Parkrun comments giving me the rage

[ChapmanFarm]

If I have to read one more time 'but parkrun is just meant to be fun' or 'you are only racing against yourself and your best time' I'm going to scream.

Why does that only apply to women?

If it's just a bit of fun there is absolutely no need for trans identified men to get a time or position either. They have the option to register as another gender or to just run and not register at all.

If it's all just fun and we moaning women should shut up, why do these arguments only apply one way?

No one is saying they can't run in whatever clothing/identity they like. Just that they shouldn't be recorded as women.

But somehow this is still wrong.

I thought I'd peaked long ago but this one is giving me the absolute rage.

The volunteers don’t set policy.

I'm as GC as it's possible to be but even I can see why Gender is the least bothersome way to collect this data and I find it really hard to believe that sex data which is real is less legally problematic that gender data which is made up.

As always with these things if you're a volunteer and there are people on your back, the easiest thing to do is walk away. If parkrun becomes legally problematic, they won't start charging entry fees and hiring lawyers, they'll just fold.

As for why not solve it by choosing sex over gender. I'd be happy with that but I suspect the problem is right now when a man selects female as gender anyone who cares can just think "Well gender means nothing so it's not ideal but he's not actually lying or cheating." sex is real a therefore a little harder to turn a blind eye to. Mind you, nobody cares about age so maybe lying about sex doesn't matter either.

Don't seek for equality women, you're responsible for the consequences of behaviours from men if they're provoked, or in causing the whole thing to be enough trouble that everyone loses it.

Just suck it up quietly like good girls, let men take what they want from you, and put others before yourself, despite your legal rights (which in this case exist on paper only, not in practice,)

I think it's quite unfair to a large part of the trans community for the few (and let's face it's the elite who get a kick out of winning) to make many people annoyed.

If trans people just register as 'prefer no to say' then no one cares.

The volunteers don't know who is who so it's not outing.

But those insisting on taking top places (which i agree is a small number) are doing harm to inclusivity.

Like many of these issues, I don't understand why there isn't pressure from the trans community to say 'be reasonable and consider other people'.

Instead people are getting progressively more pissed off that common sense has gone out of the window and that will lead to a more unsafe or unwelcome environment. Some self awareness is required.

None the less. Parkrun is a charity that exists to provide people with a free weekly run. It has 300,000 volunteers and about 70 employees. Giving such an organisation a headwind sucks. (Many of those people will be women, of course.)

I suggest you start with those people who demand to be treated as the sex category that they are not and not people who are defending protecting female single sex provisions.

Even organisations doing good things need to respect female single sex provisions.

Pleading that an organisation should be allowed to discriminate against female people because of the good they deliver to others is ultimately still a plea to allow some female people to be discriminated against due to their sex category.

There is no getting away from that.

It is just another version of the ‘it cannot be policed’ argument.

It all seems very 'but what was she wearing'.

Let’s remember too, there is a very good reason why male people chose to use female language for themselves giving not one fuck at all about the consequences to female people for acquiring female language.

If someone wishes to blame people for the situation, it seems that the same female people who are trying to protect female people are all too easy to blame than those male people who are consciously and deliberately acquiring language that excludes them. It is all part of the very same emotional manipulation equation.

It is the plea or directive that female people just suck up the ‘little bit of sex discrimination’ for the overall good that continues to surprise me.

It is the recycling of the ‘both sides are extreme’ argument when one group is defending the maintenance of observing material reality and the other group is demanding that their subjective reality is treated as if it is material reality when it is not material reality at all.

There is no solution that allows a little bit of material reality to be observed while then treating a group of people as if their subjective reality is material reality when it is not material reality. There is only material reality which is proven and will abide despite attempts to make it subjective.

As I said on the other thread, it’s always women who are expected to budge up, put up, shut up for the ‘greater good’. This expectation is so engrained, I’m not even sure people recognise themselves doing it.

A charity that exists to provide people with a free weekly run. Um.

If people want to run, why do they have to do it in a herd, policed by a charity? I used to manage without 187 other people running with me. And nobody suggested that I had to pay to run once round Regent's Park every week or so. I was quite able to time myself and write down in a notebook how long I'd taken to cover the same distance, to see if my time had improved since last week.

I dont see how parkrun can ask for participants sex, when they mix it up with other peoples gender?

They do not know, or care, if 1% or 99% of the data is corrupted, so how do they justify collecting it?

So far because of political pressure we have lost from parkrun:

1. Course records

Parkrun removed all course records from its website in 2024. This included:

• Fastest male/female course times
• Age‑graded course records
• Age‑category course records
• “Top 500 fastest” lists

These were deleted after campaign groups argued that transgender inclusion made the records “unfair” or “invalid”.

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1. Age‑category rankings

Previously, you could see:

• Fastest times for each age group (e.g., VW45–49, JM10)
• Where your time ranked nationally or globally

These tables were removed entirely. This was directly linked to pressure from groups claiming that self‑identified gender categories distorted female rankings.

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1. Historical athlete comparisons

Parkrun used to show:

• How your time compared with others at your event
• How your PB compared with national age‑group standards
• Leaderboards for “most first‑place finishes”

All of these were removed. The organisation stated that competitive comparisons were inconsistent with its “non‑competitive ethos”, but the timing coincided with political pressure campaigns.

---

1. Public visibility of top performers

Parkrun used to highlight standout performances:

• Fastest finishers each week
• Age‑graded high scorers
• Event‑level “records broken this week”

These features were removed to avoid fuelling arguments about fairness in female categories.

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1. Gender‑based competitive framing

Parkrun previously displayed:

• Male/female first finishers
• Gender‑specific PB tables
• Gender‑specific age‑grading comparisons

These were softened or removed as Parkrun tried to de‑emphasise competition during the political dispute.

Yes, we've increased equality but equality usually requires removing features that are interesting and used to give people a bit of pleasure.

There is zero chance they will swap from gender to sex because sex would be more controversial, not less. What they'll do is stop recording either and make the problem go away. Then Women will need to manually count the female appearing names above them to work out their position against other women.

In parkrun terms equality usually means removing features, because those feature are inherently unfair. Well yes, they're a tiny little bit unfair but it's a small price to pay to have them. I miss every single feature above despite rarely using them, they were nice to have.

I wonder how many people applauding the loss of these features as a blow for feminism are actually women who do parkrun?

They don't ask for sex at all. They offer a drop down list to provide gender only. You don't need to provide gender but you can if you want.

I don't even believe in gender and 10 years ago I was obviously happy enough to hold my nose and select one, and it's very useful. I'll miss it when it's gone. Perfect is the enemy of good.

The only reason I can think they collect it is to allow women to use it as a proxy for sex & see how they compete against other women. It's not perfect because gender means nothing but it works fine and I've never felt it was far wrong. I'll miss it when it's gone.

I keep coming back to this.

If there is an option with 'prefer not to say', surely if people wish to respect female people's needs but not to be treated as if they are male, this is the 'inclusive' option.

It is a very deliberate and conscious decision to register as being female when you are not a female person for any sports event. Even one that is run by volunteers and where they have a policy that currently contravenes the EA2010 because the policy uses female sex based language to describe categories.

I am not really sure why there are so many emotionally laden appeals to defend the choices of those male people. If they cannot acknowledge the material reality of their own body at a sports event, it really should not be up to other people to support that subjective reality. That person should seek assistance to be able to cope with dealing with situations where they will have to be truthful about their body and their personal choices.

It should never have been up to female people to have to become a therapeutic resource for those male people and yet, the pleas to accommodate them in the female sex sports category is a plea for female people to be just that. Laden with some guilt from the arguments we have seen.

'Gender identity' doesn't take priority over sex category when it comes to the EA2010, which was made very clear that if female sex based language was used it was a category for sex. Not gender. And if it requires further clarification because a group of people choose to ignore this, FFS stop blaming the female people defending their female single sex provisions and stop trying to emotionally manipulate them to support 'just a little bit of sex discrimination for the overall good'.

Exactly this! It's not the end of the world that these things went, and I won't mind too much if we lose the tables all together. I will still enjoy racing for time (I wonder if age grading would go too? That would be a shame for older people).

But I think overall it's a bigger loss, when you're a woman doing parkrun, to lose the gender position information entirely than be one place lower in the rankings.

However, if that's what it takes to keep parkrun 'legal' and keep it going, I guess I'll take it?

And you continue to attempt to emotionally lay the blame on the female people who are defending female single sex provisions.

But her gender is female, and parkrun records gender. It's an accurate answer to the question. It's not asking for sex

The options include male and female, which are sex categories. They are asking for sex, then allowing people to lie. What is the use of that?

They cannot report information based on this "gender" category because its meaningless. They dont know if 1% is incorrect or 100%.

If they want to record gender, they need to define it and justify why they are collecting it.

That is an issue for parkrun to resolve.

A male person is not female in any way. They can identify however they want, but using 'but gender' as an excuse to support sexist discrimination is still a person supporting sexist discrimination.

Can you explain to me why they are collecting "gender".

It will mean different things to different people. Most people would define it as sex. Some men define it as their desire to be women.

What is the use of knowing how many males and females participate in these circumstances?

I don't even believe in gender and 10 years ago I was obviously happy enough to hold my nose and select one, and it's very useful.

I signed up something like 13 or 14 years ago & I struggle to believe they did ask for my "gender" then, not in the sense they mean it now. My guess is that they have taken a lot of data that everyone understood to be runners' sex and at some point morphed it into a "gender" field, without checking with runners whose data they fudged.

I made no mention of blame, nor do I care where the blame lies.

I'm merely pointing out that the most equal thing parkrun can do is shut down. You can't get much more equal than doing absolutely nothing.

I'd also go back to my first post. I can't think of anything more GC that using Gender specifically because it means nothing, and best of all women are using it as a proxy for sex which gives some useful features that benefit women.