Bonding on the wall: How climbing became a favorite hobby among queer women in China

Indoor climbing has become an increasingly popular activity in China’s big cities, especially after it was included in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. While many of the sports in the country have a disproportionate number of male participants and fans, indoor climbing seems to hold particular allure for young women, especially queer women. According to a survey conducted in 2018, the male versus female ratio among Chinese climbers that year was about 3 to 2. In addition to getting a good workout, what do women climbers find appealing about the sport?

For HS, a Chinese woman who identifies as bisexual and requested to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, “climbing is more gender-friendly than many other sports.”

Now in her thirties, HS started to climb two years ago. At that time, she was in an all-women hiking collective, where half of the members were sexual minorities. The group was started by friends who enjoyed outdoor activities, which they realized were also effective tools for community-organizing: Navigating the rough mountainous environment together helped the members form a bond with each other, and when walking amid nature, members could freely discuss their personal experiences and reflections concerning gender and sexuality issues. The physical activity created a safe and inclusive space for straight and queer women, including HS.

Through her hiking friends, HS was introduced to sport climbing and quickly fell in love with it. While professional competitions are usually separated by gender, amateur climbing is generally gender-mixed. The sport appears to have relatively higher inclusivity for people with different body types and personal strengths, she said.

Take bouldering, for example. The sport involves using a sequence of pre-set holds and creating routes — known as “problems” in the sport — to stay on the wall and move around. The wall’s height is usually 15 feet or lower, and includes multiple routes with different difficulty ratings. Without ropes, climbers are protected by mats when they fall.

Bouldering is as much mental as it is physical. When climbing up the same gym’s bouldering wall, people can develop their unique “problems” based on their idiosyncratic skills and strengths. “Since we need to elevate our body when scaling a wall, a muscular but heavier person does not have too much advantage compared with a less sturdy but thinner climber,” HS said. “Depending on the route, women or shorter people may have more of an advantage.”

HS’s observations resonate with the experiences of another thirtysomething woman who calls herself Emily. After her introduction to indoor climbing last year, Emily has now become a regular visitor to her local climbing gym. She is not always an athletic person, and remembers herself being “quite bad” at sports as a kid. “I was not able to do pull-ups when I first started climbing. I think my physical strength was somewhere around or below the average,” she said.

Echoing the 2018 survey, Emily also noticed a higher proportion of women and queer participants in the sport, especially compared with conventional male-dominated physical activities. Part of the reason, she opined, is the newness of the sport in China. “It has not been dominated by men yet,” she remarked.

Another important factor is the more accommodating environment for beginners in comparison to sports such as basketball or soccer, where a stronger sense of hierarchy is often built between players of different skill levels. “There are different levels of climbers, but they are also working on different levels of routes,” Emily said. “A newbie doesn’t necessarily encounter more frustrations on an easy route, and the advanced climbers I know are quite humble. After all, they have fallen off from the wall so many times. This is what makes me feel comfortable about the sport. It is different from, say, playing badminton with a person who is much better than you. When making progress on the wall next to a high-level climber, I feel a sense of equity between us.”

“People are generally quite supportive,” Emily added. “When you climb in a new gym, you will hear strangers saying encouraging words to you. And when you need help, they love to share their tips and strategies with you.”

It is not only in China that climbing is becoming a social activity. A New York Times article describes the climbing gym in the U.S. as probably “one of the last urban locales where talking to strangers is encouraged.” These conversations happen during the rest sessions between climbs, when people are resting and sharing their “beta” — solutions for ascending the route — with each other.

This friendly environment forms a sharp contrast to the conventional fitness classes that Emily used to attend, where she met a few instructors who routinely made body-shaming comments. She considers it a strategy used to establish authority and secure customers, by making use of the prevalent feeling of anxiety among women over their body image. “But those experiences really discourage me from doing physical exercises,” she said. “It is the affirmative comments I receive from the instructor and other climbers that gives me more confidence to stay in this sport.”

But for a podcast she hosts called 野生芝士 (yěshēng zhīshì) — WildCheese — Emily shared her thoughts on the sport’s accessibility issues in an episode titled “Is climbing a gender-friendly sport?”

She said that she was struck by the age difference between male and female climbers in the gym: the younger group is disproportionately women, and the relatively older group is predominantly men. In other words, middle-aged women are not so visible. “You have to devote quite some time, including the time to travel to the gym. Compared to sports such as jogging, this could be inconvenient and even difficult for women who need to fulfill family responsibilities,” she said.

Another more obvious factor that prevents people from participating in the sport is the financial cost. Indoor climbing itself is an expensive sport in China. Emily pays about 700 yuan ($101) for a 10-pass punch card, while a 10-time course package she previously purchased cost 2,000 yuan ($290). Then there is the cost of necessary equipment such as climbing shoes and ropes. As such, “most of the young women in the gym are very well-educated,” she said, a pattern corroborating the above-mentioned 2018 survey, which found that more than 73% of regular climbers have a Bachelor’s or higher degree. (For reference, only 9% of the 25- to 64-year-olds in China hold a Bachelor’s or higher degree, according to new data released this year.)

Nevertheless, both HS and Emily agree that climbing provides an inclusive space for certain marginalized people. HS shared a story about a lesbian couple in her gym: “We have a women-only WeChat group. It was initially started after the gym initiated a discount policy for women climbers who come in pairs, but we then began to chat about climbing and other topics in the group. One day, a group member publicly came out by specifying the gender of her partner as female. And it turned out her girlfriend is also a gym member and a friend of mine — they came to know each other through climbing in the gym.”

Other LGBTQ stories:

Russia arrests Chinese LGBTQ blogger for violating so-called same-sex ‘propaganda’ law (CNN)

A Chinese national was arrested in Russia after posting videos on social media that document his life with a same-sex partner. According to the lawyer representing the person, the blogger is accused of spreading content that depicts “non-traditional sexual relations,” a behavior that violates the legal ban on so-called LGBT “propaganda” in Russia. The law was first passed in 2013, with its scope being expanded last November by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

How LGBTQ content built, then vanished from, China’s streamers (Sixth Tone)

Wang Shuaishuai, an assistant professor at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University’s Department of Media and Communication, reflects on the economic aspect underlying the growth and decline of LGBTQ representation on China’s streaming platforms in the past few years. He argues that the past acceptance was at best “speculative,” with the media giants using LGBTQ content to make a profit. And the more recent decline is not so much a result of a cultural war against LGBTQ people as much as a result of the state’s increased regulation over the internet platform economy in general.

Transgender activists urge the Hong Kong government to establish a gender recognition act (G點電視)

On March 31, the International Transgender Day of Visibility, three Hong Kong transgender rights advocacy groups submitted a co-signed petition that urges the local authorities to introduce a law that recognizes transgender people’s legal rights. In February, a transgender man won a legal challenge in Hong Kong that sought to remove full sex reassignment surgery as the prerequisite for sex change on the ID card.

Queer China is our fortnightly round-up of news and stories related to China’s sexual and gender minority population.