Please Don’t Require Nonbinary Runners to Select a Binary Division

Hello! I’d love to offer some feedback as a nonbinary runner. Having to choose a “backup division” of male or female and not having the opportunity to opt out of that is really invalidating. Also, when I go to sign up for a race that doesn’t have a nonbinary category, I sometimes don’t find out until I’m already registered that they used the default to Female. This is super problematic. I know you are trying to make things more inclusive by having the nonbinary category and I appreciate that. But having to select a default binary gender, and then getting registered as that gender without warning is not cool. Is this something you all would consider amending? Thanks for considering.

Hi! I’m sorry to hear about this scenario. It makes sense that this would be frustrating, and I would love for us to find a better way to handle it. If all events supported non-binary categories we could make an easy system-wide change. In the meantime, I wonder if there’s a way to communicate these changes better so that while still not ideal a change like that would at least not come as a surprise. We welcome ideas and will definitely consider possible improvements. We plan to redesign our registration experience soon, so this kind of input comes at a good time to potentially redo how things are done with registration. Thank you for sharing your experience and ideas, and we hope to make it better.

Just a follow up on this. I want to confirm that we are working on a redesign that will include much better handling of athlete identity data. Doing so requires significant but important work, so these improvements will take some more time to land. Expect these and other exciting changes to be part of our releases later this year.

Just to share here as well – it would be good to have transparency around which race directors or races have specifically disabled the reporting of nonbinary runner results. I have been told this is a choice that RDs opt-in to and choose to report nonbinary runner results specifically as a binary division. Otherwise, Ultrasignup could make the choice that regardless of RD preference, a nonbinary runner always shows as nonbinary, regardless of whether the division was supported on race day or whether there was a nonbinary podium, etc.