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?

Has anyone managed to communicate with an actual human about this - or just a generic Park Run HQ email address? Do they have any employees listed on LinkedIn?

The people you are looking for are Russ Jefferys and Tom Williams. They are on Facebook and Twitter (search their names with parkrun) - I don’t do linked in but imagine they are there too.

Paul Sinton-Hewitt is the founder of parkrun and has stepped back a lot but his opinion would be very much respected.

Here is a link to something about the Directors. It says Rowena Danes is trying to increase participation from women and girls so perhaps she would be someone to contact.

Someone who can complete a 5km park run in 30 minutes has a time of 30 minutes no matter what.

If you are of the male sex and have a time of 30 minutes you are around about average, perfectly respectable time but nothing special.

If you are of the female sex and have a time of 30 minutes you are a fair bit above average, and that's a higher level of personal kudos

If you are of the male sex and have a time of around 20 minutes you are certainly very good but depending on how popular the run is there could be about 10-20% of the other males in the field able to run faster. Pretty impressive personal kudos.

If you are of the female sex and have a time of around 20 minutes you may well be the winner. Maximum kudos.

Every time a male identifies into the female category they are not only claiming kudos they haven't earned, they are also demoting and degrading the results of every other woman in the female category by skewing the stats, so someone who previously knew they could run faster than 80% of runners in their category now only gets 79.something% based on the false data. Each individual time it happens only makes a tiny difference but each one is cumulative and devalues the whole.

Park runs are also split by age - the average winning time for 20-29 year old men is 16:45 minutes but the average winning time for 60-69 year old men is 22:36 minutes. If a man age 25 can run the distance in 23 minutes they are obviously fast and fit but not amazing. If he chooses to identify into the 60-69 year old category that time becomes amazing. Allowing him to do that would obviously be wrong and unthinkable and no one would let it stand. But it's the exact same effect as what we are just expected to accept for women because our sense of achievement doesn't matter as much as the feelings of transwomen.

To be honest though I can’t imagine them changing things. It is all about getting as many people active as possible and being inclusive, much more than the competition.

They won’t want controversy and they couldn’t police people self declaring sex or gender as they just don’t have the resources. The additional category is a good thing as some trans people originally of the male sex will use that where they might not have been comfortable declaring themselves male and anyone in that category will not be in the female categories.

@SerenadeOfTheSchoolRun Then they shouldn't publish age/sex gradings. They cannot have it both ways! They say its not a competition, not a race, you just run against yourself yadda yadda then publish a run's results as if it was a race!

@ArdeteiMasazxu Exactly. If you gather this data and tell people where they are in relation to others in your age/sex group then people have to be open to being policed on the data being accurate. We should all have one day when we do a parkrun changing our ages to 80+ to illustrate this, especially the faster women.

I do see your point and agree on the whole. I maintain that parkrun couldn’t police this. They only have around 15-20 employees as far as I know.

What they could do is put out a message that they expect people to register by sex as on they birth certificate (at birth) or prefer not to say but this would probably cause uproar in some quarters and could for example put off swathes of young people. But I realise the current position may put off swathes of women. It seems all organisations must pick a side.

If they did away with the age grading and female records etc lots of people would probably lose interest and stop going despite what they say about it being a run not a race. There is no easy answer.

@SerenadeOfTheSchoolRun there is no easy answer

They could gather data on both sex AND gender - and provide tables split by age, split by sex and split by gender. And both sex and gender can have "prefer not to say" categories so that you can opt out of either or both if that's what feels right for you, but they can make it clear that sex means only biological sex as recognised at birth, and gender can be whatever feels right for you. They can make it clear that "prefer not to say" is perfectly valid and acceptable but ticking a box that isn't true is totally unacceptable.

Then people who want to get a feel for where they rank among other people with a feminine sense of gender identity can look at the gender table and get accurate information about that (and my results wouldn't be in there skewing their results as I don't have a feminine sense of gender identity) and people who want to get a feel for where they rank among other people with female biology can look at the tables split by sex and they won't be skewed by people who have male biology.

The data needs to be gathered according to sex at birth. Otherwise, women might as well self-identify as male to make a point because the female category becomes meaningless when male participants identify into it and skew the results.

Agree with this.

This

Maybe all the women should go on as male then it will look as though NO women take part and they may be forced to revert to the traditional way by sex to demonstrate both men and women take part.

It is possible to chop and change your parkrun details. I've seen people of speedy children increase their age so they can run alone sooner.

@ArdeteiMasazxu I would go along with that but it is quite complicated so most people who aren’t aware of the issues would think it was bizarre (although they would probably just shrug their shoulders and tick the boxes I guess) and it would still bring the wrath of the trans activists onto parkrun. But perhaps the more organisations that stand up for women’s rights the less this will be a problem.

Seriously, what can we do to get parkrun's attention that this is excluding women like myself who know sex is real and influences athletic ability and fairness? Do we chop up our barcodes and post it to them?

Quite. The sex rankings make sense, as anyone can use them for inspiration if they choose to. No pressure on anyone else. Gender rankings would give no useful information at all.

Well if I was, say, a 40 year old woman who could actually do a park run. I'd identify as an 89 year old man and undoubtedly get a really good finishing position for my age and gender.

I dont do park run, so I've no idea, but if every woman just dropped the token and were unknown, how would you know which was yours?

And the best result is all women do this, more likely women will just drop out of park run entirely. Why bother if you cant match your times to other women?

At the end of a parkrun you run through a finish funnel, where the timers press their app every time someone crosses the finish line. You are then given a token at the end of the funnel with your position number on.
If you remember that but are not scanned you can see an "Unknown" for this position in the results list. So you'd still know your time but wouldn't get a result email.
Of course, parkrun wouldn't have a clue whether the "unknown" was a male or a female.

Yeah that would never get their attention, they'd just think "oh weird that more people forgot their barcodes". There's got to be a clearer way of sending a message altogether.

Maybe we should all turn up at a junior park run and say we identify as 6 year olds and that they can't complain that we're clearly middle-aged women (i reckon i could beat most of the youngest ones)

I think a lot of people changing their age to 80+ could get their attention but perhaps it wouldn’t be noticed much apart from by the 80+ people whose positions in their category would go down. It might break some age graded records and people could make some fuss about that. I think the historical results would also change.

Perhaps people could change their surnames to SEX IS REAL. Or something like that. That would be more visible as it would appear on the results list in capitals. But lots people may well not understand what was being said and think that someone was being rude.

It would have most impact for a group to go to one event with their changes but it probably wouldn’t be fair on the volunteers especially if word got out and there were protesters.

You can’t change your name or date of birth on your profile without contacting HQ - it would need to be new profiles and I expect parkrun would delete the profiles once they became aware.

Marathoner Mara Yamauchi calls on parkrun to stop with the gender identity madness - so many in support! https://twitter.com/mara_yamauchi/status/1660606684706766848
This is after Sian Longthorpe came first """"Female"""" in Portcawl this Saturday https://www.parkrun.org.uk/porthcawl/results/latestresults/
Come ON parkrun, make that tough decision and make it FAIR for women to run again!