkrunners (over 12 million and counting, amazing!) all bother to go back and change their registration. What is most likely is that we will lose the information that has been collected about gender - it's the obvious solution to sidestep this issue.

I understand perfectly well what parkrun is.

I also know that if an organisation is collection personal information, they need to have a reason to do so.

Its obvious parkrun want to know sex to monitor male/female participation and for timings. Women dont take part in sport as much as men. Men run faster, on average than women, its pointless comparing men to women. You said you are regularly in the top ten women, not participants, so you know this.

Thats why sex is important and gender meaningless. Its also so sexist that no-one here or parkrun are willing to define it.

What you also know is that you male friend will not tell the truth.

And that's why we have to go though this charade where we have to pretend sex isnt important.