Get back in your box women, you're a right wing animal if you think men should be kept out of sport. "Why have rightwingers made even parkrun a battleground for trans people?"

[AlphariusOmegron]

Right wingers, meant as an insult, are to blame for ruining Park Run, not men in frocks.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/feb/14/why-have-rightwingers-made-even-parkrun-a-battleground-for-trans-people

Complain here:
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2014/sep/12/-sp-how-to-make-a-complaint-about-guardian-or-observer-content

Voices must be heard, even if this is an opinion piece. This mad ideology only continues whilst we allow it and not speaking up is a CHOICE to allow it to keep happening.

Yeah JL turned up to a battle of wits, unarmed. You see how that worked out for him.

But the mystifying thing is that it isn’t a complete echo chamber. As I have pointed out Sean Ingle has been writing well researched, fair articles in the Guardian for years.

I'm interested in this too. Sean Ingle is chief sports writer, therefore more senior than Liew. He has managed, as you say to write well-researched and fair articles about the subject for a very long time. I've sometimes wondered how he managed to do this, given the hostile environment at the Guardian. Best guess is that the blue-haired, whey-faced activists on the paper don't tend to read the sports pages so they haven't noticed.

But someone will have commissioned the article from Liew - even though he's a staffer, you don't get to write an opinion article like that without running it past your editor. So someone at the graun - presumably on the sports pages - will have thought it was a good idea, and even when presented with the finished copy, didn't think (as most of us would): "This is a hot mess of poorly-argued, unevidenced, tinfoil-hat wearing, conspiracist, misogynistic nonsense."

I wonder who that person is?

Well, The Boobs want what The Boobs want.

🤣🤣🤣

"What’s mysterious is how we got the place where someone who writes like this is encouraged to"

Excellent @EasternStandard 👏

Same question can be asked of Zoe Williams.

Yes, but he has said that not being able to win in your own category isn't an issue. See his 2019 article where he says that it wouldn't be an issue if women could no longer hold their own titles in a single women's sports category.

So what's the problem?

Oh. It's because male people feel negatively affected.

I agree about open categories, but women are literally excluded at a competitive level if a man takes their place. Some trans women have already had their chance to compete as men.

Non binary female trans people already take part in the women’s category, and I assume any female can take part in that category, regardless of how they identify, as long as they don’t take performance enhancing drugs. However these trans athletes are not Liew’s concern.

You can’t ’compete against yourself’ as you age. You slow. You need to compare yourself to others in your age and sex category then. And actually, to do that well, you need to know where your relative position was when you were younger. To do all this, you do need to know the other women in your age/sex category are female women.

if someone is genuinely not interested in all that stuff, then there are plenty of running clubs that do social runs.

Parkrun has set itself up as an informal race. Lots of people go because of that competitive and comparator edge. Most people who enjoy races know they will never win. They still want to know they are competing fairly and they still care about their position. The only people I know who don’t understand this, don’t race and usually are not runners. And frankly, I think they should not be opining on a sub culture they do not understand. ( I do wonder what these people also do in their spare time, tell Hindus they are doing Diwali wrong?)

It’s nonsense that Parkrun are not doing this because of the fairness to women angle. Parkrun has grown enormously whilst operating as an informal race. That very clearly has not been a deterrant and has attracted an awful lot of runners.

I personally wonder if allowing people to choose to be recorded under either sex or GI is the answer? There are surely enough trans allies that would choose GI to mean not all in this category would be trans, at least in the cities.

(And on a point of accuracy, at its roots, parkrun was run largely by pretty elite male runners, as can be seen by the average finish time of 22mins back then).

accidentally

As the late great Inigo Montoya once said
"I do not think that word means what you think it means"
unless you meant to order two litres...........

Win-win, then?

Newspaper output is rigorously controlled by the editor(s) and the backbench (senior journalists on the paper/website etc). Journalists employed by a particular publication can't just go rogue and decide to write contentious things themselves, and then just publish them without anyone else's input, as a PP has pointed out.
The heads of teams and various others meet every day together to decide on content, and will also decide who is writing what and whereabouts it's going, and would be told in advance if something like Liew's article was in the wind, and exactly what it said..
The guardian wants clicks from as many different audiences as possible, so that is why they have both Ingle and Liew on their sports team.

The people who are interested in well researched journalism and the people who like a misogynist conspiracy theory?

Maybe if the Guardian is going to serve up inflammatory crap for eyeballs as didthosefeet is suggesting, they should skip the sanctimony.

I have sent a complaint too. I am genuinely sad as I have been a loyal Guardian reader for years & years but this is the last straw and I have cancelled my subscription. I have been reading the Guardian all these years because I thought it offered a reasonably objective version of the news - of course with a more left-wing bias - but still without the populist nonsense of the right wing papers.
It is really sad that journalist integrity has been sacrificed for identity politics propaganda - isn’t the Guardian now just the left wing’s equivalent of the Daily Mail to some extent?

I was surprised to see the letters in response to the article online, 3 saying not fair to when, all with names provided, 1 calling everyone mean with no name attached.....

The 3 letters criticising Liew are very good and worth reading.

the name withheld one supporting Liew misses the point and talks about the value of being able to run alongside trans women, as though the existence of a female sex category precludes this.

Also coupled with the idea that any female can now go into a men’s toilet, sports team, changing room safely as long as they identify as being ‘not a woman’ really smashes home the total logic failure of the whole situation.

Probably worse. At least the Mail
knows what it is and embraces it. The guardian thinks it’s righteous.

Its worth pointing out that the only newspaper which has a readership which is majority female, is....

....the answer might some, but it is The Fail.

I don’t mind that the guardian publishes pieces like Liew’s as long as other opinions are also allowed to be printed. I thought it was shit and clearly betrayed his lack of understanding that women are people too, but I think the principle remains that it’s fine for a paper to publish differing view points.

The problem is when certain perspectives become silenced or suppressed.

Responses here:

Parkrun, trans athletes and fairness to women | Running | The Guardian

The only response in favour of the article is by someone who readily admits to having 'skin in the game'.

Well at least the Guardian shows those responses. And hopefully, may perhaps have learnt a little lesson.

I wouldn't hold your breath. The gruan has been a TRA bin fire for years and publishing the latest Liew glue fest hardly betokens change on any level.

I'm not. But I think the ill-advised Liew piece has done more good than harm.

They also find one of them don't they?