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Ada Macey never envisioned coming out on a megaphone.
But, as a parkrun coordinator, she was left with little choice.
Each Saturday morning, the 46-year-old would stand up in front of a crowd of people with a megaphone to welcome them to either the Chermside or Kedron course in Brisbane’s north.
“The very first thing you do is introduce yourself,” Macey says.
Macey says she avoided any fanfare, or lengthy explanation of what being transgender meant.
“It was basically just, ‘Hi, my name is Ada, a lot of you would’ve known me under my previous name … anyway, for those who don’t know, I’m transgender and my pronouns are she/her.
“I just kept rolling with what I was doing, kept the [normal] spiel going.”
While this might sound like a nightmare coming-out scenario for some, Macey says she felt at peace.
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“But, with parkrun, there was no sense of concern, because I knew it was a safe space. Not only did I not lose [anything], I gained something: an internal comfort and sense of finally being able to be who I am, surrounded by people.”
How Ada used running to deal with gender dysphoria
Several years earlier, Macey could barely have imagined such a scene.
She joined parkrun at 39 when she was pre-transition.
On a journey to get fit, she decided to take part in the couch-to-5km program, and found she took to running “like a duck to water”.
Left wanting more, Chermside parkrun fell into Macey’s lap.
“I had been toying with the idea of going to parkrun and then, amazingly, they opened one right where I ran every Saturday morning anyway,” she says.
“I joked to myself, ‘Well parkrun’s in the way, I may as well do it.’ So, yeah, I got involved and fell in love with it.”
Within a year, Macey had taken up the role of run director at not one but two parkruns: Chermside and Kedron.
“I had always seen running as an individual sport … but parkrun is a community,” Macey says.
“It’s not a running community [per se], but there is a community that focuses around the event. To see and be involved in that was like, ‘This is exactly what I needed.'”
In retrospect, Macey sees taking up running and joining parkrun as a process of “preparing for transition”.
“Running and getting fit was the first time I was able to actually feel proud of my body.”
Running was also Macey’s go-to strategy for dealing with gender dysphoria, a term used to describe the distress someone can experience as a result of the incongruence between their gender identity and the sex were assigned at birth.
“I’d always known there was gender stuff going on,” Macey says.
“But I hadn’t got to the point where I could admit to myself what was going on, let alone someone else.
Eventually, says Macey, that pressure translated into a stress fracture in her foot, which left her unable to run.
“It’s no coincidence that I got a running injury,” she says.
“And when running was taken off the table, that’s when I came out, [because] my coping mechanism had disappeared.”
Binary gender options ‘counter to our principle of inclusivity’, says parkrun
As Macey puts it, public discourse about gender diversity has changed significantly since her coming out five years ago, for better and for worse.
While there is growing awareness about what it means to be transgender or non-binary, for example, there has also been very public transphobic rhetoric, especially around the participation of transwomen in women’s sport.
For many sporting organisations, this has necessitated a re-think of their policies on diversity and inclusion, a process Macey’s transition helped parkrun get a head start on.
One of the first things parkrun sought expert advice on was its registration forms, which at the time included just the sex categories “male” or “female” as options for gender identity.
“The aim of parkrun is to ensure that our events are as accessible as possible for as many people as possible,” parkrun’s head of health and wellbeing, Glen Turner, says.
As a result, parkrun moved to include several additional categories, including “another gender identity” and “prefer not to say”.
Since that time, more than 5,000 Australian parkrun participants (out of a pool of 775,000) have elected to use one of those new categories.
One of the organisations involved in the consultation was Proud2Play, a not-for-profit focused on increasing LGBTQI+ engagement in sport, exercise and recreation.
According to the organisation’s chief executive, Christine Graner, the issue of what to do when collecting gender identity is one the most common her organisation is consulted on.
“The biggest problem with having only binary options on registration forms is that it’s an instant barrier to participation for people who don’t identify with the gender binary,” she says.
While parkrun chose to add two additional categories, Graner says her organisation typically offers two pieces of general advice.
“When we’re talking to sports about gender, our first question is, ‘Why are you collecting it? And what are you doing with that data?'”
Proud2Play’s second piece of advice is to ideally have an open box where people can nominate their own gender identity.
“That way, people can put, for example, man, woman, gender diverse, non-binary, whatever they choose,” Graner says.
Graner acknowledges that there are plausible reasons for collecting gendered data, including for grant applications, or where gendered categories remain.
‘A journey rather than a decision’
Despite not being a competitive event, participants at parkrun can still achieve “placings” by gender identity.
This presented a problem for Bathurst resident Claire Scott when she transitioned at age 42.
“It took even longer to own that I’m a woman. It was definitely a journey rather than a decision.”
Scott says that, when she began her transition at parkrun, she decided to change her gender marker — but not immediately to female.
Instead, she chose “prefer not to say”.
“It was kind of good [to have that option], in that it let me not be ‘masc’, but not be female ‘cos I wasn’t ready yet,” she says.
Having the additional categories to choose from also helped Scott avert other potential issues.
While taking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) radically slowed Scott’s running times, for example, there was still the issue of what to do with the times she ran prior to taking HRT.
Some of the times Scott ran prior to taking HRT would have put her in the women’s placings, a situation she was keen to avoid.
“I didn’t want to, retrospectively, be classified as having a ‘position’ in the women’s run,” Scott explains.
“So I really liked being able to change my gender marker [to something else] in a way that wouldn’t do that.”
‘It deprives us of our womanhood’
Scott recognises the irony of her story in the context of current discourse about transgender participation in sport — including FINA’s decision to effectively ban all transgender women from competition — and the idea that someone could be motivated to transition to take something away from cisgender women.
“The way the media talks about [transgender] people [in sport] is really unfair, because most [transgender] people I know are intimately attuned to ideas of fairness,” Scott says.
“Some of the most strident feminists are [transgender] women, because we’ve seen it from both sides [of the gender divide].”
The ban’s most harmful effects, Scott argues, won’t be at the elite level — but in community sport, where she and those such as Macey have found home.
“It encourages people to be more strident in their hostility to [transgender] women — because they feel as though they’ll be backed up by the authorities.”
In this context, Scott, who is also a volunteer at Lifeline, says she is thankful for the effort parkrun has gone to to make their policies as inclusive as possible.
“It really puts the strengths of parkrun front and centre, as a stark contrast to what’s happening elsewhere,” she says.
“I’m not worried about being excluded from parkrun, and it’s one of the reasons I recommend it to so many people at Lifeline — it’s a community, but one where you don’t have to engage a lot if you don’t want to.
“You can go there and wave and smile at the faces you recognise, you can get involved in volunteering, you can walk, you can run — but everyone’s welcoming, regardless.”
ABC Sport is partnering with parkrun to promote the benefits of physical activity and community participation.
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