At first glance, Parkrun is one of the most wholesome, inoffensive endeavours in the country.
The basic premise of it is brilliantly simple; everyone - young and old, fast and slow, male and female, fit and unfit - can turn out at 9am on a Saturday morning at hundreds of locations across Britain to run 5km.
In the 20-odd years since the event began, there’s been reports of Parkrun pulling people out of depression, getting individuals through grief, enabling people to find a community that had proven impossible to find elsewhere and encouraged countless men, women and children to turn their health around. Parkrun, it’s even been claimed by some, has ‘saved their life’.
The event has, indisputably, become a phenomenon, with literally millions of people having taken part over the years. It’s now not just a running event, it’s part of the fabric of British society, in the best possibly way.
Upon its inception 22 years ago, Parkrun’s founders were keen to stress that the event was not, in any way, shape or form, a competitive race. Instead, the entire point was to get people off their bums and active and it didn’t matter who was in first or tenth or one hundredth or last place each weekend.
What, then, could there be to dislike about Parkrun? How could anyone find an issue with an event that aimed, and succeeded, in getting the general population more active?
Yet Parkrun has now become one of the most controversial events in the country; over the past few years, it’s become a touchstone for the women’s rights versus trans rights issue.
The question of how and where trans-women fit into sport has been an issue for quite some time. Initially, the sporting world leaned towards inclusion resulting, in most cases, in trans women being permitted to compete in the women’s category, despite having been born male. Recently, though, the tide has turned, with many individual sports and, more recently, the International Olympic Committee, ruling that trans-women were not permitted to compete against women.
And this is where Parkrun has become not just a community event, but one of the most explosive talking points in the women’s rights v trans rights debate.
Parkrun has not followed the trend in ruling that individuals must compete in the category of their birth sex. Despite UK Athletics (athletics’ governing body in this country) ruling in 2023 that trans women are not eligible to compete in the women’s category, Parkrun has held firm. Trans women, the organisers of Parkrun maintain, can run as women.
What’s notable, initially, about this issue in the Parkrun sphere is that there’s even designated gender categories. In an event that was sold to everyone as being entirely non-competitive, it has, inevitably, morphed into an event that many, many people treat very much as a competitive event.
Runners sign-up each Saturday to their age categories, as well as their gender category. And there’s a lot of runners, although definitely not all, who are desperate to win their category.
When Parkrun began publishing on its website finishing times and leaderboards of gender and age groups, it’s hardly surprising that many of those running began to take it very (some would argue disproportionately) seriously. There were even sporadic reports of a Parkrun ‘world record’, with Scotland’s Andy Butchart one of the previous holders of said title with his finishing time of 13 minutes 45 seconds at one of the Edinburgh Parkruns in 2023 generating any headlines.
The leaderboards weren’t in themselves, the problem with Parkrun, even though this did go against the founding concept of it being a non-competitive event.
The problem came when trans-women began occupying leading places on women’s leaderboards.
This was, a significant group of women claimed, objectively unfair. Why should someone born a man, who’s benefitted from the plethora of physical male advantages that exist, push a women down the leaderboard?
So the campaign began to ensure that when signing -up for Parkrun, each runner had to enroll as whatever their birth sex was. Born a man? Then even if that’s not what you call yourself now then you should still have to sign into the male category, argued the campaigners.
But those who advocate for trans rights immediately pushed back, accusing the campaigners from women’s rights of being transphobic. Why should trans women, they asked, be excluded from Parkrun, which has the explicit aim of being one of the most inclusive community events in Britain?
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What’s happened now, and the way this debate around Parkrun has entirely exploded is remarkable, ridiculous and downright disheartening.
The accusation that anyone is trying to exclude trans women is entirely wrong. I’ve not seen a single person suggest that trans women should not only be included into Parkrun but welcomed. Of course trans women have just as much right as anyone else to run, jog or walk 5km every Saturday morning.
But the assertion that they should register as their birth sex - male - is entirely fair. Parkrun enforcing this rule would not exclude a single individual from the event. Every trans woman would still get the same finishing time and the same benefits of participating by registering in the male category as they would by registering in the female category. They just would not be included on the women’s leaderboards, which seems entirely fair given the overwhelming scientific evidence that being born male confers significant physical advantages, even after talking medication to reduce hormone levels of naturally-occurring hormones like testosterone.
Yet trans campaigners are refusing to accept this solution, and women’s rights campaigners are, reasonably in my opinion, refusing to back down in their assertion that women’s sport should remain, exclusively, for women.
There’s now even threats of legal action against Parkrun if they maintain their current stance of allowing trans women to compete as women.
The saddest part of this entire controversy is that no one wins here. Women’s sport should be, I believe, for women. But I also firmly believe that sport, as a whole, is for everyone.
No one should be excluded from sport whether they’re trans or gay or black or white or able bodied or disabled or whatever. Sport has overwhelming benefits for everyone. And Parkrun was, in its early days at least, the best example in this country of inclusive sport.
Fixing this would be easy; keep the women’s category for women but make sure it’s clear that Parkrun, as a whole, is open to everyone and anyone.
Parkrun is not elite sport and so it shouldn’t matter who comes where in the finishing stats. This message has been lost along the way somewhere, at least by some.
There is, most worryingly, the prospect that Parkrun doesn’t survive this.
And if Parkrun folds as a result of its organisers insistence to push against the rulings that almost all organisations within sport are now abiding by, this would be the biggest tragedy of all.
