LGBTQIA+ in Climbing: Holding the Rope
- Matthieu Amaré
- 5 hours ago
- 6 min read
In 2026, 530 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills are moving through the United States, and trans people have become the top target of a hostile federal administration. In France, one in two LGBT+ people has experienced discrimination in a sports setting, and one in seven has quit a sport because of it. Climbing is not immune. During Pride Month, the question of allyship — actively standing with people who face discrimination — is running through the climbing community on both sides of the Atlantic.
Written with the help of Jay Bruneau-Bongard.
A trans flag, unfurled in the open air on El Capitan. That is what Shannon “SJ” Joslin, a ranger and biologist who had worked in Yosemite National Park for four and a half years, chose to do on their own time alongside Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmental activist known across the American outdoor community and beyond. A few days later, a criminal investigation was opened against them. On August 12, 2025, SJ was fired overnight. A new rule had just appeared in the park regulations, backdated to the day of the action. “When I was fired, it felt like losing the love of my life. I had never felt that kind of grief. I lay on the floor for two days,” SJ told Vertige Media.
The firing was not an isolated incident. Since Donald Trump’s reelection, 530 anti-LGBTQIA+ bills have been moving through the United States, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. Of those, 55 have already been passed, targeting trans rights in 16 states. The MAGA movement has made trans people — who, according to SJ, make up roughly 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. population — one of its main targets.
The Myth of the Free Space
One in two. That is the share of LGBTQIA+ people in France who say they have personally been targeted by homophobic or transphobic behavior in a sports setting, according to a 2022 Ipsos survey for the Fédération Sportive LGBT+, supported by the French Ministry of Sports. The same survey found that 46 percent of people in France had witnessed that kind of behavior, a number that rises to 73 percent among LGBTQIA+ people themselves. One in seven LGBTQIA+ people has quit a sport because of these experiences.
Mountain and climbing culture has its own features that can make these dynamics worse. A culture built around risk. Groups that often look and sound alike. A strain of macho behavior that still runs through some corners of the outdoor world. All of it can make discrimination harder to name and harder to fight. Climbing likes to sell itself as a free space, open to everyone, without hierarchy. That story deserves a closer look.
What SJ’s story reveals, beyond the firing itself, is how the climbing community responded when something unacceptable happened: mostly, with silence. After the flag action, SJ became an outcast. No more access to volunteer assignments. Friends turned away, afraid of blowback. A few local climbers defended them. The bigger names mostly did not. The reason says a lot: for too many people, Yosemite is too valuable as a backdrop for landing sponsorship deals to risk taking a public stand.
That silence is not neutral. It says something about what the climbing community protects, and what it leaves behind. Refusing to take a position in the face of discrimination allows that discrimination to keep working.
One thing becomes clear from stories like this: the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights is, first and foremost, led by the people directly affected. But in every era, that fight has also been strengthened by people who chose to stand with those most exposed.
See, Amplify, Act
Being an ally starts with seeing what is happening. LGBTQIA+ hatred does not always arrive as a direct attack. More often, it lives in the details: a joke tossed out at the end of a climbing day, the repeated use of the wrong name or pronoun for a trans person, the comfortable silence after an out-of-line comment, the total absence of LGBTQIA+ representation in magazines, club programs, and brand catalogs.
“The best way to grow representation is exposure. People don’t know what’s possible until they see someone who looks like them doing it”
Marian May Perez, co-founder of Rise Outside, in Climbing magazine
Seeing also means taking the time to learn. According to a guide published in November 2025 by the Born This Way Foundation, the organization co-founded by Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, more than one in three LGBTQIA+ young people experienced online harassment because of their identity in the previous year, and 60 percent reported chronic loneliness. Only one in three had access to spaces they saw as truly supportive. These numbers describe real people — people in our gyms, at our crags, in our clubs. Learning to recognize the mechanisms that push them out is a condition for acting usefully, not just acting around the problem.
In recent years, the international climbing community has produced stories that shift the frame. Lor Sabourin, a trans climber, is the subject of They/Them, a documentary portrait that presents their climbing and their identity without setting one against the other. Campbell Harrison, an openly gay Australian competition climber, has spoken publicly in a world where that kind of visibility remains exceptionally rare. Jordan Cannon, an American professional climber, organizes Arc’teryx Queer Ascent, an annual gathering for LGBTQIA+ climbers. Marian May Perez, co-founder of Rise Outside in New York, put it this way in Climbing: “The best way to grow representation is exposure. People don’t know what’s possible until they see someone who looks like them doing it.”
Those voices exist. Sharing those stories, recommending them — at the gym, at the crag, on social media — helps normalize forms of representation that mainstream climbing media still too often makes invisible. The impact is documented: according to the Born This Way Foundation, LGBTQIA+ young people who have access to genuinely supportive spaces report depression at roughly half the rate of those who do not — 28 percent compared with 53 percent.
In France, these kinds of stories are almost entirely absent from climbing media. That absence is not an accident. It is the result of editorial choices and institutional silences that have made certain experiences invisible for far too long.
The third lever may be the most effective, because it is within reach for everyone: act where you are. A climbing gym can state clearly that it is a safe space — a supportive place where marginalized people can feel secure without hiding who they are. A club can adopt explicit rules against discrimination and train staff and volunteers to enforce them. But a sign on the wall is not enough. What matters is concrete action: naming a staff contact people can go to if something happens in the gym, offering gender-neutral changing rooms to customers and club members, and making sure people know what will happen when a problem is reported. The more genuinely safe a space is, the more likely a climber is to speak up when an anti-LGBTQIA+ comment is made in front of them.
The Fight Goes On
Allyship is not built on grand statements. It is built through repeated, concrete choices in everyday spaces. Economic support for the organizations doing the work is part of that, too. In the United States, groups such as Flash Foxy, Queer Crush, and All Rise Outdoors — founded by climber Ashima Shiraishi — organize gatherings, mentoring programs, and inclusive climbing spaces. “Our gear sponsors allow us to offer sliding-scale programs — without them, we would have to charge three times as much,” Lou Bank of Flash Foxy told Climbing.
France has few national equivalents. Grimpe et Glisse, an LGBT+ association and member of the FFCAM, the French federation of alpine and mountain clubs, offers outdoor activities and is one of the rare initiatives working at the intersection of outdoor sports and LGBTQIA+ identities. It remains fragile, held up by volunteers. The Fédération française de la montagne et de l’escalade, France’s national climbing federation, does not currently have a publicly stated policy on LGBTQIA+ inclusion. Most clubs have no effective protocol for preventing or handling discrimination.
Still, models exist. Project Pride, founded in 2022 in Squamish, British Columbia, by kinesiologist Michelle LeBlanc, offers bouldering sessions for 2SLGBTQIA+ people — a Canadian acronym that includes Two-Spirit people — along with mentoring and partnerships with local gyms. Four years after its creation, the project has expanded to Calgary and Canmore, in the Canadian Rockies. Its model — nonprofit organizing, gear partnerships, sliding-scale pricing — can be adapted elsewhere.
SJ Joslin, for their part, found the strength to get back up. They decided to sue the U.S. federal government to defend the right of public employees to exercise freedoms protected by the First Amendment, and more broadly, to strengthen trans rights. On June 13, a federal judge dismissed SJ’s case. They are now awaiting a final decision from the Office of Special Counsel in August.
“Climbing happens on public lands that we all manage together. When the people who protect those lands are silenced, fired, or pushed out because of who they are, it affects everyone,” SJ told Vertige Media.
The crag is not outside the world. It is shaped by the same power dynamics, the same silences, and the same possibilities for resistance. Being an ally in the climbing community is not about checking a political box. It is about deciding, whenever the moment comes, where you stand.
