What is Parkrun?

Parkrun is a weekly 5k run that occurs in local parks across the globe. It has become a wildly popular event that gathers thousands of participants each weekend. While many use parkrun events as a recreational run, many of the runners are competitive and use parkrun events to rank themselves against others as all runs are timed, and runners can look up their times and places according to both "gender" and age category on the public parkrun event websites. They previously kept overall course records and age category records, divided into Male and Female. Parkrun currently uses "gender self-ID," not sex, for registration.

The organizers of parkrun have decided to let males register themselves as “female” for parkrun. In fact, all males and females are allowed to register in any of parkrun's four categories, “Male,” “Female,” “Another gender identity” and “Prefer not to say.” Due to criticism received from many parkrun participants including female runners themselves, especially over the fact that male runners held several female course and age category records, parkrun decided to hide all official records, age category records and some other data in early 2024, statistics they claimed were turning people away despite having received no complaints prior regarding this. Parkrun has retained some data including age grade % scores. Males running in the female category enjoy much higher age grade % scores than their fellow males of the same age and speed in the male category.

This decision received immense backlash, sparking several petitions with over 24,000 signatures, yet parkrun has not budged, as they continue to prioritize the desires of a small handful of male runners who wish to force others to call them “female” over the fairness and dignity of actual female participants.

Many event and run directors (some of whom are males running in the female category themselves) respond to feedback from female athletes with ridicule and scorn. Their message is that allowing males to call themselves female on the runs promotes “inclusion” (despite the fact that many of these males had run as “males” previously without issue) while these policies have caused other runners to stop registering instead, and their removal of records has received nothing but negativity. Although parkrun claims their events, with a start and a finish, official times, measured courses, and published results from fastest to slowest with placements categorized by “gender” and age, are not races, they seem to think it of the utmost importance that males must be able to register as “female” rather than simply not having their results publicly recorded and just running “for fun.”

Parkrun refuses to recognize how their policy allowing males to run as “female” is not only unfair to the runners who gain a personal sense of achievement from these runs but also deeply offensive, demeaning, and humiliating to female human beings who are deprived of the ability to compare their performances against those of their peers and whose collective shared experience of being female (entirely unique from that of the male) is deemed so insignificant that a simple “F” on a piece of paper written on a man’s whim and his love of fingernail polish override it entirely.