A report, backed by Olympians, proposes cutting Government funding for Parkrun if concerns regarding the participation of biological males in women’s events are not addressed. The Mail has more.
Biological men hold at least three Parkrun female records because of its policy that lets entrants self-identify their gender, according to the Policy Exchange think tank.
Gender ideology is risking the fairness and safety of competitions for women and girls, said the analysis backed by the likes of Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies.
The report also claimed women could be “alienated” from grassroots sports and highlighted major physical advantages which biological males have over females.
It said Sports England, the Government’s non-departmental body for community sport, should tell Parkrun that it must collect participants’ data based on biological sex, rather than gender identity, and update course records to reflect this. It added: “If this does not happen within 12 months, taxpayers’ funding should be withdrawn.”
Research by Policy Exchange found at least three female records set at five kilometre (three mile) community Parkrun events are held by biological males.
This includes the female 45-49 category at Porthcawl in South Wales which had been set in 2008 at 20.06 minutes by Deb Roberts. In May this year, Siân Longthorpe – a transgender woman who is biological male – set a new record of 18.53 minutes.
That result gained national attention when it was cited by Mara Yamauchi, a former British Olympian, as an example of what she claimed was the exclusion of women athletes and their achievements in the name of being “inclusive”.
The report said: “Given the fact that men generally have a performance advantage over women of at least 13%, it is unlikely a biological female will beat Longthorpe’s time in the future.”
Longthorpe also holds the age 40-44 female record, as well as the outright female record at Parke in Devon, and the female record for ages 40-44 in Torbay Velopark. …
Separately, transgender Lauren Jeska who was born a man has held both Aberystwyth’s ages 35-39 record and the outright female record since 2012, with a time of 17.38 minutes.
The report said: “Since 2012, three women have lost out on holding the outright title due to Parkrun’s gender self-ID policy.” …
Daley Thompson, two-time Olympic gold medallist in the decathlon, who also backed the report, said: “We risk alienating a generation of young female athletes if we cannot promise them fair and safe play from the grassroots level to the top.”
Worth reading in full.
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This is fire-fighting rather than addressing the underlying issue that men cannot actually become women irrespective of what the legal profession conjures up.
I’m a man that identifies as a woman because women now identify as men and men can now identify as women. Thank God for the feminist push to remove our differences.
Shall we go back to basics?
Meh. Parkrun. Just a Saturday morning jog.
I know, right?!
As Bob Parr remonstrated to his lovely wife, as he learned of his five year old’s “graduation ceremony” for finishing a year at primary school,
“They keep inventing new ways of celebrating MEDIOCRITY!”
When everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody… Straight out of Stalin’s playbook.
Siân Longthorpe – a transgender woman who is biological male – set a new record of 18.53 minutes.
Someonewho’s biologically male is a man. A man playing the role of a woman in public is still a man.
100%, and the article title should read “Parkrun’s Self-ID Gender Rules Have Seen at Least Three Men Win Female Records”
Please can we stop using the term “transgender woman”.
Personally, I’d prefer:
Blokes With Mental Illnesses Win Prizes For Turning Up Mentally Ill
That’s about the size of it
Mental illness is relative – stamp collecting or collecting anything can be obsessive but we would not call that mental illness because for many it is ‘normal’.
Elevating gender identity to a position of an absolute right to “equality” to the detriment of equality for the rest of the population is not equality but a distortion of it.
But compassion is needed for those who genuinely have this issue.
Men who have an overwhelming desire to live as women are a tiny tiny proportion of the population.
One person’s mental illness is another’s normality. Many people walking in your streets have interests and desires you may never discover because they do not have their private thoughts tattooed across their faces. But if you knew their thoughts you might wish you did not.
Some years ago a man who was well over six feet tall shopped in a local supermarket. I only saw him twice in his dress and wig and he was unmistakably a man and unmistakably very tall with huge hands for a man let alone a woman.
And it was at once disturbing and also sad. He looked like he had a knife and fork version of reconstructive surgery on his posterior with what appeared to be very badly executed and lumpy implants.
To have such a compulsion to go to such lengths to try live one’s life as a woman is difficult to understand. Why attract attention like that? Why might anyone believe they are living their dream of being a woman in a woman’s body when that is plainly not so as in this example? It is a self-deception on a grand scale but some people feel a compulsion to live it.
“But compassion is needed for those who genuinely have this issue.
Men who have an overwhelming desire to live as women are a tiny tiny proportion of the population.”
I agree with you, but compassion does not mean encouraging someone to live a lie or letting them believe they can have something simply because they (tell themselves they) really, really want it. Sometimes compassion equals tough love. The real cruelty is allowing people to believe they really can “be a woman” despite being a biological male. Truth is beauty: lies are ugly.
Imagine you have this compulsion – if you can. You cannot be logical with someone with such a compulsion. If you knew people who suffer from the delusions of ‘voices’ – a common symptom of schizophrenia – no amount of ‘tough love’ will shake their belief in hearing ‘voices’ or that they get personal messages over the radio or TV when the newsreader is reading the news.
You cannot reason with them. Logic does not work. ‘Proving’ there are no hidden cameras watching them such as in light bulbs and the like does not work. They still believe the camera is there regardless.
And one thing you can never achieve regardless of what you do is to convince them by logic or ‘tough love.
So let us look again at compassion – and this I mean for the genuine cases and not paedophiles and abusers – who clearly have their own version of a compulsion which to us as ‘normal’ people we might find abhorrent.
This is what compassion means and it does not include ‘tough love’.
compassion /kəm-păsh′ən/
noun
Amazing – two downvotes. Clearly from people who have never experienced others with mental illness.
No compassion here then.
But compassion is needed for those who genuinely have this issue.
Men who have an overwhelming desire to live as women are a tiny tiny proportion of the population.
WTF? I’d like to have some compassion for my desire to avoid sitting mostly motionlessly for prolongued periods after a day of work during which I have to when being in a pub. Instead, I tend to become to butt end of all kinds of jokes and people trying to annoy me in various ways and – not that rare – open attacks because someone’s again convinced that I’m certainly doing this based on some harmful hidden agenda. Some compassion for wearing army boots (have the nice advantage that my feet actually fit into them) and using shoe polish on them would also be nice. And I’m not running around and trying to force any particular objectively wrong world view onto anyone.
Men who have the ‘overwhelming desire’ of live-action roleplaying what they believe to be women and the overwhelming desire to force others to partake in that against their will deserve exactly no sympathy just because of this fact.
Well that all makes no sense whatsoever.
Am I supposed to take this boilerplate countermove of people lacking arguments to support their case at face value? I think I won’t.
What’s your point? You don’t make one.
I appreciate that women have invested a lot of time and money in their sport. But unless they simply refuse to participate, even for a month or two, then this absurdity will continue. I recall the words of Serena Williams when she was once asked how she felt she would do against the men. ——“If I played Andy Murray I would lose 6-0 6-0”—-Enough said.
Or they could hijack the event by having their own awards and medal ceremony and still enjoy their sport.
Perhaps some might sponsor and fund this?
The absolute is to set up competing womens’ sports associations and run their own events under their own rules?
So if that were to happen, the existing sports associations might be forced to recognise two categories of participants – real women and men who have ‘transitioned’ and still award real women first place based on their achievement and ‘transitioned’ women their awards as transitioned women.
If one favours equality and fairness – is that not fair?
I am just investigating possible solutions – so what do you think?
Ha. A downvote – for one sentence!! Must be a world record.
I certainly did not down vote you. Your idea is fine. But imagine having to create new setups for every sport, when solidarity by women not showing up on mass would force u turns.
It is not so difficult. All sports organisations started small and grew. And don’t underestimate women.
Yes, but I feel a NO SHOW would be easier and more effective in the long run, as authorities would then get the message and quit this absurdity.——Setting up entire new bureaucracies would be time consuming and costly. ——-You cannot hold events when 99% of the athletes don’t turn up
They would be no-showing because they would be attending their own events. So a) boycotting and b) still enjoying their sport. A win-win – pardon the pun.
Lauren Jeska was jailed a few years back for stabbing Ralph Knibbs. He, Ralph, was an AAA official. She blamed him for discriminating against him/her.
Ralph Knibbs was one of the finest rugby players never to win a full England cap. He was selected to go on tour to South Africa but decline the opportunity.
It was a miracle that Ralph survived. This Jeska character presented a very real danger to women in addition to stealing their achievements.
Clown world where such a fight is even necessary.
In German, there are three genders: Male, female and neutral. But people in Germany still have only two sexes¹.
¹ This is a bit of an oversimplification, because human sex markers work somewhat like a two-bit binary number which has the following four possible values: 00, 01, 10 and 11. 01 and 10 are the common cases representing female and male. 11 also exists which is both female and male (which is not a third sex, just another combination of two sexes). I don’t know if 00 — neither male nor female, also exists.
Do these sad malcontents really feel proud of their achievements?
Sanity will be restored when all biological women and girls refuse to participate in sport – at any level – if biological males are allowed to participate in women’s events.
And it would help a great deal if women refuse to vote for politicians who believe that a woman can have a penis.
It seems likely our next Prime Minister will have a penis.
Are you saying women should not vote for her?
A good move towards restoring sanity would be to drop these meaningless qualfiers. Wrt sex, ‘biological women’ don’t somehow belong into the same category as ‘biological non-women’ claiming to be ‘non-biological women’ just because they do. Paraphrasing someone else: A man seeking to appear to be a woman is still someone who’s desiring a genuinely male experience no woman will ever share with him.
If you have, or have even had, dangly bits between your legs, you are not a woman.
If you can’t succeed in men’s sport, graciously accept you are not good enough and take up train spotting or stamp collecting, but don’t pretend you’re a woman just to win a race.
You’re not pretty and you’re not clever. A wig and 5 o’clock shadow does not make you a woman.