Why Did USA Climbing Just Ban Trans Women From All Events?

Liam Hurlburt was afraid to win.

On a sweltering Saturday last August in El Paso, Texas, she stepped onto the black mats of the Sessions Climbing and Fitness climbing gym. A nondescript house beat pulsed through the building. She faced the crowd with a smile and reached into her red chalk bag. It was the final round of Crossroads, the annual bouldering competition at Sessions.

When the announcer yelled, “Go,” Hurlburt spun to the wall with a brush and scrubbed at the slab problem’s footholds. At first, she struggled to balance onto a sloping volume and perform a leg-twisting back step. On her fourth attempt, she slammed to the mat, casting up a poof of chalk. Somehow, she held her balance on the fifth go. From there, she climbed opposing side pulls to the top. She dropped and waved to a whooping crowd.

“One more time for Liam!” bellowed the announcer. “Let’s put our hands together and make some noise!” Hurlburt hurried back to the isolation area, trying to smother a smile.

Hurlburt, a 28-year-old trans woman, was particularly anxious about the prospect of doing well. “I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’” she remembers. “I’m about to literally get on stage as an openly out trans woman competing in finals. That felt really scary.” Her first-place win at a recreational comp the previous year had resulted in weeks of hate emails and texts, and she didn’t want to repeat that experience. She just wanted to climb.

“Going into it, I was like, do I actually want to try my hardest?” she says. “Do I actually want to be a contender? Because I was worried about pushback. This is Texas. It’s not my home gym … I didn’t feel like it was entirely permissible for me to win.”

For the past 18 months, USA Climbing has worked hand-in-hand with transgender climbers to develop an inclusive policy that would allow a path for competitors like Hurlburt to participate in the category that matches their gender identity. By late July, this policy was 95% complete. Then the organization made a screeching U-turn.

On July 22, USA Climbing announced that due to President Trump’s Executive Order, trans women would be banned from all sanctioned events. “The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) recently updated its Athlete Safety Policy, requiring all National Governing Bodies to comply with Executive Order 14201,” USA Climbing wrote in an email to its members. In effect, this update prohibited transgender women from competing in all women’s categories at USA Climbing events.

“This isn’t USA Climbing’s desired policy,” says Marc Norman, the CEO of USA Climbing. He emphasizes that the USOPC could decertify USA Climbing if it doesn’t comply with the new directive to align with President Trump’s Executive Order 14201, which specifically targets trans female athletes.

With this ban set to begin in October, gym owners, coaches, climbers, and USA Climbing officials have some important decisions to make. What will the world of indoor competition climbing look like, for everyone involved?

Why we don’t see many trans women in climbing

Indoor climbing has not seen a transgender female athlete participate, much less dominate, the women’s competition at an elite level. At the time of this article’s publication, zero openly trans women in the U.S. have competed in an IFSC World Cup, a National Championship, an Olympic event, or any competition in the USA Climbing Elite Series.

USA Climbing, which had almost 19,000 members at the end of 2023, was not able to provide an estimate for how many trans women compete today, but a member of their policy-writing group estimates “dozens, but not hundreds” climb across all age divisions, including the Paraclimbing Series and Youth Series.

Vera May, a trans woman and New York-based climber who formerly coached at USA Climbing events herself, puts the number below 20 people total. “I have not seen proof there were more than 10 or 20 trans feminine climbers in USA Climbing, youth or adult, in any capacity,” she says. “If you gathered the 20 best trans women rock climbers in the world in a room, I would be in that room, and I cannot even compete against the 50 best 11-year-old girls. Nikki Smith is astounding; Lu [Gondeim de Alencastro] is my favorite climber alive … but on the whole, trans women that climb above 5.12 or V6 are extreme outliers.”

May also suggests that blocking testosterone and increasing estrogen—the two main components to feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT)—contribute to this trend. Trans women, she says, become disadvantaged in climbing during HRT “because now, we just have really heavy bones and no testosterone. After being on HRT for two years, it’s like building muscle and getting stronger is actually impossible because my bones are so heavy and my muscles don’t work.” She adds that people should question if trans women actually have any sort of physiological advantage over cis women in comp climbing.

Hurlburt, who completed feminizing HRT in 2020, remembers not wanting to start her medical transition because she knew that the hormone therapy would make her weaker. “I literally can’t dyno anymore,” she recalls. “Before transition, I had a surplus of power and would just muscle through things. Post-transition, I don’t have that power and that fast-twitch muscle mass especially.”

A “groundbreaking” policy is shelved

When Kristen Fiore got USA Climbing’s email, she wasn’t surprised, but she was disappointed.

Fiore is a Vermont-based climber and a cofounder of Trans Climbers Belong (TCB), an advocacy group that sprung up in October 2023 in response to USA Climbing’s new Transgender Participation Policy. This policy mandated that trans female climbers provide medical records for at least one year indicating that their testosterone levels are below five nanomoles per liter, which is 50% lower than the maximum testosterone levels allowed by the International Federation for Sport Climbing (IFSC).

The new rules drew enormous criticism from trans activists and allies. “You’re saying that you need a 12-year-old to be on gender-affirming hormone therapy for at least a year,” says Cat Runner, another TCB cofounder. “In 24 states, that’s not legally accessible to them.” (That number is now 26).

After coordinated backlash by TCB and trans allies, USA Climbing paused their new policy in November 2023, just two months after it was released. For their second attempt, the organization met with TCB members, collected survey feedback, and launched listening sessions hosted by trans facilitators. Fiore herself joined the Transgender Athlete Participation Policy Revision Group to help craft a new set of regulations. Nearly a year of deliberation followed, during which Fiore says USA Climbing made “so much progress.”

The July 22 email struck a heavy blow toward the goal she and her colleagues had been working toward for 18 months. According to Fiore, the trans participation policy they’d been developing was “95 percent done,” and only needed board approval. However, now that the USOPC has laid down a blanket ban, the policy Fiore helped negotiate will be shelved indefinitely.

“One of the things that’s going to get me really emotional is the fact that there were some really good things in this [policy],” Fiore tells Climbing. “I really believe this would have been one of the best policies that any national governing body has ever created. To invite trans and intersex athletes to the writer’s table is groundbreaking. That’s part of what makes this so heartbreaking.”

She declined to share details of the policy’s clauses, citing a non-disclosure agreement with USA Climbing. Norman disclosed that the policy was “quite detailed” and that it “allowed a path for participation” for trans female climbers.

“My body is shaped like a lot of other women’s bodies”

Hurlburt didn’t grow up as a competition climber. In fact, pre-transition, she tried a few local competitions and recoiled from them. “In the men’s category, it … felt very macho and ‘I’m going to prove that I’m better than you,’” she says. “It felt very competitive and antagonistic and it just wasn’t fun.”

But when she finally gathered the courage to pull herself out of a dysphoria-induced depression and start HRT, she quickly returned to the sport she loved. “I hardly did anything for six months,” she says. “Climbing was the last thing to go and the first thing I started up with when I got out of that hole.”

As she progressed through her transition, Hurlburt found stoke and support in other female climbers—and found herself actually enjoying competitions. Competing alongside other women felt more like a community atmosphere, with an “us versus the routesetters” mentality.

Being around other female climbers also helped Hurlburt push back on lingering feelings of dysphoria. “A lot of athletic women tend to be more on the masculine side,” she says. “Especially early in transition, my body is shaped like a lot of other women’s bodies because I’m a climber. If I’m in the mirror and feeling like my shoulders are too big, I’m like, no, my shoulders are big because I fucking climb.”

Making the Crossroads finals was particularly memorable for Hurlburt. “It was really cool getting to climb in front of a live audience,” she explains. “For me, it was the lighting that stood out. The dramatic lighting, the music, someone announcing your moves. It was really special.”

When she flashed Problem 2, however, she realized that she could win—and panicked. Back in isolation, Hurlburt apologized to her fellow competitors. They refused to accept her apology. “They said, ‘You’re going to try your hardest’,” she remembers. “They said they wanted to see these routes get sent.”

Can USA Climbing fight the USOPC’s orders?

“At this point, there’s no path toward challenging what the administration believes the Executive Order spells out,” says Norman. “What we’ve seen is that the administration is quite clear on what it wants. We’re chartered by the USOPC and the federal government, so we’re required to comply.”

The consequence for non-compliance? The immediate loss of High Performance funding and decertification as the national governing body for climbing. By the time any sort of legal challenge could gain headway, he predicts that the USOPC would essentially set up a new USA Climbing to oversee the sport and follow the ban.

However, it’s still possible that USOPC’s decision to ban trans women could be challenged in court. The Ted Stevens Act, a 1978 law that officially established the U.S. Olympic Committee, says that a sports organization is only eligible to be certified as a national governing body if it “does not have eligibility criteria … that are more restrictive than those of the appropriate international sports federation.”

In other words, since USA Climbing’s outright ban on trans women is more restrictive than the IFSC’s current trans participation policy, the ban might violate the Ted Stevens Act. According to the Associated Press, the Trump administration has anticipated this challenge and has already provided a free, detailed legal brief to the USOPC to help defend the ban in court. Such a case would only arise if and when a qualified trans female athlete is explicitly barred from an Olympic Games or world championship.

Trans athletes in climbing versus other sports

Before the USOPC’s ban on trans women, the International Olympic Committee published  guidelines for international and national governing bodies on how to regulate transgender participation in sports.

One of these guidelines defines a “disproportionate advantage” as “one that is so large that no other athlete competing in a contest will have a reasonable chance of winning.” The IOC urged International Federations of Sport and National Olympic Committees to avoid placing any restrictions on athletes based on perceived disproportionate advantage simply because of their transgender status. Instead, they wrote, any restrictions should be based only on robust, peer-reviewed evidence.

USA Climbing—and, more accurately, the USOPC—is far from the first organization to disregard these guidelines. With the Trans Legislation Tracker marking anti-trans legislation at an all-time high, international governing bodies have increasingly been willing to ban first, then check the evidence later. For example, trans women have been banned from the women’s competitions in darts and chess, activities that don’t easily justify gender divisions in the first place.

Running, however, is one example of a sport that has a well-defined performance gap between male and female athletes. The average Olympic male runner runs 10.7% faster than the average Olympic female runner. Neither the 100-meter dash nor the marathon have a single female runner in the top 2,000 competitors. Furthermore, several sex-linked biological features explain this particular performance gap, including muscle mass and hemoglobin levels. This evidence for a sex-linked performance gap doesn’t imply that trans women should be banned from participating, but it does warrant a closer look at what fair competition looks like.

Climbing, however, lacks such a justification. In fact, compared to running, climbing’s gender performance gap barely exists. Only three men in the world (Adam Ondra, Seb Bouin, and Jakob Schubert) have redpointed a sport route with a higher grade (5.15c) than the top-redpointing woman (Brooke Raboutou) has. Only two men (Ondra and Alex Megos) have onsighted a route with a harder grade (5.15d) than the top-onsighting woman (Laura Rogora) has. The hardest boulder climbed by a man is V17; the hardest climbed by a woman (Katie Lamb) is V16. Several free climbing milestones, including the Nose free-in-a-day ascent and the crack climb Meltdown (5.14d), were established by a woman more than a decade before a man successfully repeated them.

Given that there are simply more male climbers than female climbers, it’s not surprising that men are ahead in the record books. In a 2016 Climbing survey of more than 3,000 female rock climbers, 78% said they believe that women will climb harder grades than men at some point. And one of the only peer-reviewed studies on climbing’s gender performance gap centers around why the gap is so small compared to other sports.

Socially, the climbing community seems to have accepted that women can be nearly as strong as the men. For example, two-time Olympic gold medalist Janja Garnbret and her coach have both speculated that Garnbret could possibly win the lead climbing events in the men’s category.

“I did try some of the men’s [lead] routes, and I did pretty well,” she told Magnus Midtbø in his recent video, “I Got Destroyed by the World’s Best Female Climber.” (She added, “But a comp is a comp, you know. Pressure and everything still plays a role.”) Garnbret’s coach also said that he thought she could win.

Their predictions alone don’t prove that Garnbret would succeed—we’d need a special livestream for that. Nor do they eliminate the fact that men hold most of the firsts. But they do highlight an important question: In a sport where men and women can challenge each other at the highest levels of climbing, is it possible to draw a line and say that a trans woman is “too strong” for the female category?

Privacy concerns with a “woman” test

One question USA Climbing has not yet answered is how their new rule can be implemented without violating athletes’ medical privacy.

Fiore, for one, believes that there is “no appropriate way” to figure out if a competitor is trans. “I know this term gets thrown around, but it turns into a witch hunt,” she says. “It turns into, ‘You don’t fit the idea of what I imagine a woman looks like, and therefore I’m going to accuse you. How do you prove that someone is or isn’t trans without deeply invasive medical records? This is why all women are harmed by these policies.”

In Hurlburt’s experience, competing as a trans woman has involved offering up her own medical records to strangers. At one local competition a couple years ago in New Mexico, the gym owner asked Hurlburt to provide testosterone results to comply with USA Climbing’s now-rescinded policy. As a pre-med student who works in labs, Hurlburt had the ability to order her own tests. “I agreed to comply just because it was easy,” she says. But later on, she ran into insurance issues because “insurance doesn’t want to cover more testing than necessary.” Her HRT plan only required testing once a year, but USA Climbing’s policy, at the time, required testing every six months. “That’s a significant financial burden because these tests can cost $200 out of pocket,” she says.

While Hurlburt was willing to provide medical records on request in the past, she is deeply concerned about the fact that USA Climbing isn’t HIPAA-compliant. Therefore, USA Climbing has no obligation to shield athletes’ medical information from law enforcement. Since, as she explains, “gender-affirming care is increasingly being criminalized,” submitting private information could put trans climbers at risk of harassment, arrest, and prosecution in some states, “especially if the organizers are less than supportive of the trans athlete’s eligibility to compete.”

USA Climbing doesn’t yet know how they will navigate athlete privacy with the new ban. Currently, the organization does not verify the chosen sex categories of any participants. Norman says that USA Climbing is still seeking guidance from the USOPC on whether additional documentation will be required for registration. All U.S. national governing bodies have been ordered to submit a new, more restrictive trans athlete participation policy to the USOPC, but Norman hopes that the USOPC offers a standardized one that national governing bodies can adopt. In response to concerns that the ban on trans women could turn into a witch hunt against any woman who doesn’t fit a mold, he tells Climbing that’s an “ongoing concern.”

“More than anything, we need additional guidance from the USOPC,” he emphasizes.

USA Climbing plans to release details of the trans female participation ban in October, before the start of the 2025 Youth Series.

What happens next?

Fiore, for one, wants to finish the more inclusive, nearly-complete trans participation policy instead of just abandoning it. “One of the things that I hope, expect, and believe that [USA Climbing] will do is finish out this policy … so that the moment this gets challenged by some court or judge, they have a good policy to put in place.”

Norman tells Climbing that he will leave that decision to the writing group. He also confirms that athletes who speak out against the ban will not face any corrective action from USA Climbing. “They can express their personal views,” says Norman. “Of course, we would hope that they would be aware enough to understand the nuance … We may correct if they’re misstating the facts, but they’re definitely free to share their personal opinions.”

While USA Climbing is unlikely to lift the ban unless the USOPC changes course, the new restriction does not apply to local competitions. Gym owners and coaches can continue working with trans female climbers in both recreational and elite programs. May, who has coached trans climbers in New York, says that people with institutional power need to step up. If she encountered a trans girl in the climbing gym, she would “do anything” to keep her in the program. “The social development and practice and team-building was 10 million times more important than competition,” she insists.

Hurlburt’s own story illustrates why May is right: community support matters. When Hurlburt was doing well in the Crossroads finals and feared being attacked for it, the other female competitors noticed her anxiety—and surrounded her with encouragement.

“The other girls in iso[lation] emotionally patched me up,” Hurlburt says. “Like, ‘No, you’re getting onto that damn stage. You’re going to do your best. We will accept nothing less of you.’ They put me back together. That was a really amazing moment.”

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