They/Them
2021 · 50m · United States
Directed by Blake McCord, Justin Clifton
Genres: documentary, LGBTQ+, sports
Tones: contemplative, tender
A trans climber's season-long effort to redpoint a hard Sedona trad route becomes a portrait of identity and resilience.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the trans climber doc to be inspirational—uplifting triumph porn. McCord and Clifton flip it: they let the route stay brutally hard, let doubt exist alongside determination, and refuse the easy catharsis. It's contrarian by being honest.
The film understands the grammar of climbing cinema—the patient accumulation, the spatial grammar of the wall—but repurposes it as portraiture rather than conquest narrative, situating itself against the genre's conventional rhetoric with formal precision.
It's the editing choice to hold on failure, to let a pumped-out attempt breathe without cutting to the next attempt, that transforms this from sports footage into something about identity itself—where the climber's body and the rock's indifference become inseparable.