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.

@BabyGrooverBug

I'd be interested in hearing if they ever used sex.
For the first 15 years or so of parkrun's existence, almost no one would have thought the sign up page asking "gender: male [] female []" would have meant anything other than sex.

This debate is being driven by people who don’t fundamentally understand how Parkrun works in that it’s an amateur arrangement to encourage a bit of exercise, supervised by volunteers and providing untold benefits to participants. The beauty is that you can travel the world and turn up to a local park at 9am for a walk/run/wheel.

It is not a professional company running 5km runs and lining the pockets of the shareholders. These outfits could change their approach to registration to vet birth sex if they wanted to. They have paid people to do this.

My local Parkrun sees a huge drop off in women between 40-55 at which they start to come back, often walking the distance. I was a late starter to running and the ability to compare my timings to others my age was a real motivation as I walked, then walked/ran, then finally ran the entire distance.

I agree we could throw the baby out with the bath water here..

It is not the Olympics ✅
it is not competitive ✅
and it is not able to be policed ✅

Got it.

As well as ‘female people should accept some negative sex discrimination for the overall good’ ✅

@JudyBlumesBlubber
It started as purely volunteer led, but has since had millions of pounds worth of public funding via Sports England and other grants.

Park run is a charity if that's what yiu mean by volunteer led. However news flash! All charities in the UK are volunteer led. My local hospice which has an income of tens of millions and employs consultants, doctors and nurses to provide palliative care is volunteer led

park run has income of 11 million, employs
62 staff abd pays its CEO over £150,000 a year. It has all the resources necessary to comply with the law, it just doesn't want to because they just don't think women matter as saving around virtue signalling fur men larping as women

If someone needs an indication of their performance, why not have people’s performance categorised into range zones that have been created from evidenced fitness studies where sex and age has been verified? Just publish everyone’s times by alphabetical order with no first finishers.

That way people have a verified source of comparison. Therefore it would be irrelevant who ranked higher on the day. After all, it is not a competition, it is not the Olympics and that way no one needs to police anyone’s sex category.

Good point about the funding.

There's an attitude that sport, even a fun run, is competitive for men, and an opportunity to get get involved/increase confidence/get fit for women.

Therefore the ranking and accuracy is important for men and irrelevant for women.

Trans identifying men get to add another layer to it all by making it a validation opportunity- not only its not fair that they have 'compete' with men after they have transitioned, but its emotionally damaging for them to be recorded as male.

So men have a competitive event where their identity is prioritised, women get to have a go.

So what?

So everyone's position is affected in that scenario, not just women.

Therefore the ranking and accuracy is important for men and irrelevant for women.

Not in park run it's not. If trans runners make the positioning wrong it does so for both women and men.

There is already a “place in age range %” indication but the advantage of knowing how your fitness is improving compared to your local cohort is a major plus. Would I have wanted to know that I was moving from the bottom decile to the second bottom decile for my age for all global women as per some anonymous academic research? No that would not have motivated me week after week. Knowing that I was improving steadily compared to the local field was motivating, the same group I met and discussed their illnesses, injuries and lives over a coffee later. There is a reason why GPs recommend Parkrun.

I take it here that some Mumsnetters disagree and don’t find the local event stats an advantage at all. That’s fine too. But it’s some women only.

Maybe a separate new event for the people who want to volunteer to police passports and maintain tight records, or an event with no published stats for the participants, is the answer. No PR volunteer I know would sign up for that and I suspect take up would not be as strong as is suggested here.

That would really spoil it for me, but yes we've already lost six things that make it fun and I'm sure we'll lose rankings too in the interests of equality but that won't be for a long time yet.

Age and gender will go next because "lies can make them wrong".

But yes, outside pressure has spoiled Parkrun already with 6 fun features taken away. The next two features to go are are glaringly obvious. At some point after that I'm sure you'll win the battle to end rankings all together.

Once rankings are gone, attention will turn to the unfairness of men and women running together and the unfairness of people of different paces running at the same time. Presumably at that point parkrun will fold. The only way to make something fair by anyone's definition of fair is to not do it.

The direction of travel is clear.

@JudyBlumesBlubber
A new event isn't needed. The general consensus on the thread seems to be the best option is for parkrun to obey the law, follow public opinion, and use some of their considerable public funding to return their data collection and runner categorisation from gender back to sex.

I'm pretty sure the killjoys spoiling Parkrun don't even do Parkruns.

The consensus on this thread is not representative of the hundreds of thousands who run across the world every Saturday morning or the people who turn up to volunteer at my local event, week after week.

This is an anonymous forum and for all we know, the posters who want to change Parkrun might not even attend regularly.

Maybe the way forward is for local events to decide for themselves with eligibility to vote based on attending 5 in the past year. Then it’s not just the keyboard warriors whose voices are heard.

This dismissive, disingenuous response shows that you wilfully misunderstand the idea of fairness in competition and reject the well established science of male advantage over female.

Again. Why can’t runners be individually informed of their position in relation to their local cohort?

Will Parkrun change it? Possibly not. Could they ask for ‘sex at birth’ if they wanted to? Yes. Is all the “it’s too complicated”, “they’d have to remove results”, “but volunteers” a load of water muddying bollocks? Almost certainly.

Maybe they could start by asking all the hundreds of thousands of attendees what they understand by the words ‘male’ and ‘female’.

The dislike of women who won't stay in their box for men is getting a bit obvious now.

Quick zoom through:

too complicated
women's job to keep the boat from rocking (not men's apparently, ever)
women's job to protect everyone innocent in the situation (not men's apparently, ever)
women's job to prevent men upsetting and annoying others by not challenging them and making them kick off (he assaulted her? But what was she wearing? What did she do to provoke him?)
women's duty to suck up disadvantage for the greater good (huge binary sexist stuff going on there)
'everyone' likes how it is and anyone disagreeing is just a noisy harpy who doesn't run/six nasty women and their socks
Cis/GC as they come/feminist/why don't you worry about the womanly things that women properly ought to worry about instead (and which don't involve presenting any inconvenient boundaries to men or claim any ground for women that men don't wish to give)

Normal activist rubbish.

God I'm so bored of all this waaaah it's so haaaard

it wasn't at all hard when it came to handing over women's stuff to men - somehow that coukd be done with a cursory 5 min chat "Will women mind? Dunno! Who cares anyway" but when it comes to giving women their stuff back "well this is all extremely complicated and will take many months and years of discussion with men"

if park run wasn't competitive it simply wouldn't bother recording times in a way that allows ppl to compete themselves against others but it does, so it is. The fact that some ppl never check and don't care is neither here nor there! I'm so tired of the endless disingenuous nonsense

How do you know the consensus on this thread isn't representative of parkrunnners, volunteers, or the public in general?
On all the sub-issues bundled up in the gender debate, protecting women's sports tends to consistently be the one that polls shows has the clearest public support.

And yet, if the male person ran in the correct category for them, the male category positions would be correct.

It is possible to love parkrun, to want to support it and be grateful to it for what it does, but still upset at their stance on fair categories.
We don’t have to be working against it to complain and make it fairer.
It feels like anyone pointing out the injustice is assumed to be fighting them.

Exactly!!! Parkrun is generally brilliant but on this issue it is condescending, patronising and should follow the fucking law

So, you are competitive then. Thanks for acknowledging it.