Mountaineer Erin Parisi Stands Tall on the World’s Highest Peaks for Transgender Visibility is Closer Than Ever to Making History Climbing the Seven Summits
by Heather Cassell
Mountaineer Erin Parisi started 2022 off right. She concurred her fifth peak summiting Aconcagua in Argentina planting the light blue, pink, and white flag at the top.
Erin, 45, is the first transgender woman to set her eyes on summiting all seven summits around the world. She has summited and planted the trans pride flag designed by Monica Helms on Mount Kosciusko in Australia, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mount Elbrus in Russia, and she had just completed Mount Vinson in Antarctica right before climbing Aconcagua.
“We really take pride in putting the pink, blue and white up there,” she told the Washington Blade. “I climb these summits just to kind of remind myself and remind the world that you can be yourself and you can enjoy the things you enjoy. You don’t have to make a choice.”
Climbing Kilimanjaro was her second time. She first summited the African mountain before she transitioned from a man to a woman.
“I have been trying to train and get to the tops of the highest mountain on every continent: Seven Peaks, seven summits, seven continents,” she told the Blade from her hotel room after returning to Chile’s capital city, Santiago, which is close to the mountain, on New Year’s Day.
Climber Dick Bass pioneered the feat of climbing the Seven Summits in 1985.
Erin trained for more than three years and at times has missed important holidays and moments away from her family in Colorado. At the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, the climb to Aconcagua summit took her away from her wife, Allison, and their nine-year-old child, Alyx, for Christmas, New Year’s, and her own birthday.
She requested to use only their first names to protect the family’s privacy and safety.
“I just finished Antarctica, which is an extraordinarily difficult climb as far as logistics, as far as dealing with the weather and the environment, a mountain that’s only been climbed 2,000 times before,” she said.
Falling in Love with the Great Outdoors
Erin has been an avid climber since she was 6-years old. She started her quest to climb all seven of the world’s tallest peaks in 2018. She completed three of the seven summits in just six months. Her stride was stalled by the global pandemic in 2020, but with two more summits under her belt, it appears she got back up to speed in 2021.
Erin’s Aunt Beth, who also identified as a part of the LGBTQ community, foster her love of the outdoors, she told Westword. Aunt Beth, who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, watched out for the transgender youth during her visits West from the Buffalo suburb, Clarence, in New York, where she grew up with her three brothers and a sister. The two set off to the Rocky Mountains of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, and to Canada. They skied, hiked, and enjoyed nature. Erin’s Aunt Beth taught her the healing power of nature as a “valuable outlet for self-meditation and healing.”
Beyond those trips to New Mexico, family vacations consisted of road trips and camping in the Allegheny Mountains bordering the Eastern United States and Canada, she told Westword. There she ran free jumping in lakes and exploring the woods.
Climbing Toward the Light
Erin believed from childhood, “once people transitioned, they move away, cut ties and start over,” she explained to Westword about the narrative she carried in her head.
“The idea was just to blend in and not be seen, heard or talked about at all. You can’t do that if you’re keeping ties to your family,” she said.
Lightning struck during college when she knew she had to get away. The State University of New York at Buffalo where she studied business and economics was too close to home.
Denver had everything she wanted, she told Westword. Its size provided anonymity. There were resources and health care for transgender people along with an established LGBTQ community. It was close in proximity to the Rocky Mountains and Aunt Beth.
Erin arrived in 2002 and fell in love with Denver and the Rocky Mountains. There, she developed her lasting passion for mountaineering, mountain biking, and backcountry skiing.
Erin loves the “variation you see going from the base to the summit,” she said noting the diversity of ecosystems that can be explored from the desert to the high-alpine tundra within a matter of hours.
“The more you explore, the more you realize the differences as you cross one ecosystem to another,” she said.
Growing Into Herself
Transitioning was on her mind when she departed Buffalo for Denver, but she continued living in the closet for 12 more years, she told Westword.
Masculinity and gender haunted her, even in the great outdoors on the trail and skiing in the backcountry where she found the most time and space for introspection. She finally came out as a transgender woman eight years ago, but that was just another new beginning and a challenge.
She described people in the suburbs pulling their children away from her during her transition from a man to a woman.
“It hits you right in the heart,” she said. It didn’t help her embrace her gender and sexual orientation. Neither did her then-marriage falling apart. However, in an unexpected irony, she found acceptance with her family who took the news of her transition well.
Erin struggled with her gender identity and suffered from being an outsider even with Aunt Beth’s support. She drew in negative images of transgender people in the media and believed her family wouldn’t accept her. She was dead wrong.
“I ended up being the one who was wrong. I implied to my family that they wouldn’t accept me. That’s what I thought of their level of tolerance, and I missed the mark,” she told Westword.
Erin’s confidence began to grow. She set out on her first real mountaineering trip after transitioning climbing Australia’s Mount Kosciuszko in 2018. It was a success.
“It was everything I needed,” she said. “It was an escape from my divorce and the first time I had my new passport — and it was working. The whole thing was amazing.”
Her high was brought down when a group of college kids beat her up outside of a taco shop near her home and who took her dog. Her dog was tied up waiting for her outside the restaurant. Erin’s dead name, transgender people’s given name before they transition, was still on the tag. She was outted.
Erin escaped the assault, ran home, and called the police and the taco shop. By the time police arrived on the scene, her assailants were gone.
Pushing Past Fear
The attack weighed on her as she set her eyes on Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for her second time, this time as a transgender woman going into a highly homophobic and transphobic country.
Furthermore, she used the same guides that she previously hired for the climb years before. She told the guides her old self was a cousin who referred her to them. The guides remembered her pre-transition self’s nickname. It jarred her.
“It’s almost counterintuitive,” Erin told Westword. “Here I am wanting to stand on the highest mountains and tell the world I’m not afraid to be who I am, and then I go to places like Tanzania and realize it’s still not a possibility.”
She pushed through her fear and climbed the second mountain of the Seven Summits arriving at Kilimanjaro’s summit on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2018.
Erin walked again into the danger zone to summit Mount Elbrus in the Chechnya region of Russia three months later. Global outcry over Chechnya’s so-called “gay purge” had been making headlines regularly around the world for more than a year when she summited the mountain in June 2018.
“In my life, climbing these mountains is about resilience,” Erin said. “I was beaten down and lost some things in my life, but still, I kept climbing.”
Her journey to be the first transgender woman to summit all seven peaks was captured in the short film, “TranSending: Journey Into Self-Discovery,” produced by by Merrell and directed by Marin Hart was released May 8, 2020.
Journey to Be the First
Five mountains down and two more to go, Erin has her eyes set on Mount Denali in Alaska. The North American mountain’s peak is 20,310 feet above sea level and has eluded her twice. The global pandemic postponed the original trip scheduled to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the first Pride march, on June 28, 1970, in 2020. In 2021, she attempted to scale the mountain, but weather conditions and an injury thwarted her team and her from reaching the summit last May.
“Last year, we got flattened by wind,” said Erin, who was disappointed that neither she nor anyone on her team was able to reach the summit due to those conditions and injuries. “I want to go back and have a little chat with Denali.”
Erin had broken her volar plate, in the base of the palm of her hand where the tendons from the index finger converge and tore up the ligaments. The injury was painful, but she pushed through it climbing Vinson Massif without the benefit of her dominant right hand,” reported the Blade.
Erin’s wife finally convinced her to go to the doctors where she learned that she needed surgery.
Needless to say, that chat with Denali will come sometime this summer during her third attempt to get to the mountain’s peak.
Healing and Confidence
In 2023, Erin will set out to climb the famous Mount Everest in Nepal. Everest, the last of the seven summits, stands the tallest in the world at 29,050 feet.
The climb will be special. Next year will be the 70th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s expedition, in which the late renowned transgender travel writer Jan Morris was a reporter embedded in the team decades before her transition. A journalist for The Times of London at the time, Jan died in 2020.
“I never thought I would try to climb the Seven Summits,” Erin told Westword. “I’m happy just being outdoors. These big mountains are very much a different thing for me, and the reason I’m climbing them is very much for the trans community. We need to see trans people proud of who they are and willing to be seen.
“These mountains are metaphorically where the world can’t push you into the shadows anymore. You’re standing on the highest points of the world saying, ‘I’m not hiding,’” she said.
“I find joy in the outdoors. I find joy in breathing the fresh air. I find joy in my nine-year-old child,” she told the Blade. “Everything about life is better when you’re yourself.”
Erin’s work after she meets her goal being the first transgender person to climb the Seven Summits will not be done. In April 2018, she launched TranSending 7, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and advancing transgender rights through sports as a form of building awareness and inclusion around the world.
The organization’s board is filled with who’s who of Colorado’s transgender leaders and she’s partnered with the Venture Out Project, an organization making the outdoors accessible for LGBTQ youth, and the American Alpine Club, the country’s leading climbing and mountaineering organization.
TranSending 7’s current goal is to help Erin reach the top of the Seven Summits, but beyond her personal goal, she wants to focus on transgender inclusion in outdoor sports beyond team sports. She wants more positive stories about transgender lives to bring more balance to the stories about murders of transgender people, especially after 2020 and 2021 being the deadliest years on record for transgender people, according to Transgender Day of Remembrance.
“I want to spark a discussion around outdoor sports. We need visibility,” Erin told Westword. “What would it take for a trans person to sail around the world solo or climb the Dawn Wall?
The Dawn Wall is the face of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan.
“I think the world is ready to feel those stories of recovery, resilience, and healing,” she said. “I’m hoping that 2022 somehow will be a better year.”
Follow Erin on Instagram at @transcending7 or donate to www.transending7.org.
Book your next Intrepid women-only vacation with Girls That Roam Travel. Contact Heather Cassell at Girls That Roam Travel at 415-517-7239 or at .
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