Even during Antarctica’s warmest months, the temperature on Mount Vinson Massif plummets to -40°F, a cold made worse by katabatic winds exceeding 40 miles per hour. Severe storms are common, and the fierce austral sun pierces the mountaineers’ eyes as they plod toward the massif’s summit at 16,050 feet. “The environment is relentless—there’s no place to shelter or hide yourself from the elements,” says Erin Parisi. “The wind is strong enough to throw your body and gear, and can make it dangerous to move on a rope team or with a sled.”
In 2021, Parisi experienced the mountain’s brutality firsthand when she headed to Vinson in her quest to be the first openly transgender person to climb the Seven Summits—the tallest mountain on each continent. On Christmas Day, she recalls several teams struggling to touch the top. All turned back except one. That team returned “with some of the worst frostbite I’ve ever seen: black fingers, toes, and parts of their hands and feet,” Parisi says.
Still, she persisted, motivated by how few trans role models there are in the outdoors. If she could reach the Vinson summit, she could be the inspiration for others she never had. “I had spent a lifetime looking for stories of trans Antarctic explorers, trans divers, trans cyclists, and I never found them,” Parisi says. “When I was growing up, I realized how much people are keeping positive trans stories out of public libraries—all these books about trans joy were being banned.”
After six days on the ice—hauling a 60-pound pack on her back and dragging a 60-pound sled, trudging across ice toward Mount Vinson’s apex, Parisi reached the summit on December 26. With her, she carried her trusty Petzl Summit Evo ice axe, which had become her constant companion after an earlier hand injury on Denali. Even though she is an experienced alpinist and took precautions, she had suffered not only windburn and sunburn but also frostbite on her lips, nose, hands, toes and fingertips.
Even so, at the summit, she danced and yelled in joy: Then she unfurled the trans pride flag, took celebratory photos with her team, and finally sunk her ice axe in the snow.
This June, Parisi served as the keynote speaker at an employee recognition event at REI headquarters in Seattle. She shared her transition story with the rapt audience and also opened up about her struggles—the challenges she faced in scaling five of the Seven Summits so far and the abuse she has endured not only as a trans person but also as a trans person in the outdoors.
At Parisi’s side was her trusty aluminum and steel ice axe, which she donated for induction into the Co-op Living Archive, a collection of historically and culturally significant pieces of REI history.
“To me,” says Parisi, “the ice axe is a symbol of the final thing that keeps me safe. It’s a piece of protection you carry and place to secure; it’s the way to arrest a fall from extending into a ‘death slide’; and in a crevasse fall, it’s often the piece of gear you place to anchor your rescue system,” Parisi says. For Parisi’s additional safety, the axe is engraved with the initials E.E. instead of E.P. to protect her trans identity during international travels. “I think for me, it is often a metaphor for the mental safety that being able to properly express my authenticity has provided.”
At the induction ceremony, the audience gave Parisi a standing ovation; among the attendees were her wife and daughter, whom she proudly gave shoutouts to. “There were tears,” Jenny Avalos, REI program manager of inclusion marketing partnerships, says. “I was crying, and everyone around me was crying, during her speech and presentation.”
Parisi’s ice axe joins three other pioneering women mountaineers’ ice axes in the archive: REI co-founder Mary Anderson; former REI president and CEO Sally Jewell, who went on to serve as President Obama’s secretary of the interior; and REI Member Catherine Perman, the first woman to work in the Juneau ice fields when glaciology was a new (and male-dominated) field of study.
“The ice axe collection is about powerful women in the outdoors,” says Will Dunn, historian for the REI Co-op Living Archive, who is thrilled that these artifacts bring light to the hidden legacy of women and queer people in the outdoors. “The cool thing about the collection, he says, is that it shows that these athletes have been here for a long time. “They exist, and this is not a new thing.” Anderson, after all, was mountaineering in the 1930s.
For her part, Parisi is proud that REI is spreading her message of trans joy. “I fought tooth and nail to be recognized as a woman in the world,” Parisi says. “It’s huge to have a company that’s progressive enough to understand the challenges that I’ve faced and the struggle I’ve gone through,” she says.
Parisi grew up near Buffalo, New York, with four brothers. She was outdoorsy and athletic from youth and grew to love backcountry skiing with a lesbian aunt with whom she shares a strong bond. Today she ski mountaineers, snowboards, mountain bikes, rucks and backpacks. She has mountain-biked down some of the fiercest mountains across the western United States, the Andes, the Canadian Rockies, western British Columbia and Iceland. While she says she’s far from fearless, the expedition climber thrives on challenge, constant adrenaline, and situations requiring toughness and endurance.
The Seven Summits felt like a natural next challenge for Parisi after she accomplished tough backcountry skiing routes and climbing pitches. “The challenge combines everything I want, plus a personal growth aspect,” Parisi says. “I wanted a big expedition that I could grow from in multiple ways: from training to traveling to foreign places to being roped together with a team for weeks.”
Since starting her pursuit in 2018, Parisi has summited mounts Kosciuszko, Kilimanjaro, Elbrus, Aconcagua and Vinson Massif, in that order. Only two peaks remain for Parisi to climb, and they are massive: Denali, at 20,310 feet, and Everest, at 29,031 feet. (And she doesn’t have the funding yet to climb Everest.)
Being a trans woman can add challenging, intersectional layers to outdoor endeavors. For instance, Parisi experienced a loss of muscle mass after starting hormone therapy, making it more difficult to climb Kilimanjaro in 2018 than it had been on her pretransition climb years prior.
“My body had changed quite a bit, and I was still figuring it all out,” Parisi says. “I didn’t have the strength I used to have, so physically I had to be smarter with how I trained and to train differently, and I had to get smarter about how I carried (weight) and the way I use my energy.”
There were other challenges that caused her anxiety. Kilimanjaro is located in Tanzania, a country where homosexuality is outlawed, even in private. In order to book the same tour operator she’d previously used, she claimed to be her pretransitioned self’s cousin. That protective shield worked, but then she noticed that she was treated differently as a woman than as a man. Despite those setbacks, she knew she wanted to summit post-transition to complete her Seven Summits journey, though she’d already made it to the peak before.
Inclusion sounds wonderful, and though we may consider ourselves to be more progressive in the United States, Parisi has been physically assaulted twice in the U.S. “One triggered me starting the Seven Summits, and I don’t speak about it frequently,” she says. After returning from Australia’s Mount Kosciusko, she was assaulted a second time outside a bar in Denver, in the state that has been home since 2002.
“The first couple peaks after [the assault], I was angry,” she says. Combine that with the fact that it was technically illegal for her to be in the countries where the second and third peaks are located, and a larger problem becomes evident.
In places such as Russia, she has had a strange, helpless feeling of standing on a summit, privately celebrating her feat as a trans woman, while knowing that elsewhere in the country, gay and trans people and activists were being jailed or even killed.
Parisi grapples with the violence against herself and other queer and trans people. She found some solace in establishing her nonprofit organization, TranSending, which not only supports her ascents but also funds outdoor activities for gender-nonconforming kids, offering them the ability to feel accepted and free among their peers.
Reaction to Parisi’s climbing has been mixed. “Half the time, I get hate mail telling me how I should die outdoors and my body should never be found,” she says. “For every thousand of those people telling me to die someplace cold, I get one person sending a note about how I encourage them.”
Though Parisi isn’t sure she sees herself as a role model, messages about how she’s inspired others offer her encouragement amid the negative or hateful messages. “Putting my axe into [the co-op’s] archive is almost like an act of rebellion or an act of allyship that tells a powerful story,” she says. “The way that society right now is bending to try to exclude trans people and queer stories is to attack our ability to tell our stories in a positive light. REI is doing a great job with that, and that’s ultimately the best way to encourage people to feel and be themselves.”
But Parisi also has motivation in the form of competition. Recently she received an email from a trans youth in Paris who told her they’re going to beat her in climbing all Seven Summits.
“Please do! I want the competition,” Parisi replied. “Nothing would make me happier—I just want to see it done.”
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