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?

I think there was a communication to the ambassadors yesterday that was leaked and there will be an official announcement but they have taken the stats down before anything official has been said. The Facebook groups are really grumpy and blaming GC groups.

The answer to the moaners is "Don't like it? Then don't let males cheat by saying they're female."

Sounds so simple when you put it like that.

Looks
Like they are going to refocus their comms to relate to gender rather than sex.

But they surely need to explain why they are doing that. No one's running speed is affected by their gender. This could be proven experimentally with the right experiment and rigorous application of starisrics. After eliminating the effect of sex and other unrelated factors, there would be no correlation between running speed and gender. The correlation between running speed and sex is well established. There is no rational basis for subcategorising all results by gender.

Exactly @ArdeteiMasazxu , it's absolute nonsense to say that age grading is based on gender. How can they still use it at all? And also once they do away with age/sex grading, who does this impact? Older people and women! Young men win AGAIN. How is that inclusive?

It doesn't matter who wins so long as women lose.

Everyone is equal but some are more equal than others.

So it appears that all the men telling females to shut up. That it is just a fun run and the records don't matter were lying? Well who'd a thunk it?

Why not use star signs? That has as much effect on running speed as gender.

I've always thought we should be compared to other people who are in the same Harry Potter house. I don't want to be compared to Slytherin running times!

Chinese zodiac? At least that'll loosely correlate with age.

Ah, but if you DON'T bother to discount the effect of sex, which they don't, then as most people will have entered their sex when it asks for "gender" (because they either don't have a "gender", or think it means the same as "sex", especially as the terms "male/female" are being used to describe the supposed "genders"), the "gender" classes will mostly correlate with sex classes and only a few pesky women will be disadvantaged when they don't, it will look superficially just fair enough to the casual and personally unaffected (aka male) observer that they won't kick up a fuss about it.... that was the thinking, I reckon!

https://www.bbc.com/sport/68239218 parkrun have said that this change is not in response to the transgender issue, so that should shut up the testerical whingers in lycra.

They lie.

Have they done away with age/sex percentages? That is/was a handy way of comparing your results at different ages? E.g. you were at 65% 10 years ago, and now you're slower in terms of minutes but you're actually at 70%, so you're doing better for your age.

Of course they claim that. They've looked like mendacious fools since they started defending this nonsense. 😂

I don't believe them either, why would they change tge age grading page to gender at the same time if it wasn't related to transgender issues. Parkrun make such poor decisions. I really think this will affect so many people's enjoyment of parkrun. They are naive if they think people don't care about the age grading or competitive aspects and all people will just turn up to run together in a park... I don't think so.

Not yet. But I wonder if in time it will only appear in your own results email and not on the results table.

Where has the quote button gone?

Today's BBC story makes Auntie look a twit. On the 6 o'clock news last night the newsreader said the change was because of complaints about "transgender women'.

They're doubling down on the 'publishing race records put people off from participating' line - I don't believe it for a minute. Why have they changed the age grading to say "gender" instead of "sex" at the same time, then?
https://www.parkrun.com/blog/news/2024/02/14/an-open-letter-from-russ-jefferys-ceo-parkrun-global/

That was unbelievably waffly 🙄
And didn't really explain anything

How many wannabe parkrunners are they surveying who wpuld love to do it but are put off by stats being published???

Also, if you don't get your barcode scanned you can easily run without being recorded at all. It's bullshit.

How many wannabe parkrunners are they surveying who wpuld love to do it but are put off by stats being published???

None

Although I came across a post from someone on LinkedIn claiming that she worked with "thousands" of women who are put off doing parkrun by the fact that it is a "race". Yeah right.

They are digging a deeper and deeper hole for themselves, only a small minority agree with what they've done. Such a shame as it is a brilliant force for good in the world. This will impact them doubly now, from the women who do not have a fair category to themselves to the people who chase records.

It's asking an inaccurate question and also forcing people to pretend they believe in gender ideology. The question needs to be Sex: M or F, because that is the information needed. Otherwise you are asking 'what gender stereotype do you identify with' to which the answer could be anything.