“Climbing as a School for the Body”: Philosopher Hil Malatino’s Life in Transition
In Climbing, published this summer in the United States, Hil Malatino explores what 15 years of climbing have done to his relationship with his body, with other people, and with himself. A scholar of philosophy and gender studies, he brings transition, grief, class, and queer culture into the story to ask what climbing can reveal about the ways we move through the world.
Hil Malatino started climbing “primarily for fun.” Fifteen years later, it occupies enough of his life that he has written an entire book about it. Behind him during our video call, shelves packed with old books are a reminder that Malatino is also a professor of philosophy and gender studies at Penn State. Yet for nearly a decade, he never really stopped to ask why he kept coming back to climbing gyms and crags. Climbing, the title he chose for the book, was supposed to give him a way to ask that question without taking it too seriously. His mother had just died, and academic work had become nearly impossible. “I had total brain rot, basically,” he says early in our conversation. Writing about climbing was supposed to be “a fun detour side project.” But while the first draft was with his publisher, his father developed cancer and died a few months later. The book changed along with the person writing it. The body and gender remained at its center, but grief, class, queer community, and mortality entered the story too.
Failing Together
When Malatino takes friends climbing for the first time, he notices that some of them hate the experience. Falling, trying again, failing to do a move in front of strangers: for some people, that is enough to make sure they never come back. That very concrete discomfort is where the first chapter of Climbing, titled “To Failure,” begins. “You’re rarely ever failing privately when you’re climbing,” Malatino says. “You have to be comfortable letting people witness your body and your will falter or your bodily capacity not meet the intention you have for it.”
“Who has money to buy a ProMaster or a Sprinter?”
His complicated relationship with his body, of course, did not begin with climbing. As a teenager, Malatino learned that he was intersex: his puberty did not follow what doctors expected for someone assigned female at birth. A medical team suppressed his body’s primary natural source of testosterone and prescribed estrogen. In his 30s, he would instead begin taking testosterone as part of his transition. In between, he says, he mostly tried to distance himself from his body, including through alcohol and drugs. Climbing gradually forced him to do the opposite: pay attention to that body, understand how it moved, and notice what it could and could not do. A foot a few inches too low, a hip turning too soon, the pelvis in the wrong position: getting better requires learning to read exactly what your body is doing. Neither running nor long-distance cycling, which he also does, has produced the same kind of attention. “The way climbers talk about the body is totally different and much more obsessive and fine-tuned,” he says.
That attention has a darker side. It can turn into constant body monitoring, particularly around weight, and feed eating disorders. But climbing can also make one thing difficult to ignore: the same problem rarely has only one solution. A tall climber may skip a move that someone else breaks into several steps. One person muscles through a sequence; another uses flexibility or finds an entirely different method. Watch enough people climb and, as Malatino puts it, “you realize there’s no such thing as a normal body.”
That does not mean climbing has escaped its own physical ideals. Malatino remembers arriving at Miguel’s for the first time, the legendary pizza shop and climbers’ campground at Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. He looked around and wondered: “Is this like summer camp for hot adults?” He had never seen so many conventionally attractive, visibly fit people gathered in one place. Fifteen years later, he sees much more diversity in gyms and at crags, though climbing has hardly shed all of its body obsessions. “It’s still totally toxic sometimes, depending on who you’re talking to and what spaces you’re in,” he says.
“If people in my life want to see me, we basically have to be doing climbing together.”
He is similarly cautious about another familiar claim in climbing culture: that climbing is therapy. During his parents’ illnesses, Malatino would sometimes leave their bedside and go bouldering. Not because a boulder problem could solve cancer, but because a boulder problem could be solved. There was another hold to reach, a sequence to figure out, a problem with defined boundaries. Climbing, he says, is also “one of the few things that if I do it I’m too exhausted to obsess about the rest of it.” Asked whether that exhaustion is a form of care or simply a way to escape pain for a few hours, he does not see much value in drawing a clean line between the two. “Maybe it’s therapeutic, maybe it’s healing, maybe it’s avoidance, maybe it’s both of those things at once.”
His relationship with failure also connects directly to his experience of transition. Growing up queer or trans, Malatino explains, often means realizing that you do not fit the models of masculinity or femininity you have been given. That gap is frequently treated as a source of shame or humiliation. But once someone stops trying to hide it, Malatino argues, something else can emerge from it. “There’s a resilience that comes out of that experience with gender failure too.”
The Price of the Dream
At some point in our conversation, Spinoza ends up sharing space with the price of a camper van. The two subjects are not as far apart as they sound. The year Malatino discovered climbing, he was teaching his students a question posed by the Dutch philosopher and major rationalist thinker: What can a body do? He thought he would find the answer in books. Climbing gave him a practical version of the same question.
It also gave him a community. His first months as a climber involved learning a language: giving beta, the advice climbers share about how to do a move; talking about knee bars; discussing whether a hold was too humid to stick. From the outside, a conversation between climbers can be spectacularly boring. But learning that vocabulary also means beginning to enter the group: first understanding the conversation, then joining it, and eventually feeling at home.
Early in his climbing life, Malatino met Jamie Logan, a major figure in American mountaineering who was transitioning at the time. Logan taught him how to read a route: slow down before leaving the ground, anticipate the sequences, and understand how the moves fit together. The encounter mattered for another reason. Some of Malatino’s earliest lessons in climbing came from an older trans person at a time when people like Logan were still rare in his own world. In Climbing, those two stories do not become one, but they now run alongside each other. Learning to climb also meant entering a world where Malatino would meet other queer and trans people and build part of his community.
He found that again several years later through Queerclimbtastic, a queer and trans gathering at the New River Gorge that he helped organize for roughly seven years.
The point was not simply to make climbing more welcoming to queer and trans people. Those communities also brought their own skills with them. In the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, and after a long history of political violence, queer and trans communities had learned how to build solidarity in situations where taking care of one another could be a matter of survival. In a sport built around trust, belaying, and accepting risk, Malatino recognized some of the same culture of care.
“We were already very good at thinking about how to support one another in a risky environment,” he says. “There were like skills that carried over into climbing that were actually very finely honed elsewhere.” A rope can also bring together people who might otherwise have had little reason to meet. Without climbing, Malatino says, “I would have a lot less straight people in my life,” and probably fewer non-trans men as well. That does not mean climbing erases every social barrier. Class, in particular, is much harder to bridge.
American climbing still cherishes the dirtbag ideal: live on almost nothing, work only enough to keep climbing, reject conventional careers and consumer life. Malatino grew up with that mythology too, fascinated by climbers like Lynn Hill and Steph Davis and by their major ascents. But these days, even the fantasy of living cheaply can be expensive. Malatino and his spouse are both professors. Recently, they started wondering whether they could finally afford a van that would make climbing trips easier. “We were recently like, maybe we could buy a van now,” he says. “Like maybe that’s the thing we could afford at this point in our life.” Then they looked at the price of a Sprinter or ProMaster. “Absolutely not. Who has money to buy a ProMaster or a Sprinter?”
More than the van itself, Malatino is now interested in the trade-offs hidden behind the dirtbag myth. Some of his friends have moved to places like Lander or Squamish to live close to climbing. To make that possible, some accepted low-paying or part-time work, walked away from certain career paths, or decided not to have children. The image is one of a life liberated from ordinary constraints. Malatino sees something more complicated: a long series of very concrete choices. He spent years trying to “serve two masters,” his academic career and climbing. The result, he says, is that “if people in my life want to see me, we basically have to be doing climbing together.”
Trump, the Gym, and Deep Time
Malatino was in his 20s when he started climbing. Like plenty of climbers, he built his own pantheon: legendary ascents, styles he wanted to emulate, climbers whose lives seemed somehow larger than everyone else’s. Now in his 40s, he is more impressed by his friends.
The people who keep finding room for climbing alongside jobs, relationships, aging, and the ordinary constraints of life matter more to him than the mythology ever did. “I think that the scale on which I approach climbing is much less grandiose and much more down to earth now,” he says. These days, he cares more about climbing as an everyday practice than as spectacle.
That attention to ordinary lives also shapes the way he thinks about climbing politically.
During Donald Trump’s second presidency, Malatino says he has not seen the same normalization of far-right rhetoric in the gyms he frequents that he has seen in other parts of American society. In his view, years of work around inclusion, along with the climbing community’s environmental concerns, have helped create some resistance to that shift.
Those views exist, he says. But in the climbing spaces he knows, people still seem less emboldened to express them openly. “Feeling emboldened to say it out loud, I think, is not something I’ve witnessed in particular,” he says, “which is a relief and honestly very dissimilar from many other sectors of society.”
After talking about gender, class, queer communities, Trump, and wildly expensive vans, Malatino eventually brings the conversation back to something else entirely: rock. In the final pages of Climbing, he writes about deep time, the almost impossible-to-grasp spans over which water, wind, and the movement of the Earth shaped the stone where we spend a few hours placing our hands and feet.
Since his parents died, that scale has taken on a particular importance in the way he climbs.
If there is something genuinely healing about climbing for Malatino, it may be this ability to change scale—to place a human life inside a span of time far larger than itself. Climbing, he says, lets him become “very much in tune with the long timescale of the earth.” And that, more than anything else, can be therapeutic: “for sort of right-sizing our existences on the earth.”
