Park run email today - "Living as myself"

[wantmorenow]

blog.parkrun.com/uk/2022/07/27/living-as-myself/

Today of all days after Allison's victory!

Another form asking us to choose a gender or prefer not to say when I just want the word sex. Or non-believer in gender identity woo.

Who do we email to put our protected beliefs to?

It does make a difference to other parkrunners though. I won my category once (just the once, when there was a small turnout ). I'd have been well pissed off to be beaten in that race in my age/sex category by a man.

Link please? I can't find it

Yep. If it doesn't matter then why separate by sex at all?

If it doesn't matter why do they record times, record the order of runners, age grade and celebrate fastest times on social media? Parkrun are being totally disingenuous to claim it has no competitive element. If that was the case they could easily remove all public times and just provide them to individual runners.

Park run is basically a fun run. But we cant ditch the times and records and sex distinction because its very important for man with gender to force everyone to pretent their gender is relevant.

This. It's either a trivial thing or it isn't. If it's trivial the men can be told to suck it up, can't they?

Parkrun can be treated as a fun run by those who enjoy running socially and as a competition by those who prefer to do it as challenge/time trial. (It was originally set up as a time trial but has obviously evolved into something bigger, and more inclusive)

What's not OK is to say it must be a fun run for women but men can still run competitvely if they choose to

Exactly this!

People who are newer to parkrun may not know about its time trial roots.

It has only embraced walking etc because it gets a lot of funding for health initiatives.

People who say that it should stop timing people women are effectively taking away its whole raison d'etre.

It was in an email, they've not shared it on social media to my knowledge. I couldn't find it on their blog page.

Victoria Smith has covered this in the Critic

https://thecritic.co.uk/do-women-only-sports-categories-matter-if-youre-rubbish/

It's so hard to argue this. Amateurs derive immense pride from their achievements. Grassroots sports for example. My friend's life and personal pride revolves around his amateur football team, of which he is captain.

Bully for you if results mean diddly squat to you. But if course they don't for I would say the majority running. Part of the attraction to parkrun is tracking your stats, I know this because family members have quoted their stats to me. They are sporty and competitive people but just normal, non professionals.

One day, people will look back and wonder why they argued against fairness in sport for women. It either is or isn't, at any level.

I received an email from parkrun support telling me that I am wrong that parkrun is a competition and people run it competitively. What absolute rubbish! They need to do away with public posting of results, age grading and also the listing of times for runners in particular clubs - what's this https://www.parkrun.org.uk/reading/results/clubhistory/?clubNum=949 if it's not for competitive purposes? Sick of being gaslit by this organisation that pretends to include people but is actually excluding a lot more.

Which is why they celebrate the people who have been first finishers (also called "winners") the most often: https://www.parkrun.org.uk/results/mostfirstfinishes/

!

The records have all disappeared today. I am really sad but can understand why they did it.

Yep - the TRAs have messed it up for everyone

course and age category records have been removed from event web pages today.

They couldn't keep fobbing off women that it was just a "fun run" and then keep them up, really.

So, do we think that when the men start moaning that their course records have now vanished that parkrun will make a statement? Heaven help then if they do, they ignored women complaining about men stealkling their records for over two years....

Wait...I can't see the search function in the results drop down any more, does that mean we can't search our own results any more? 😢

I don’t think I ever found that - you can still search your name on a main results page?

I had a horrible feeling this was going to be the outcome :(

A lot of men on social media are having conniptions about how unfair this is.....

hilarious

Aw.

Yeah men are kicking off on twitter and blaming feminists. This wasn't what we asked for! The pressure from women has been building lately. They couldn't maintain a position that they didn't promote competition, so many ways to compare performance have now gone. I think they are going to get a lot of flak for this!

Have they done it with no explanation at all? That's strange though isn't it to not have any communication and just remove all that information?

Men will be furious about this won't they? I guess they may not have even known about our issues with the results until now, when it is affecting them.

Seriously, parkrun, you absolute idiots... They've changed the age grading page to refer to gender (the other was screenshotted in December, I found it on twitter) . So now apparently your running time is compared by a social construct and your age. I can't believe this is the hill they decided to die on.