From The Climb to Kentucky, Cat Runner Is Building a Queer Future for His Sport

JON CHERRY

Cat Runner is Them’s 2024 Now Award honoree in Athletics. The Now Awards honor 10 LGBTQ+ vanguards at the forefront of culture and change today. Read more here.

Cat Runner is a study in stability. As a professional rock climber, his body can hold extreme levels of tension, maneuver through complex movements, and find solutions to challenges on the wall. In many ways, his work as an advocate for queer people in the sport is no different: Problems that may seem insurmountable, like the transphobic policies currently sweeping through state legislatures and athletics associations, can be tackled with enough persistence.

“There is arguably a selfish aspect,” Runner tells me of his organizing work. “A lot of the stuff that I do, I’m creating because it doesn’t exist and because I want it, or I would have wanted it.”

I first met Runner in 2022 at the Flash Foxy Climbing Festival in Bishop, California, a three-day event for women and genderqueer climbers to connect, share resources, and play outdoors. I remember watching Runner climb a stiff boulder problem, but I was most impressed by how kind and down-to-earth he was — a refreshing pairing of skill and humility.

Since then, the 26-year-old Runner has had a momentous few years: In 2022, he established the Queer Climbers Network, a database project aimed at helping LGBTQ+ climbers across the country find each other. In 2023, he co-founded Trans Climbers Belong in response to a discriminatory policy introduced by USA Climbing, the national governing body for the sport. He is also an established photographer and videographer. But he is perhaps best known as the winner of the HBO Max competition show The Climb, which aired last January.

Hosted by climate activist and actor Jason Momoa, alongside rock climbing industry legend Chris Sharma, the show presented 10 competitors with difficult scenarios ranging from bouldering to multi-pitch routes, stretching all the way from the crags of Majorca to Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert. Runner’s performance was exceptional; but what viewers didn’t see was his behind-the-scenes struggle to find meaning in the project amid a wave of anti-trans legislation in the U.S.

While taping The Climb amid the 2022 midterm elections, Runner watched as transphobic vitriol spread across the social media platforms where he maintains an active presence. He had to grapple with a legal agreement not to post while on set. “I eventually kind of broke the rules and just started sharing stuff that wasn’t going to give any context to what I was doing,” he says. But as the show continued, Runner often asked himself what he was doing filming a TV show about rock climbing, feeling that it wasn’t a meaningful project when so much harm was being done back home. “The closest thing in terms of terminology that I can equate it to is survivor’s guilt,” he tells me. “Of being able to have this moment and do something that’s really positive and enjoyable, but while the rest of your community is suffering or going through this extreme trauma.”

To try to regain his footing he called his best friend. “We talked about it on the phone, and she was like, ‘What you’re doing is important. If it doesn’t feel like it’s important now, it’s important. The representation that you’re presenting is important,’” Runner recalls. “It was reassuring.”

That wisdom from back home proved accurate: When the show aired, Runner quickly captured the attention of the audience. He became a visible marker for trans joy, not just due to his win, but because of how authentic he stayed to himself throughout the competition.

Among the heartfelt messages Runner received was a letter of gratitude from a parent whose child was moved by the closing segment of the show, in which he shared more of his personal story. “That’s me,” the child said. “He’s talking about me.”

Runner was raised in Louisville, Kentucky, a state that only last year passed a law outlawing access to medically necessary care for trans youth. But as heartbroken as Runner is over the legislative environment, and as frequently as he leaves the state for climbing, he remains deeply connected to his roots. “Kentucky is still very much home,” he says. “It’s a place that I want to return to, and I’m happy to return to. I love traveling, but it’s funny, when I’m driving back… my heart flutters when I see the skyline.”

When in Kentucky, Runner climbs in an area called the Red River Gorge (known colloquially within the community as “the Red”), which he describes with a mix of reverence and excitement. On the East Coast, it serves as a major climbing hub. “We are hilariously the home crag from Florida to Canada,” he jokes. But the Red, as Runner well knows, is much more than an outdoor gym; it’s a platform all its own. As big of an impact as he had through The Climb, it’s his stable connection to his local climbing scene that has made some of the most meaningful change. “I have people coming up to me saying, ‘I wasn’t sure about climbing’ or ‘I tried it once [and] I didn’t like it,’ but I tried it again because I saw you doing it,’” he says.

At his local gym in Louisville, Runner organizes the Queer & Trans Climbing Club, offering a discounted entry rate to LGBTQ+ people who need a safe environment. Climbing can be a scary endeavor as it is, purely on a physical level; the initiative helps ensure it doesn’t have to be emotionally daunting, too. Community members can access the gym knowing there will be others who can support them and share skills. Runner has watched as the same faces return over and over again. “Climbing usually becomes a part of your routine,” he observes. “It means a lot to see so many in the community who’ve restructured their schedule to be in the gym during those [meet-up] times.”

Climbing in the Red and mentoring at a local gym might sound like a dramatic change of pace from a televised globe-trotting adventure. Many might assume Runner would have tried to leverage his win to catapult himself into a frenzy of life-altering endeavors. In 2023, he was profiled by USA Today and Out magazine among many other outlets, both local and national. But he is explicit about wanting to stay grounded. “My life is very much the same,” he says. “We filmed in two parts. There was a break for the holidays, and I got off the plane, and the next morning I went to work. And then when I got home after filming [the second part], I went back to work.”

Since the show, Runner has made time for more climbing trips, but when he actually asks himself whether he wants to move away form Kentucky, he comes back to a quote from his favorite film, Juno, in which the titular protagonist, played by Elliot Page, says, “I never realize how much I like being home unless I’ve been somewhere really different for a while.”

Amid all his comings and goings, he remembers where his feet are planted. “There’s a lot of good memories here, fond memories here,” he says. “There’s a lot of comfort here. A lot of love.”

Runner’s rootedness has ripple effects. Over time, his local work has expanded to a national scale he might not have foreseen, but that he has handled with levelheaded determination.

Over the past few years, trans and nonbinary athletes like Runner have been fighting to continue competing in their respective sports, navigating a byzantine and often bigoted maze of shifting policies from both national and international governing bodies. In September 2023, USA Climbing announced its exclusionary Transgender Athlete Participation Policy, which would have established harsh barriers to entry for trans athletes, who were previously able to compete with simple documentation. The new policy required continual and recurring demonstration of hormone levels below a certain level for at least twelve months prior to competition which, in some cases, would apply beginning at age 12. That detail was especially startling for Runner. “We’re talking about minors’ bodies,” he stresses.

By October, the policy had been approved by USA Climbing and the repercussions would have been widespread. Runner answered the urgent call to action by co-founding Trans Climbers Belong along with other concerned advocates. The group posted a petition challenging USA Climbing to rethink their approach, quickly garnering thousands of signatures and spreading awareness about the policy’s unfair targeting of transfeminine athletes. By December, USA Climbing announced they would be “delaying the implementation” of the TAPP to listen to the concerns before revising the requirements. “Trans Climbers Belong is the first advocacy group to interact with a governing body of sport that published a policy that restricted access and then interacted with them and got that changed in a positive manner,” Runner deservedly boasts.

That victory is a testament to the grassroots nature of change — and the uniqueness of climbing. The activity itself is so demanding and often all-consuming that the need for solidarity is especially heightened. It may be you against the rock, but the right person holding the rope and a supportive group of people rooting for you can make all the difference. It’s no surprise that the same principles apply to Trans Climbers Belong. “It’s really important work,” Runner says, “and it can also be exhausting work before it’s rewarding. I’m lucky I’m not doing it alone.”

At once an unassuming powerhouse and a Taurus who craves creature comforts, Runner has modest dreams that mirror his values. When I ask what’s on his horizon, the answer is more of the same impactful, slow-building change that has defined his life in the South. His biggest aspiration is organizing a climbing festival for queer and trans folks in the Red. “It’s kind of astounding that we don’t have anything here, or that people aren’t making an effort to come and develop stuff here like that,” he says.

Currently, he is working through Queer Climbers Connect to help more LGBTQ+ people find each other in places as far ranging as Smith Rock in Oregon to the Adirondacks, but building a well-resourced community of queer and trans climbers below the Mason-Dixon is still a work in progress. “In the South, people leave because they have to, or they’re driven out, or there’s better opportunity or safer opportunity somewhere else,” he says. Compared to the Northeast and West Coast, Runner says, his region is “very far behind,” especially when it comes to offering the kind of affinity programming that helps introduce LGBTQ+ climbers to the sport.

But talking with Runner about this disparity doesn’t make me feel despondent so much as it feels like taking a deep breath, re-grounding myself, and considering how I can keep working to improve my own spaces. Runner sees climbing as a multi-faceted tool — something that can take an individual to great heights, but more importantly a method of building sustainable environments where people feel welcome. “For me, it’s always about celebrating queer and trans pride,” he says, “because those are the communities that I feel closest to.”

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Originally Appeared on them.