Parkrun comments giving me the rage

Just a reminder.

https://x.com/mara_yamauchi/status/2096144220176171058?s=46

“Parkrun: good illustration today of how self-ID corrupts age grade rankings.

A male in his 60s ran parkrun in Australia in the Female category. If he’d run in the Male category, he’d have been 6th in the age grade rankings with a score just over 70%. But because he ran in the Female category, his age grade score was just over 86%. This rocketed him up to the top spot by a massive margin (well over 10%).

The runners who got bumped down were:

1. A young man who was 1st to finish so he was robbed of being 1st by time and 1st by age grade.

2. A woman in her 60s who’s a devoted parkrunner & has done >100 parkruns;

3. A man in his 60s, also devoted & is close to having done 200 parkruns;

4. A woman who, despite being in her 40s, was near the top of the Female finishing order. She’s done >70 parkruns;

5. A man who, despite being in his 50s, was near the top of the Male finishing order. He’s done >50 parkruns.

All these very good runners who are devoted parkrunners suffering unfairness & being robbed of their hard-earned place in the age grade rankings, and all for what? So that parkrun can indulge the beliefs of men who say they are women. So much unfairness inflicted on men & women bc parkrun can’t bring itself to say no to these men & implement sex at birth categories.”

I think many of us on this board are used to being derided, derogated and demonised and vilified for pointing out how female single sex provisions are negatively impacted by male people accessing them.

If you, personally, are arguing for any exception for any male person to bypass female people’s consent, individual or collective consent, then you should expect to be able to defend your stance if challenged. If your reaction to being challenged is to fall back on excuses that are irrelevant and that maintain allowing some negative sex discrimination for female people for the overall good or is to resort to more irrelevant points that is fine, many of us have seen it before. Usually, it is a reaction from the male people themselves, but either way, it is rather common.

And yet, other female people cannot give consent for those female people who have said they don’t consent to male people using what is a female single sex provision.

The sporting event falls under the EA2010 and that has been clarified. Regardless of whether those who are pointing out the issues are runners, are part of parkrun, the situation remains the same.

So we are back to female people needing to accept a small amount of negative sex discrimination for the overall good.

Why is it always women who are told to go and set up their own event?
Why don’t trans people and their allies go and set up their own events? All the ally women should be more than happy to be treated as second best in order to affirm a load of delusional men.

So, you are competitive then. Thanks for acknowledging it.

Exactly!!! Parkrun is generally brilliant but on this issue it is condescending, patronising and should follow the fucking law

It is possible to love parkrun, to want to support it and be grateful to it for what it does, but still upset at their stance on fair categories.
We don’t have to be working against it to complain and make it fairer.
It feels like anyone pointing out the injustice is assumed to be fighting them.

And yet, if the male person ran in the correct category for them, the male category positions would be correct.

How do you know the consensus on this thread isn't representative of parkrunnners, volunteers, or the public in general?
On all the sub-issues bundled up in the gender debate, protecting women's sports tends to consistently be the one that polls shows has the clearest public support.

God I'm so bored of all this waaaah it's so haaaard

it wasn't at all hard when it came to handing over women's stuff to men - somehow that coukd be done with a cursory 5 min chat "Will women mind? Dunno! Who cares anyway" but when it comes to giving women their stuff back "well this is all extremely complicated and will take many months and years of discussion with men"

if park run wasn't competitive it simply wouldn't bother recording times in a way that allows ppl to compete themselves against others but it does, so it is. The fact that some ppl never check and don't care is neither here nor there! I'm so tired of the endless disingenuous nonsense

The dislike of women who won't stay in their box for men is getting a bit obvious now.

Quick zoom through:

too complicated
women's job to keep the boat from rocking (not men's apparently, ever)
women's job to protect everyone innocent in the situation (not men's apparently, ever)
women's job to prevent men upsetting and annoying others by not challenging them and making them kick off (he assaulted her? But what was she wearing? What did she do to provoke him?)
women's duty to suck up disadvantage for the greater good (huge binary sexist stuff going on there)
'everyone' likes how it is and anyone disagreeing is just a noisy harpy who doesn't run/six nasty women and their socks
Cis/GC as they come/feminist/why don't you worry about the womanly things that women properly ought to worry about instead (and which don't involve presenting any inconvenient boundaries to men or claim any ground for women that men don't wish to give)

Normal activist rubbish.

Maybe they could start by asking all the hundreds of thousands of attendees what they understand by the words ‘male’ and ‘female’.

Again. Why can’t runners be individually informed of their position in relation to their local cohort?

Will Parkrun change it? Possibly not. Could they ask for ‘sex at birth’ if they wanted to? Yes. Is all the “it’s too complicated”, “they’d have to remove results”, “but volunteers” a load of water muddying bollocks? Almost certainly.

This dismissive, disingenuous response shows that you wilfully misunderstand the idea of fairness in competition and reject the well established science of male advantage over female.

The consensus on this thread is not representative of the hundreds of thousands who run across the world every Saturday morning or the people who turn up to volunteer at my local event, week after week.

This is an anonymous forum and for all we know, the posters who want to change Parkrun might not even attend regularly.

Maybe the way forward is for local events to decide for themselves with eligibility to vote based on attending 5 in the past year. Then it’s not just the keyboard warriors whose voices are heard.

I'm pretty sure the killjoys spoiling Parkrun don't even do Parkruns.

@JudyBlumesBlubber
A new event isn't needed. The general consensus on the thread seems to be the best option is for parkrun to obey the law, follow public opinion, and use some of their considerable public funding to return their data collection and runner categorisation from gender back to sex.

That would really spoil it for me, but yes we've already lost six things that make it fun and I'm sure we'll lose rankings too in the interests of equality but that won't be for a long time yet.

Age and gender will go next because "lies can make them wrong".

But yes, outside pressure has spoiled Parkrun already with 6 fun features taken away. The next two features to go are are glaringly obvious. At some point after that I'm sure you'll win the battle to end rankings all together.

Once rankings are gone, attention will turn to the unfairness of men and women running together and the unfairness of people of different paces running at the same time. Presumably at that point parkrun will fold. The only way to make something fair by anyone's definition of fair is to not do it.

The direction of travel is clear.

There is already a “place in age range %” indication but the advantage of knowing how your fitness is improving compared to your local cohort is a major plus. Would I have wanted to know that I was moving from the bottom decile to the second bottom decile for my age for all global women as per some anonymous academic research? No that would not have motivated me week after week. Knowing that I was improving steadily compared to the local field was motivating, the same group I met and discussed their illnesses, injuries and lives over a coffee later. There is a reason why GPs recommend Parkrun.

I take it here that some Mumsnetters disagree and don’t find the local event stats an advantage at all. That’s fine too. But it’s some women only.

Maybe a separate new event for the people who want to volunteer to police passports and maintain tight records, or an event with no published stats for the participants, is the answer. No PR volunteer I know would sign up for that and I suspect take up would not be as strong as is suggested here.

Therefore the ranking and accuracy is important for men and irrelevant for women.

Not in park run it's not. If trans runners make the positioning wrong it does so for both women and men.

So what?

So everyone's position is affected in that scenario, not just women.

There's an attitude that sport, even a fun run, is competitive for men, and an opportunity to get get involved/increase confidence/get fit for women.

Therefore the ranking and accuracy is important for men and irrelevant for women.

Trans identifying men get to add another layer to it all by making it a validation opportunity- not only its not fair that they have 'compete' with men after they have transitioned, but its emotionally damaging for them to be recorded as male.

So men have a competitive event where their identity is prioritised, women get to have a go.

Good point about the funding.

If someone needs an indication of their performance, why not have people’s performance categorised into range zones that have been created from evidenced fitness studies where sex and age has been verified? Just publish everyone’s times by alphabetical order with no first finishers.

That way people have a verified source of comparison. Therefore it would be irrelevant who ranked higher on the day. After all, it is not a competition, it is not the Olympics and that way no one needs to police anyone’s sex category.